so what is a machine?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

more ways of killing the cat

The point Marx says of this all is that the worker is killed twice. That is their sprit is broken in very different ways by capitalism.

The first stage is he world of manufactoring. Manufactoring industry break up an entire task into a series of mindless occupation. the occupation, may or may not be skilled. and are carried out be separate individuals. Humanity becomes then a part , a cog in a living machine, with nothing beyond that mechanic life. humanity is the cripples into place. That is, their education, and the life squeezes them into that cogs they are now going to be. They become useful in being a cripple, in being fit only for a single simple task.

what is more the logic of any captalisms system is that it genuinely squeezes he folk within it into place. they must be trained and paid for it. The system therefore is one of rigid heirarchy and protection. Each role is specially designed and protected. little deaths of little humanity pockmark the system therefore.

This is the the dystopia we all know so well, in the the Moon of First men in the Moon or the world of Ghormenghast: The world of the mechanic human. A World capitalism revists all the time: that is any time when there exists production processes where not any one could do it. The minute this happens little bubbles of pride and skill enter into a certain element of the system. Those 'skilled' workers become protective and proud of the limited disposition or skill. they start to protect their position, they start to despize others, then start to give themselves airs. Marx's point is that these airs and graces are distinctly defined and bound. They individual only have a pride in being a part of a system; that pride might be great, but the cost of crippling a mind so that it is only defined within a single series of tasks is greater yet. The richness of life is lost in the self importance of an occupation.

Be this as it may, this position of skilled worker within a system, trained p to a single task and protective of it (and only valued from it, though the job) clearly remains a deep element within capitalism.

Marx sees his great discovery as the alternative pole in capitalism. A machine utterly de skills. Anyone can do anything. This is the great maxim of the machine We are all theater directors now...The old worlds of skill are swept aside then in technological know how. The effect then on a humanity used to the protection and bonding on skill is then unmeasurable, Marx suggests.

In the immediate circumstance that effect is horrific. individual lives do not matter, and capitalism becomes then utterly blind to them. The world of capitalism plugs its workers into a machines, burns up their lives and then takes up another worker and does the same. If their is not need to train a work force, and no need to organize it beyond what a whip or starvation can and will do, then running the system is easy, and profits and lives are cheap.

And yet beyond this tyranny is that elusive of men, those who live in the communist sate. After all the old order of minds that were locked into certain jobs is now gone, but not utterly destroyed Humanity will still value itself in occupations, and yet that occupation is the factory could be doing anything or being anything. Pulling levers, pressing buttons, gives a flexible power. Moreover the rules that separate one from ones fellows are clearly broken down. One is no longer an occupier of a certain profession. , on is merely one pari of hands and eyes in a long and complex process: Ones action here and now echo across the that entire process, mingle with others, become one with others. To be a single human then is eroded in the machanic process. one eddies across others and through differing apparatus of the world.

One perhaps becomes communists.

well maybe.

What is clear is where Max is correct in his prediction, and where there is a hitch.

The first two of these two arguments are predictive. Humanity is oddly skilled and oddly values in a system of skilled workers in the workshop. Humanity is likewise utterly devalued in a mass production process. The trouble comes that the way government fight the latter is to impose the former (that is to create workers rights and treat all jobs as if they were skilled). No socalist government has then really been able to wrap their heads around what the final stage, what the path to communisms might look like. We simply do not know what kinds of minds are being born for there. They might well be everywhere, and yet us brutal socalists of the now might suppress them. Who knows?

The problem is then what does the socialisms consciousness within the machine, the sharing of that social labour look like to us? A problem that not so easy to solve (and one that Marxists have singluar cocked up for the last 150 years or so)

In this marx is right...

This last point of Marx of course has a great del of power to it. The self as in the pompous hegelian this is ME might be highly problematic. It is that bit of a me that drives bourgeois society on, and makes it function as it does. It make it demanding.

However the second rubric of the self, which ted it to the gentle empiricist pitching what they are in the world, opens one up to the idea that ones identity does always bleed across the world. Modesty demands as much. That is it demands not that I am, but rather that what I am mves and shifts across a world. What I then feel about myself and my actions, about what i is to have an effect, and what it is to be effected in todays world, is rather different from what it was before. My actions have different effects, my power toreach others is different, my realtion with any sort of external world is also very very diffeent.

l of which goes with out saying: Well after Marx said it we all took it as read.

That this in a sense is the problem with the history of a future. he novels written their are frustrating in that one reads them, one takes on what they are saying on board, if becomes a ready platitude and one forgets its fiery origins. the world is full of Marxists who know it not...

But here Max licks his lips.He knows he always aims to say something richer in his works. That is to have odd treasures hidden within the long and complex prose that most simply will never read. ha way one reward those who actually study with other truths than the one that is readily accepted, other insists into the re-vamping o the self within the machine.

However it needs to be said that although Dickens accept the logic of the empirical changing human and the machine, he doubts where any series of changes will ever be enough to mitigate that bourgeois self-man and self conciousness: If a revolution works peoples must act to make it happen, and what will they think about those actions?

Will they be merely bound by determinism?

Bound by pride? Or bound by some unspecified feeling of the future - but where then Dickens asks can one get this feeling? where does it come from?

How acan ti be born?

at which point...

Marx here snort-

he has Dennis taped. Denis the man whose work is death, and who wears the clothes of dead men is the living embodiment of the capitalist machine: a machine is clothed in the dead labour of mechanical force and power, and yet composes a natural force that strangles the unfortunate individuals whose labour it needs.

The social work of the 'Boot' is the caught up in the sinister game of death. That is social individual is exploded into a machine his labour is articulated against dead labour or made to resonate across dead labour, which he part animates (and at the cost of killing his individuality)

The worker in the capitalist system is a true host, at once dead and alive. Their own life (as individuals) is being starved out of them by the system they are a part of: and yet their own living labour is necessarily to articulate the ghoulish machine they are a part in. To work in a machine, to have an individuality conjured into the machine is therefore to have or be part of an individual which is organic and mechanic but also living and dead. That is ones social live is caught up making the dead live (the machine works) while one individuality, is caught up in the process of actually dying (the system stares its workers).

Capitalism is therefore the system that makes our own collectivity a potential enemy, or monster. No wonder then it does not want to understand the 'spiritual' or ghostly side of life - that is the meta individual: It needs such ''folk' only to be the provenance of the capitalist, they are his slaves, the lifes he used to animate dead force: No wonder then it clothes individuality in inadequate tools. It needs the individual to pitch themselves in the wrong place, so that they cannot understand their own assassination in the system. Notions such as mankind are an effective castration of the worker: they make them crave a democracy that will never save them - that will only make the problem worse. They therefore leave unchallenged the capitialists ownership of their social life. It is this element, this owning that Marx sees as his enemy. The social human must be freed for the capitalist (if not the machine), and therefore made into the individuals friend, and not as they are at the moment their direst enemy.

Understanding the sense in which the world of work takes us necessarily beyond ourselves thereby becomes very very very very serious....

Beyond humanity part 1

Marx has an answer to both Dickens and the anarchist.

To be a human he says in a capitalist society is not simple.

The capitalist has bifocal vision in regards to humanity.

one the one hand Marx conceds there are those humanities of the everyday: That is those biological unites who need to eat and wipe there bums and everything These humans are then ones then that come to the market place to sell their labour.

they are even the ones the capitalist pays. They are certianly the one that various ideologies and opiates fixiate.

However there are not the humans that the capitalist actually hires. Marx has a very strong line here. Humanity en masse is not the same humanity as in the individual. They do not work the same, and do not behave the same. The very fact of being a social animal means that between folk other humans, them of en masse, them when their effects upon each other is allowed for, exists.It is then this extra individual, this net effect of pooled individuality that the capitalist directly hires. That is it is the success or not of this individual that will define for the capitalist their profit margins. They need, however they do it, for this individual to produce as much as possible (and always more than the individual peoples involved within it).

Capitalism is the system where is is never individual that are hired, but rather the collective folk created across the effect of social relations. Capitalism itself will take these relations as its productive power. That is the effect of being in a factory and the ins and out of extra production that can create (irrespective at his point of machines) is seen to be the peculiar property of the capitalist and not merely the property of the individual. The meta-folk of the factory floor are then clothed not in flesh and blood but profit. They exist or better are articulated only in their ability to make a profit for someone else. Our collective folk, the child of our cooperation is therefore the natural born slave. Or better it is the role of capitalism to make them appear a necessary slave; their existence in the workshop (and only in the workshop) is the creation of slavery.

But at this point a very deliberate unclarity enters Marx;s account. He clearly delights n listing reasons how and where this additional value comes for, It might be for the competitive instinct of humans to do their best, or the effect of averaging out their differences, or the way they break down their tasks or anything.

In a sense it does not, and cannot matter. What matters is that this effect is there and is real. To find one cause is to miss the point. Or worse it is to attempt to trap in the individual the existence of this extra human that is necessarily beyond individuality (and so not reduced to the process that produced its own individuality).

To breed the monster beyond humanity therefore, one must free oneself of that humanity. That is one will only get a Dennis style beast man if one attempt to lead such a being back towards individuality.

The problem is elsewhere.

The problem that this natural born slave, then serves as the template for a far greater slavery.

Once an extra humanity is created in the factory floor, the rules that link this humanity, to tools and beyond them machines are clearly very flexible : The social human flows into the machines within which their world is articulated very very naturally. Not only is the cooperation of such social folk very like a machine in the first place (it breaks tasks up or makes them run in parallel - humans are then already half machine. or the machine grew out of this social human, and not out of normal individuality) but also as no individual ones that power, it can very easily be take and broken up or articulated differently within machines. That is it can be absorbed within a wide series of improvements which take and mechanicalize aspects of human labour, and their cooperation, and include the cooperative human in the process.

The cooperative human is not therefore merely the natural born slave, they are also the born already as a part in a machine: or perhaps better the machine grew from them; it expresses their trapped collective power therefore. Social humans individuality is therefore lost within the wider story of production (as the machine are then owned by he captialist...)

Capital will thereofore embody not merely the social ghost of an individual, but also the being of an individual who is caught up and articulated across machines. It creates then a folk who are already part mechanical, already bound up in the machine and its effect.

The met-mech- workers are then marx thinks therefore already necessarily beyond human. They are clothed only in profits (which define their individuality), but their beating hearts are necessarily beyond all folk or all specific individuality: The need then to be freed, they need to become natural born monsters, and not merely slaves, for they are the communists to come.

The thin monetray line

It is always said that the extreme of communism and capitalism loop back on themselves:

One can easily have anarchist of the right and the left: They talk the same talk about survival and individuality. The rant against government and interference in the same voices.

And yet between these two lies a very deep schism. The chasme of individuality and money. A chamse only a hairs breadth wide, and yet uncrossable.

For the leftwing anarchist come communists, anarchy is what follows from the absence of humanity. It is therefore how one character ones being is open to flow into and though others. it is the power to be many things in oneself and through others. one might be 'self reliant' and yet that reliance is merely because one knows one is multi faceted. it reflects then the ability to flow across many mind, and to use other is that flowing. Anarchy reflects then the inestimable ability of humans to share what they are with others, and do so in free form.

On the right the same talk of withdrawal and the same rejection of authority is had, and yet for utterly different reasons. The motivation is not the following of individuality so much as the bastion f the self and the family. One is therefore an anarchist because one is a self. It is in the defence and the defiance of the self that one is and asserts ones being.

As such money to the right wing anarchist is not necessarily wrong. It presents is a sense the codification of their anarchy. That is the medium between all things. A medium of the meta market, and so beyond the state. A medium in which individuals finds their possession announce or discover their freedoms through them. Money therefore is the anarchic flow within which the rightwing individualist wants to pitch a being.

Money is therefore the point at which the rightwing break upon everyone else. that is it is the sole point f trust between themselves and everyone. The point they accept that anarchy needs others, at some point.

The opposite is then the case for the left. Money is the sole point at which all trust all sharing breaks. But is therefore the point at which there is no trust and no value beyond that inspired in the money relation. Money is the point at which the true anarchist ought to turn way (or ought rather to talk about sharing the land). It is the point one cannot have.

This difference is then a very real one. to be an anarchist and belief that one makes ones own laws is in a sense one say nothing. So many humans are there: We all make the empiric laws of our own minds, and tell our own stories within them. The real game is to understand how that position of priveldge links one with everyone. Is the link via an individuality and the one sharing indviduals create, namely money? Or is it because all individuality as all laws are lost in the being of the anarchst. The division then really matter.

The trouble actually is, though with being a human is that it is very difficult to hear this vital difference. The problem then of the chasme between left and right is not that it cannot be bridged but rather that it can a little too easily: Tyrants of all shapes and forms jump over from the right wing to the left: The move is simple- one forgets money (or sees it only for personal gain, and not as a collective thing) , one keeps ones individuality, but the lose sight of everyone elses individual: Others become the facts or numbers on which ones own being is empressed. One becomes then (at least in ones own eyes) the micro-managing master of the universe. Running the other way advertising takes the fact that humanity cannot hold onto its own emotions, and uses this fact to make money or politics with.

Monsters are born at the chamse. Better they naturally flow from it, once it is opened.

And to close such a rift, such a point of difference which cannot be heard, would take a very great conjuring, it would take a revolution; and Marx of course hopes he is the wizard of that particuliar spell.

The heart of humans

What is t that allows one to say a bundle of pink stuff and a freight of actions is a human?

It is is a real question in Barnaby Rudge

is humanity the ability to hold a memory?

Or is it the ability to be convivial?

or is it faith?

Or loyality?

Or bravery?

Or merely manner.

Well it is clearly all of these, including the last. and yet the last in normal Dickens style illustrates the problem. one might it is true be polite and yet under the venneer of that politeness all kinds of poisons lie. The polite might have a human front and a monsterous interior.

At which point of course the entire enterprise of defining a human reveals its oddity. almost many definition will be localized. it s always easy to define then a human or a self as a something somewhere. The problem is that this somewhere is always a limited space: Around then the go sit many of dark desires and thoughts fencing it in or expanding it: Around reason sits all the motivation all the base thoughts reason justifies. Around morality are all the gut instincts that oppose a humanity the face of their morality. Around a definition such as a laughing animal sits all the other affects we are.

The problem si then not merely that each definition is partial, but also that in giving a rubric for humanity, it gives a lie t that rubric. humans take up that definition and are inhuman around it. That is they use it or fit it into a life beyond that definition ? (where not everything can be human), and musing it then modify their life in the face of it, and to differing advantages.

A definition of humanity cannot be torn apart form life, and as is a myriad and monstrous as that life surely is. Or at ;east as it ought to be.

The end point then of humanity as a definition ought to be a monster: That is the individual who cares nothing about anyone else, and cannot conceive of their individuality or does not worry about this effect upon them. The pure form of humanity s then Chester- the monster of manners.

Perhaps then Dickens wonders one out not to define humanity so much as a create an axis to define where the monsterous is given.If one cannot easily define humanity, perhaps one can create a bestiality of monsters in its place.

Dickens gives you three more options.

On the darkside a man might be a beast. As a beast, the dark figure of Dennis the hangman, who wears his victims clothes and gloats over their deaths is the ultimate figure of inhumanity. he is the nightmare that humanity fears. The 'what will happen' if we abandon the quest for the human.

but Dennis the beast is not the only possible.

The idiot is also their. The idiot, Barnaby, might not in himself have wit, and cannot hold down a steady occupation. And yet. and yet, he gives off a spirit of freedom, and a power to trust. This power, this ability to enter into all lives with the same pride is then the whirl that sets the book going. The power to trans-locate and yet be yourself whatever the context, the power to respond in a space beyond any one self, or any one fixed being, becomes revealed as a potent force.

Finally their is hugh a dark faced, bright hearted centaur.The ultimate victim of a society that condemns his 'type' as already inhuman. he reveals himself none the less capable of sefless love (for Barnaby), a love that redeems him of the verge of the grave- a love beyond himself. But also he is the master of the riot, the lord of chaos and revolution. Wherever the is destruction he is their, monitoring it, 'leading' not by plan but by occasion, and through his own bravery.

In Baraby Rudge three beyond human states appear live and real; in all their creativity and all their folly the beast , the innocent, and the centuar. Marx problem si that he need a fourth The communists, who has al the virtues of their three, without their vices, and does not merely slip for one to the other....

Getting there.

In the world shattering chapter of Das captial, chapter 15, Marx stars to seriously understand where his blind revolution might come from.

The probe of industrial capitalism is that it gears up two contrasting flows.

The one flow wants to make profit, and needs to squeeze labour to do so Costs must come down, for profit goes up.

The other flow is that of machines. the machine is the principle which allows one to re place the skill of a task with a machine. Each machine therefore as such embodies a rationalized human task. Knitting is therefore broken down into mechanical actions and those actions are then articulated one against another, and made into a mass production process. The affairs of the home and the workshop becomes then affairs of science.

To build a machine is thereofore to convert a human actions into externalized physical reality. it is therefore to drag human action from biology into chemistry and physics.

What s then created is not however Marx insists a simple reduction. True the tasks are broken down, and understood, and yet the tasks remain the same. At the centre of a machine are then the knitting needles or whatever there has always been. It is merely that these needles have been taken out of their human context and made to dance on the wider skies of energy, force and time. The move is therefore not simply reductive. It is rather a means in which small tasks are objectified and then spun across the world as a thing apart. They in a machine have their own life.

Likewise a machine is never a series of bits cobbled together anyhow. On the contrary they are always at every point a continuity. Machines might then nest inside other machines, or might expand into other mechanisms or be caught up in a variety of uses. They might then change what they are, and what they are used for. But in each of these changes the entire point of the machine lies in its homogeneity internally and with other machines. It is therefore always a part of a process greater than it.

Machines therefore not only objectify individual actions, they replace the unity in with those actions; it is not humanity which surround them with their life and their local skill, it is rather then , branch of the wider machine which tasks up a task and orchestrates it against a wider world.

Between then two elements, Capital and machine the gearing up of capitalism lies. Capitalism is the defined within the interaction of these elements; their taking up on one within and through the other. The logic of capitalism is therefore to divide and redivide the human what a human is, and what they can do is being challenged: and Marx, always tuned to historical change knows and welcomes that fact.

What capitalism will do (and how it will undermine itself) is therefore hidden. All we really know is Marx thinks it will happen across the axis of the machines. The unfetterd machine ought, logically enough challenge our very definition of ourselves as separate distinct things. It ought then to open us to another means of living: A means in which our actions cease to be simply our own, but ratherr are taken for what they are, a part in the cog of a wider society. A society which who knows might end up being truly communist.

The process has of course taken far longer than Marx thought: but maybe this is because humanity is more complex? That is it has more level to loose or to objectify in the machine that Marx allowed for. The human then re-asserts itself in these remenants. Alternatively of course it might be the case that humanity is not an idea which dies this way. It strives then become mechanicalized or better recreates itself and its desire to own everything elsewhere, in which case Marx would never be right and Communism would not happen here: or else would happen, but elsewhere humanity would still insist in its power to own (but do it elsewhere). That is the human would change were it was felt. Mechanism would become collective (a multi national, or a state might be such a machine, the global community, are all such communisms),a and yet elsewhere the individual would still insist on its right to be and so bugger up everything if that included the right to conjure itself over political language, belief and so powers.

Dickens' Reply...

Dickens new just as much as Marx that the only real change in their times, to only change that mattered was the industrial one.

In Dombey and son therefore Dickens suggests four principle of industrialization.

1) firstly it is random, choatic and patchwork. The revolution errupted across london, forcing change and challenge. It made then a world where things were necessarily different and yet that difference was unexpected. Old ways gave to new utterly distinct and yet juxtapose with them, with no order or pattern. Life's unity was the a t once shattered, and yet the parts still lived in their fractured bits. The new does not utterly destroy the old or replace it, it merely explodes it.

2) Each process is then akin to a mini-death. To listen to a train, to flow its beat in verse is to here the echo of time and the changes of time. It is that which destroys what was. that which explodes. That which takes one on journies where if one returns at all everything is different. The rhytmm of this change, is then the tread of death. What is touched is forever altered. what remains remains only suspended. It might carry on as if nothing had changed. In a sense given change is death for it it cannot to other than this. And yet it is likely enough in the end death will come for it (as only politics and banking look set to escape).

3) The change empowers odd people. Those then who live through it, and becoming its working class have new rights and abilities. They can reachacrss old divides and arrange things differenelty. Industrial change challenges the social order and must do so.

4) Finally industrialization is the strangest of punts on the future. we are like an inventor who has a number of bets on what will be. The shrimpy boat will not doubt one day come it. and yet when and were we do not know. It will happen...sometime and somewhere. To live in the industrial world is therefore to live knowing that somewhere there is an inventor, making something to change everything - and yet that person is hidden and will be hidden until their invention breaks onto a world, jangling it otherwise..

Revolution take two.

The problem the Brumiar insists is not that revolution stands upon a cusp of time. Or problem as revolutionaries is that we do not know what they ought to look lie now. If one then follows the old schemata for revolutions, then Dickens is right.

The power of the revolution is ultimately to dislocated a society into factions, factions that they play out a drama beyond reason or point.

However Marx suggests that is not all are revolution need be.

One the contrary what one needs to aim for is something far more vivid, and real. A revolution that does not relax into a language, A revolution that will have the rewored the rules of on,w a revolution needs to be thought as it occurs.A revolution that cannot then be contained within a past, and is not 'over' in its radical phaze the moment it breaks out.

Marx therefore present us with the need to rethink revolution. Or better to rethink the nature of exactly who the revolutionary is. Maybe the old profession, is not enough. One genuinely uncalled and unbidden, and yet timely, a revolt needs to come from the blue, and in the giving not merely re-throw the past, it also needs to form a radical break with it. It must then not merely be the words which force what was to appear to be that which lead one forward. It must rather be that which ends the past, and breaks with it. That change which, like industrialization makes the past utterly unthinkable.A revolt which makes words meaningless and empty, and ghosts powerless.

A revolution not then of political stridency, but one of those other revolution of technology.

That is Marx's model is surely the industrial revolution. A revolution whose time and place is impossible to pin down. A revolution that was named (or mis named) across an epoch. a revolution which sunk into the consciousness of the manufacturing peoples only after the event ( of else as a political word, a moment of policy within a number of events). The revolutions, the type of revolution, Marx really values are then the blind silent revolutions of technology: Remember when Marx wrote the term industrial revolution was not known. The changes he saw everywhere lacked cogency. They formed the a blind revolt; a sequence of nameless mythless changes.

A revolution like the one we are in at the moment(which combines; broad band; to worry about climste change and appropriate technology to bio chemistry as engineer to complexity theory, to ....,A revolution all around us, but one that not be known yet) but will surely have some kind of age at some point.

Dickens might then have revolution as event right but Marx insists, but such events do not cover all events. There are those revolts which are different from revolutions as events. There are this nameless silent sequence of interlinked changes that occur as a seed of technological change is such that humans need and use moving categories to think think (and so assume change, an thereby make it possible),. Real revolution, the final revolution will occur then when this change echoes into political language. That is when it subsumes an event within a sequence of changes, that cannot be exactly located.

Marx's gambit is then that this move, this throw of humanity into a technological type revolution is possible. Our problem then of course is simple. is this possibility like the second coming- and always possible but actual or does its very possible make political revolution powerful?

A problem to mull over.

One Solution

Dickens suggests three moments of revolution in Tale of Two cities (moments which have a power in spite of the dodgy history which surround them)

The First: The forming of the language. Before the revolt, das captial needs to be written and a language found to name the sins of the current system. This language is essential both collective and creative. It is shared by would be enemies; Defarge and Darnley, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, and Seyies. all have a hand in the developing and the using of it. But the language is also creative. In linking together passions, words, perceptions and actions it creates a real world. It makes a sin. It becomes the way that emotion is expressed, and miseries caught in truth. It becomes therfore the reality into which the mind is poured . It gives the way to understand the world, and therefore the nature of truth.

It is a language characterized by Irony and scorn. The old reality is withered and forced by laughter and mocking to concede that really it is at a loss to understand the world and name passions and worlds. Scorn therefore scours language and forces a debate elsewhere.

The second moment comes with the event itself. In the event a person or a set of circumstances becomes the dark precursor that created the lightening strike . Under their gaze everything changes. The event reached into that old (collective) language and purifies(or splits) it: words become unsayable or else cannot said in that fashion, while new forced languages are born. It reaches into the past and forces that past to become what was making it alone . It becomes then fate. Here of course is a real irony. The event itself, that is exactly what happened is contigent and often the active creation of a small number of individuals, and yet the action itself, once it happens will demand that the past warp and change in how it is viewed. The past becomes that which created what followed. it becomes the oil in which the event was sown. It becomes the pathway to it. It is forced therefore to allow or what was not in it, or not in that form, the event that happened.

The event is therefore the moment the past is bent into a certain present; it is the point at which a language is made to say only one thing : the point Mirabeau and then Seyies and then Danton fall away form the revolution that is Robespierre. It is the moment at which time is forced onwards. The terror; The point history and all its effects need to change once and for all.

The third moment, the aftermath happens as the event is itself absorbed as a fact into other lives. Those whose language is utterly changed by events have in a sense the last laugh. They must for ever allow for it, and cannot return quite to what they were. And yet they have the power in communicating and understanding the event to change how it is viewed. This change is pivotal. It is the nature of the initial event to be divide. It is after all the moment history splits. Something new occurred. Older or merely other views are then crushed or dismissed or destroyed. The event is that which divided. But the reaction to the event is somewhat different: minds which the event initially divided come together to understand their division, and so locate the event within a personal but also a wider history. The event becomes then shared in spite of itself. It becomes collective. The solitary masters who expressed it are then robbed of their power (and often their lives). They represent the split and not the reaction to the split. A world might then have changed (and it will not change back), and yet it never need change in quite the way the revolters wanted .

In a sense it cannot.

The moment the event is open to history itself (and not merely re-throwing fate), this much is clear. For exactly happened, and what should follow from that happening is always an open question in the fluxes of the world. It changes as many people inhabit and do so differently.

In a sense this difference is the events great legacy.It marks the splitting off of a language into other languages, other takes different communions, different takes on the event,. The event thereofore takes the collective talk of revival and potential enemies and transform it across a history into a set of closed affairs and defined constitutions (in nations or in families). It defines then a series of limits and creates a language for those limits.

The great events of the state become then a thing for school kids to debate over, or politicians to use as a badge of identity - until that it the process starts again.

This then for Dickens was Marx's error. He failed to realize what he was the master of. He was the master of the creation of a language for capturing the essence of a time; The problem of capitalism; He is then one of the thinkers creating out of the diverse languages the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century created a single language, in which many voices can be heard. This project is the one he shared with Dickens (but also Darwin). What Marx was not the master of was however revolution.: but then it is a role which at least half of Marx (the man of the british library would have surely relished).

Marx's eyes

Your money but whose time?

I suppose it took nearly 100 years to happen - which cannot be bad - but why it happened can be learned from reading Das Capital.

Marx defines exchange value in terms of the hours one spends in the production of good. A thing cost more (or ought to cost more) if it takes longer to produce. Capitalism is then in a very real sense for Marx the system in which individuals exchange, one with the other, the hours of their lives. What makes it powerful is then that by my putting some of the hours of my life at your disposal, you get to be, and do more things. You can have shoes without being a cobbler, or law without being a lawyer, or travel without too much hassle. Capitalism is therefore in Marx’s argument so powerful because it exists as a way of pooling human action. Our lives become in the exchange of commodities caught up with and able to use one another.

Marx has two natural limits’ of this pooling

The first of these limits is the assumption that their will always be a medium, a tangible reality, which forms the gold standard of exchange. There needs then he suggests to be a product whose production is difficult and availability is relatively scarce. This product forming the standard against which all others are valued. Gold and silver therefore form a single yardstick, or monetary clock against which the value of an action was measured.

Secondly Max suggests there must be somewhere in the system some group of people who are working for mere subsidence. Sweat shops form then the basic unit of production in the system. Their role is therefore to literally ‘price’ the value of profit. This is because that while the amount they are paid is fixed (by their biological) need, what that labour is used for And how productive is might be) is open, and can change. Technological advance is therefore able to make the same group of workers achieve more, for the same basic pay. A capitalists profits lie then in getting more form their workers for the same or less pay.

Over the century and three quarters since Marx’s time this last limit has been slowly mitigated or perhaps watered down. The number of workers paid subsistence has been reduce (although somewhere in the system there will always be those workers). A capitalist found that they make profit by merely ‘underpaying’ their work force. That is, by agreeing with the work force that it is a part of their role to increase what they can do for the same basic pay (that is to make productivity increase the condition of employment)..

Likewise for around a century we have lacked the gold standard, and it has all appeared to work.

And yet, for Marx at least the lack of these limit or the removal of one and watering down of the other ought to have been critical, for without these limit who can say what value to put on the hour of a life? Are they not actually ‘valueless’? Or is not their use value beyond any price? How can they be judged if not against either one particularly dangerous and difficult job (gold production?). or the ‘cost; of subsidence?

The temptation grows up either to over pay workers (the city was rater prone to this),; or pay them in kind (expenses); or to encourage them to double their money through credit.

That is, it is the role of credit to express this ambivalence. This is because, when it is no longer clear what could compensate one frittering ones a life away at job, credit became an appropriate ‘additional’ pay. Credit in effect doubles or trebles the (exchange) value of ones pay. It opens one up to greater possibilities in the present, at the cost of miring one further and further within the (purely relative) system. One stopped working for the here and how, and rather got caught up in a system where one pay now pays for past debt; and/or ones pay now allows one to make purchases based on future work. All the draconian and spartan Rhyme and reason Marx was so aware of, was therefore excluded from the system (as was of course the revolution) .

A system without any real ground was created. A system waiting to crash. A fact that surely spawned three further mysteries: Why did it take so long? How can we find a way to pool our labor now ? And finally can we ever actually produce a system that moves beyond that problem of sweat shops? Or will subsidence wages, that produce profit by squeezing the poorest people in the system, to produce ‘real’ profits, become once again our only possible redemption? They suffer so we can thrive...