A Space-hijacker answer

"So, the question is, what can we plan and later build, and keep building upon, to shed ourselves of these bee skins?" Well, the correct answer is most certainly tanks, blue-colored, happy-hippies tanks with pirate flags on top. Although it didn't go all that smooth after all...

PS: It was definitely either Stalin or Zizek who asked: "The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" It was the Space Hijackers who turned the question back on his feet: Bees, how many divisions have we got?

Bee-gin the Revolution?

"what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax." - Marx, Capital I, p284

I couldn't help but notice this creature at Climate Camp during the G20 protest this week. It is unlikely that this architect of change was much bothered about Marx's interest in the difference between the species-being and the bee but the idea of it amused me enough.

The protest did get me thinking though, and I wonder if that little bee symbolises the fact that even at that protest, the swarms of angry anarchists and drum-beating hippes were still yet reduced to the status of bee.

The plans were made for them, as every building was boarded up and the glass-walled RBS shimmering in the sunshine was beckoning for a hit. They were caught like sardines and thrown into the Bank of England keep-net. I can't help but sort of agree conspiracy theorists on this one...a little bit.

It seems to me that although we have the ability to plan and mobilise, we're still beaten up for obstructing the streets. We can't be violent because we are disciplined and can't beat the law, and we can't be peaceful because the foundation of revolution is in violence. Ultimately, it appears as though we are to remain perpetually cordoned off in the bank of England, dressed like bees, constructing our cells in wax with neither a plan nor a purpose.

So, the question is, what can we plan and later build, and keep building upon, to shed ourselves of these bee skins? I can't help but think one-off street parties aren't quite the answer; they make some noise, and that noise needs to be made but, what now?

Worker Bees

I thought this might be of interest to some, given Marx's bee-ing fun.

It was originally posted by N Pepperell 29/01/2009 on
http://www.roughtheory.org/content/worker-bees/

"I have to admit, I’ve never particularly thought about the industrial organisation of crop pollination, until I read this column from the New York Times discussing possible responses to Colony Collapse Disorder - the mysterious plague that causes adult bees to desert their hives, leaving honey and larvae behind. I found this image particularly striking":

…it is important to add that, here in the United States, the majority of our crops are pollinated not by wild bees, or even by honeybees like mine, which live in one location throughout the year, but by a vast mobile fleet of honeybees-for-rent.

From the almond trees of California to the blueberry bushes of Maine, hundreds of thousands of domestic honeybee hives travel the interstate highways on tractor-trailers. The trucks pull into a field or orchard just in time for the bloom; the hives are unloaded; and the bees are released. Then, when the work of pollination is done, the bees are loaded up, and the trucks pull out, heading for the next crop due to bloom.

Massive pub fights on primitive accumulation

Hi Tom,

first of all thank you for answering. I don't know, maybe it is just me, but looking through the Grundisse I had the impression that for Marx what comes first is the free play of human creativity, living labor. His discussion of the "civilizing power of external trade" seems to point out that it is only through trade of surplus product that human products become quantitatively comparable on the base of their exchange-value - as opposed to being only qualitatively comparable as use-values. Independently from exchange the object created by our own labor is only valuable because it is useful, not as embodiment of an abstract "socially-necessary-labour-time". We can compare our home-made trinkets only qualitatively, not quantitatively. So first is human creativity, then is trade and the commodity. And what's next? Then, while all of the product of social labour comes slowly to be commodified ("not even the bones of saints can resist this alchemy"), we have primitive accumulation.

My problem with primitive accumulation in Capital is that it is something that Marx leaves at the margin of the argument, as if it was an appendix. We have to "assume the existence of a primitive accumulation". One can not understand why primitive accumulation happened in that specific moment in time and in that fashion reading Capital. It is a story of the original sin, it is not explained either theoretically or historically. Why did primitive accumulation starts? In the Grundisse you have an explanation, more or less explicit, which says it has something to do with the effect of growing English foreign trade with Holland. One could also think of a technological reason, and I guess there must be also that in Marx somewhere.

But I don't think that saying this, saying that also primitive accumulation must be dialectically explained, is to state that there is an identity between the historical content of the book and the exposition of its contents. Indeed I think Capital can hardly been thought as an historian's book, although clearly there is lots of history in it. The exposition clearly does not want to be historical. So, I am not sure, but I think I really agree with your comments on "On the Method of Political Economy".

About the mode of exposition: Marx is trying to explain "the whole movement of capital" which "seems to turn around in a never ending circle". The explanation of that circular movement takes the first 25 chapters (all of the book but 70 pages). The last part, on primitive accumulation, poses two theoretical arrows at the opposite sides of the circle of capital. One very real, violent and historical - that is the moment of primitive accumulation - the other still to come, a possibility which Marx wants to indicate. I think the purpose of the last part of Capital is to draw these two theoretical arrows. That's why Marx doesn't go on explaining the origins of primitive accumulation itself. In my understanding the origins of primitive accumulation seem to lay in commerce, "external exchange" and the rise of commodification. I don't know if you would agree with that or if you see it as problematic.

Maybe on wednesday we will end up having a massive group fight on the correct understanding of primitive accumulation!

Nick: cheers for the link to the essay. It look's interesting, and I'll have a proper read of it tomorrow.

Amadeo: I'm not disagreeing with your comments, but just one question (in lieu of a further conversation in person, perhaps on Wednesday): does this notion of the commodity coming first mean that we end up with an identity between the historical content of the book and the exposition of its contents? In other words, does it mean that the developing arrangement of concepts and categories becomes akin to their 'real' historical development? I don't think that's what you're saying, but it does seem to imply it - and it's problematic, as the concepts are slowly moving from the abstract to the concrete, and we can't say that one epoch is any less concrete than another. It might be worth bearing in mind that Hegel himself avoids any kind of identity between a logical and historical sequence. He states this explicitly at the beginning of the Philosophy of Right (whilst explaining why private property is discussed prior to the family), and in the Phenomenology talks about the French revolution before Greek religion. One of the most useful texts that I've looked at whilst trying to figure out what Marx is up to in this wierd mode of presentation is the short piece entitled On the Method of Political Economy, also in the Grundrisse (in the introduction). In that one he talks about the need to use the commodity as the concept from which you can unfold all the others that explain society. ...but again, and as we discussed on Thursday, the emphasis that I'm placing on 'concepts' here is perhapsd problematic.

Hey,

I stumbled across this rather good article on 'capital’s attempt to measure immaterial labour and thus (re)impose value and the law the value' which uses the UK university as an example. Might be useful for people writing the self-reflection essay, and for anyone thinking of doing a Phd. Doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Cultural Studies Departments.....

Nick

Commodity exchange and primitive accumulation

Oi guys,

here there is a great piece of the Grundisse which I found trying to make sense of what we were discussing earlier - how is the process of primitive accumulation related with the establishment of commodity production. Which one comes first?

Here, although the wording "original accumulation or primitive accumulation" would make us think otherwise, I think Marx is saying that the origin of the capitalist mode of production rests in the sphere of exchange. It is through the "“civilizing influence of external trade" (sigh!) that the process of transition to the capitalist mode of production start to realize itself. This, I think, for two main reasons.
First of all, through external commerce the product of labour is more and more – first only the surplus product, then the all of social production – is stamped with exchange value. The product is made into a commodity which value is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time embodied in it (dead labour).
Second, capital appears in its original form of merchant capital. It is the particular power-position of the mediator – ie the possibility of “outbargaining” and “cheating” (commercial profit not only appears as out-bargaining and cheating, but also largely originates from them - Volume III) – which allows the creation of capital before it becomes able to control the two poles of production which in the first phase is only able to mediate.

Here you have the first part of the fragment titled "Transition from Circulation to Capitalist Production" in the Grundisse (you can find it in Marxists.org). Quite usefully I think it goes back to the example used by Marx in the chapter on Primitive Accumulation - ie the expropriation of the commons in England. Here, though, Marx goes one step further back in his analysis and says that the reason behind the movement of primitive expropriation was the growing commerce with Holland and the creation of new needs and new possibilities of realizing surplus production.

So, I would say, the commodity comes first. After all - if capital is dead labor which valorizes itself sucking living labor - it means that the product of human labour has first of all to take the form of dead labor - ie it must take the form of exchange-value as opposed to simple use-value - and only then can, given the right social relations are established (through violence), rise up and sucks the living.

That's also why, i guess, the chapter on commodities and commodity fetishism comes first.


Is this making any sense? Please let me know because i am trying to think this through.

Transition from circulation to capitalist production.

This movement appears in different forms, not only historically, as leading towards value-producing labour, but also within the system of bourgeois production itself, i.e. production for exchange value. With semi-barbarian or completely barbarian peoples, there is at first interposition by trading peoples, or else tribes whose production is different by nature enter into contact and exchange their superfluous products. The former case is a more classical form. Let us therefore dwell on it. The exchange of the overflow is a traffic which posits exchange and exchange value. But it extends only to the overflow and plays an accessory role to production itself. But if the trading peoples who solicit exchange appear repeatedly (the Lombards, Normans etc. play this role towards nearly all European peoples), and if an ongoing commerce develops, although the producing people still engages only in so-called passive trade, since the impulse for the activity of positing exchange values comes from the outside and not from the inner structure of its production, then the surplus of production must no longer be something accidental, occasionally present, but must be constantly repeated; and in this way domestic production itself takes on a tendency towards circulation, towards the positing of exchange values. At first the effect is of a more physical kind. The sphere of needs is expanded; the aim is the satisfaction of the new needs, and hence greater regularity and an increase of production. The organization of domestic production itself is already modified by circulation and exchange value; but it has not yet been completely invaded by them, either over the surface or in depth. This is what is called the civilizing influence of external trade. The degree to which the movement towards the establishment of exchange value then attacks the whole of production depends partly on the intensity of this external influence, and partly on the degree of development attained by the elements of domestic production -- division of labour etc. In England, for example, the import of Netherlands commodities in the sixteenth century and at the beginning of the seventeenth century gave to the surplus of wool which England had to provide in exchange, an essential, decisive role. In order then to produce more wool, cultivated land was transformed into sheep-walks, the system of small tenant-farmers was broken up etc., clearing of estates took place etc. Agriculture thus lost the character of labour for use value, and the exchange of its overflow lost the character of relative indifference in respect to the inner construction of production. At certain points, agriculture itself became purely determined by circulation, transformed into production for exchange value. Not only was the mode of production altered thereby, but also all the old relations of population and of production, the economic relations which corresponded to it, were dissolved. Thus, here was a circulation which presupposed a production in which only the overflow was created as exchange value; but it turned into a production which took place only in connection with circulation, a production which posited exchange values as its exclusive content.

They Live

I don't remember who mentioned John Carpenter's film They Live, but if you haven't seen it do watch it. It's a work of sheer, unadulterated genius. Slavoj Zizek used it's hillarious ten minute fight scene in his lecture at the Historical Materialism conference last year, but if you don't feel the need for such official intellectual endorsement you might be persuaded by the following, golden line: 'I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of bubblegum.' See Randy (yes, 'Randy') Roddy Piper do his thing at the following links, but do watch the film (ideally after a few drinks)

First, Randy Roddy gets hold of some special sunglasses. Not only do they make him look dead cool; in addition, they allow him to see that all rich people, policemen, celebrities and politicians are aliens. He also notices that billboards and magazines display notices that read 'stay asleep', 'no thought', 'marry and reproduce', etc. : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=S0GxyZCVc5M

He then gets very upset when his friend won't put the magic sunglasses on. They have a very big fight (it's not so funny when you can see the progress bar, but anyway...). http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZpdUUdd3I

Notes on Wagner

Further to a conversation in the pub earlier this evening:

Towards the end of his life - in fact, I think this may have been one of the last things that he wrote - Marx made a collection of notes (for his own use) on a German political economist named Adolf Wagner. Wagner had had the temerity to summarise and explain Marx's theory of value, and predictably enough incurred Karl's wrath. A lesson to us all.

Anyway, the text is interesting, as in dismissing Wagner Marx also offers some useful comments about the account of value that he presented in Capital.

I also rather like this line:

"According to Mr. Wagner, Marx's theory of value is the cornerstone of his socialist system” (p. 45). Since I have never established a “socialist system,” this is a fantasy..."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm

I'm not going to be able to post a link to the essay on the transformation problem that we spoke about. If anyone wants a copy and didn't receive it via e-mail a few weeks back please send me a mail (cup01tb@gold.ac.uk)

Tom

Here is something worth 6 minutes of your valuable time - a little film by an Australian comrade called Zanny

Called:

Treat (or trick)

See it here.

Treat (or trick)
Film by Zanny Begg
DVD 7min PAL
Sound Kate Carr
Camera Osama Yusif
For a full version email: zanny.b[at]gmail.com
www.zannybegg.com

Value, Price and Profit

Hi,

I mentioned this text to Kasim last week, but thought it might be useful for some of the other people who are doing the essay questions based around enquiry and analysis into your own economic situation. It's entitled Value, Price and Profit (sometimes entitled Wages, Price and Profit), and it's the text of a speech that Marx presented to the International Working Men's Association in 1865. It's worth looking at, as he's trying to outline the essentials of his ideas in an accessible manner, and in a way that would be of use to people concerned with understanding their own circumstances.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/


Perhaps I'm being completely stupid, but I couldn't find much Gramsci at all on the internet; the Marxists.org archive just seems to have the contents of his works and little else. If anyone else can find something online please do post it here.

Cheers

Tom