No I will not explain, it's not my job to educate you on how to educate me 💅
You should never tell someone to read theory without posting specific theory for them to read
Does yelling “read Settlers” at people despite having not read it myself count?
I have. I suspect half the people who told me to read it haven’t.
My opinion is that one of the best parts of this site is its a place where people who know theory can explain parts to people who don't and are trying to learn.
I don't know that much, and appreciate when people correct my dumb ideas. Also, I try to help people where I can.
I tell people to read theory because it is frankly inspirational, and when a particular book would be a better resource than what I know.
If you're someone who's well read, and can't take a few minutes to correct bad takes, thats one of the types of liberalism for sure - but also, why are you here
It would be cool if we had a /c/theory comm where people could ask questions and discuss ideas about what they're reading.
EDIT: I just put in a comm request for this. Leave a comment there if you want to see it happen.
This sort of exists already. There are communities for the various tendencies and you can post questions to the perspective you'd like answered. The same thing also exists on the Discord, if you prefer single-threaded conversations for some reason.
But I guess it could be useful to have a single community for all theory-related discussions. [Edit: which does actually exist in the form of !books@hexbear.net]
please read this gigantic book in which karl marx goes off on the price of jackets for more pages than you would think he would need
Jackets are the foundations of society, if you don't understand jackets you don't understand jackshit
- marx probably
like it is kinda of a beatles situation, if you have never listened to beatles, but have listened to music that has used their music as a starting point you have internalized a lot of those things already so it feels clunkier going back, but when they were doing this it was a new thing, it is the foundation like reading capital is interesting but you probably have internalized a lot of things inside the book, because it is obvious to me that the price of the jacket is higher than the price of the material because my understanding of economics is tied to the idea of labour as the producer of value, a thing i learned not from marx directly at first but books that discussed marx's dea
Making me read theory and then distill it down to easily understandable chunks for you is capitalist shit, profiting off someone else's labour :porky-happy:
Hmmm, I don't own the means of theory understanding that you would use, you have to provide them, so I'm worse than a regular capitalist pig, I'm a gig-theoryunderstanding capitalist pig!
Okay, you make coats.
Linen costs $5 a yard.
The coats cost $50, and take up 2 yards of Linen.
Cost so far, $10 per coat.
The Megacoat maker you operate is a $100K machine. It can make 1 million coats in it’s lifetime of 5 years. Break the cost down, it’ll be an operating cost of $.10 per coat before it’s just a heap of scrap that needs replacement.
Cost so far, $10.10 per coat.
You make $20 per coat as your wage. You work for 10 hrs. You make 50 coats.
Cost so far, $30.10 per coat. You make 50 coats per day of work, you work 5 days a week.
You make $1000 a week making 50 coats that sell for $50 each. So $2500 in value is created by your work every day working with the Megacoat maker. You make $12,500 in value every week.
You also have 19 other employees, doing various styles of Linen coats, with their own Megacoat Makers, that also sell for $50 each.
20 employees are making 50 coats a day. 1000 coats each day at $50. $50,000 in value made every day.
$250,000 made every week.
$13 Million made every year. Off of work you did, which you took home $52,000.
Employee wages across all the coat makers is only $1,040,000.
So $12 million remain to pay executives, rent that hasnt been accounted for, advertising to justify forcing you to increase output from 50 coats to 65, and to hire new people at $15 per coat instead of $20.
Then they outsource it to a different company with negotiated rates of $.10 per coat, $.25 per yard of Linen, operating the same machines, 100 employees, and shifts of 10 hrs a day, 6 days a week. The coats sell for $75 now. They make 10,000 a day. They also have a budget line that sells for $25 and they make 40,000 a day.
And they tell you hard work pays off.
Or. You pick up a shift at the dick sucking store.
You like it, you hang around and start working 30 hrs a week there.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You are a cashier.
You are asked to sell 300 boblins for $2 with every transaction you make this week. You see no bonus for hitting these numbers.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
Go through a really big week at the dick sucking store. 10,000 transactions! You hit the margins for upselling boblins by 2x. Next week they tell you to make 900 in sales for boblins at the register.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
Dry week at the dick sucking store. Bad weather, no one wants to be out. 200 transactions! You had no hope of hitting those numbers. You’re told it’s your fault. You do not control the weather.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You’re moved to stocking, you do the rotations to make sure product is readily available. You’re on your feet all day. The new Boblin’s out, but your store only got 3 boxes, they sold out in the hour. People come in just to look for them. They yell at you like you have any control over quantities.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
You’re promoted to shift supervisor. You have responsibilities to run the store. They’ll talk to District about getting you that raise. Yes, backpaid.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
An old lady took a dump in the aisle.
Your boss thinks he saw an old black woman steal a tin of cookies and called the cops, 6 officers showed up.
You’re working during a robbery. You’ve been held at gun point. You’re told you should always comply. They will still yell at you anyway.
You made over $100M in sales this past year.
Your rate is $11 an hr.
I usually also suppliment with this example.
You're a cobbler, and on a good day you can cobble together $40 worth of leather into a $60 pair of shoes every hour. That means you are making $20 profit every hour. This is post-taxes, because we live in a libertarian wonderland now and taxes are a thing of the past.
The capitalist can supply the raw materials and pay them $10/hr, so that the capitalist makes $10 profit.
At first it might seem like the capitalist has the shittier gig, right? WRONG. Check this out.
After a while of exploiting his worker, the capitalist will have enough money to buy two sets of raw materials at once, and then hire two workers to construct shoes for him. Now he's making $20 profit every hour, and will be able to afford a third employee is half the amount of time as it took to get his second employee.
Now, you, the cobbler, see this happening and want to try it for yourself. So you spend a few weeks eschewing the almond milk caramel frapachinos every day, and soon you've got enough money to buy two sets of leather raw materials too. You go an do that, and then things start to get kind of confusing (lets just say you're not the brightest cobbler in town), you saw the capitalist hire two workers, so you go and construct two sets of shoes, which takes two hours, and you realize you're still just making $20 profit an hour. An idea pops into your head, "Eureka!" you guy and buy two sets of leather supplies again, an d this time you use both sets to build a set of a shoes, but those shoes turn out to be REALLY big, far too big for anyone to wear. Now you're out $80 raw materials, have no cash on hand left, so you sigh and sign up for a job at the capitalist's factory, where you'll only be making half of what your used to make.
The moral of the story is that regular everyday normal working people and more or less limited by a linear rate of profit.. On the other hand, fat cat ghouls like the capitalist can keep hiring more and more workers as their profits get larger and larger. In an idealized setting, the capitalist is only limited by an exponential rate of profit. No matter how hard the worker works, they will never have anywhere close to the amount of money the capitalist has, because their relationships with money are fundamentally different. Undisturbed, wealth inequality will grow in a n unbounded fashion until the gini index looks like an ideal
laughterlaffer curve.To keep the metaphors dumb, because the Capitalist Boss can hire another employee to increase output, instead you the lone shoemaker, having to either work harder to make more shoes per hour to increase your margins, or use cheaper materials, realize you can't increase the amount of money you can make in the same way.
Because the capitalist didnt make his money skimming off of one person's work. It's everyone involved in the making of the shoes. Or Coats. The Capitalist didn't add $19.90 to the cost of the making of a coat. The coat, by the rules of Liberal Economics, should cost $30.10 because of the amount of work that went into it.
I started reading Capital, Volume 1. He's talking about the value of commodities. I am not the dumb leftist. I am pretty average. I am still like wut? I think I need a discussion group for this honestly. *Maybe I should watch that Professor's lecture series everyone always talks about on here to accompany my reading?
lol this guy doesn't know about the value of commodities haha :side-eye-1: hah...
Hey I am actually using this to ask real questions about reading and not just slam dunking on Joe Biden not knowing where he is. *Oh wait you're kidding.
lol I hit the same walls. Even something like Capitalist Realism, which is a lot easier to digest than anything Marx wrote makes me feel like an idiot. I'm with him on the Wall-E references and then he starts talking about the real versus The Real and I'm like wtf I don't even know what these words mean anymore.
in philosophy, the difference between "small r" real/reality and The Real is a distinction made necessary by the limitations of language that muddy the separation between the Imaginary (a personal/subjective/changeable "reality" that exists for the individual/group that is pondering/humoring it) and The Real (the category of True Statements about the world, unfettered by sense perception or symbolic/cultural interpretation).
for example: the phrase "the sky is blue" is a statement made about a subjective experience of reality; for it to be a True statement, the subject who says it must either a) be looking at a sky that is blue and validating this blueness by their own sensory perception of the wavelengths of light they see, or b) have previous subjective experience of blue skies, which they attempt then to relate to another. Note, of course, that the blueness of the sky is not supported by any concrete, objective reality beyond the fact that the physical world can align in such a way that sometimes the sky is percieved to be blue.
On the other hand, statements made within the space of The Real would be True in an objective way, regardless of the personal experiences of the subject making the statement. From the wiki, explaining the Lacanian interpretation:
The order of the Real is not only opposed to the imaginary but is also located beyond the symbolic. Unlike the symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in the Real. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the symbolic, the Real is "always in its place: it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from there." If the symbolic is a set of differentiated signifiers, the Real is in itself undifferentiated: "it is without fissure." The symbolic introduces "a cut in the Real," in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the Real emerges as that which is outside language: "it is that which resists symbolization absolutely." The Real is impossible because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality.
ok but what does THAT mean? The Real is traumatic in its impossibility? Well, lets go back and try to make a Real statement about the sky. The sky is blue doesn't work, because that subjective experience implies the "presence of blueness" that precludes the "absence of not-blueness." It is inadequate as a Real statement because the sky can be one of any number of colors, patterns, conditions, etc. In this same way, what the weather is, or the constituent matter making up the gas admixture of our atmosphere, these questions can only ever be answered through subjective processes, not just because any statement made about these attributes of the sky will be subjective, but also because the words themselves are from the world of words, created by subjective human social experience, to explain the world of things experienced by that society. The degree to which statements about these attributes could be Real is hindered by the absolute reality that the statement itself is trapped in the subjective realm from its very conception! A statement about the sky that is Real has to be configured to make sense outside of this subjective world of words and things described by them. One that gets close, but is still hindered (ever so slightly) by the fact that we're still calling it "sky", would be something like, "The sky IS." i.e. whatever subjective interpretations of reality are caught up in the meaning of the word "sky", there is an objective Truth that that thing described by the word "sky" is definitely up there, is definitely present in Reality.
But wait, that's boring. Where's the "traumatic Real"? To that, I will first remind you of Chicken Little, and now I will subject you to a dramatization of the consequences of The Real:
ahem
JESUS FUCKING CHRIIIIIIIST WHAT IS THAT THING!?!?!? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH FUCK ITS EVERYWHERE AND ITS JUST HANGING UP THERE! THEY TOLD ME IT WAS JUST A BLUE THING THAT'S BIG AND SOMETIMES ITS WET BUT AN ICE CUBE THE SIZE OF MY FIST JUST CAVED IN THAT DUDES SKULL AAAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGH WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT LOUD NOISE WHAT ARE THOSE FLASHING LIGHTS WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO HOW WILL MY PEOPLE SURVIVE THIS TERRIBLE CONFUSING CONSTANTLY PRESENT FICKLE MONSTER OF REALITY THAT CAN KILL INDISCRIMINATELY AND TAKE WHOLE HARVESTS OVERNIGHT PLEASE LORD GOD SWEET BABY JESUS OR MAYBE THE KING OF THE LAND DO SOMETHING AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
Okay okay, definitely a dramatization, but hopefully it gets the point across: the Real has consequences that are generally invisible to/hidden by the world of subjective language/interpretation, consequences that cannot simply be explained away by developing more sophisticated labeling conventions; the system of labeling will never be sufficient to paper over the raw nature of the underlying physical reality.
Anyway, this is all loose, and probably a bit wrong in places, but it gets the basics of the concept across.
Now go read Capitalist Realism again :)
yeah in retrospect the last line turns the whole thing into copypasta, doesn't it
So David Harvey has a lecture series on Kapital that I think is really good. He breaks it down well. If you find Kapital to be so dense and confusing I’d say watching his lectures are a good substitute.
I used the audiobook, and it seemed like he just repeatedly talked about commodity value and how it is initially generated through a combination of the use value and labor value of the commodity being produced, but once it exists and is traded as a commodity the importance of use value is diminished. The commodity value takes over and it can be traded at much higher values than its actual labor value would otherwise dictate.
I think, anyway.
I'm still not sure why he takes so long to describe that, but maybe I zoned out and missed more than I thought I did.
Yeah that it's pretty tight summary. What determines something's actual use value?
Use value is the utility of a product, and isn't tied to a money value. The exchange value is what is eventually represented through money value. That's the whole "10 yards of linen for a coat" exchange is morphed into "10 yards of linen bought for money and that money then spent on a coat."
I must yet again say that the reason you personally read theory and combine it with extensive study of history is so you can literally rewire your own brain so as to be able to spontaneously generate and comprehend your own arguments when agitating.
Like I'm not kidding compared to when I was a babby convert in early 2017 my brain works differently now, when I get into a deep and frenzied dialectical mood it is actually a very weird feeling because I have near-perfect memory recall of vast amounts of raw information I've consumed over the years. It feels like I'm going insane sometimes because I'm like "bruh I can literally see the invisible threads holding together material reality wtf"
I have the "bruh that exact same bulshit argument was said by jerks in 1734 and was being debunked at that time"
read, study, understand.
the knowledge of theory linked to knowledge of history ties it all to the 'real' and how wefucking got here, which ties it to this moment.
then live praxis.
we're here because tim berners-lee and frank zwhatshisname failed to get their vision for the future of tech off the ground, and we're refugees from the corporate internet, which is the child of wall street (steve jobs was a salesman, not a tech guy. bill gates was a rich kid who had connections before he was out of high school. silicon valley gets a lot of its muscle from stanford-a business school, not MIT or any of the great tech schools in CA) more than the workshops and workstations of old (farewell, sweet prince, sweet xerox-parc, semantic web, university network, anonymous freedoms showing us our truest selves), which is structured like a panopticon(okay thats a whole thing, but tl;dr: it's built around self censorship and social pressure and limiting opportunnities and privacy) slaughterhouse (so when temple grandon redesigned the modern slaughterhouse, she took it from something the cows struggled against, to something they would walk forward in and fuel by their own muscle, just by manipulating the walls and view, and making them comfy until it was time to shoot them in the fucking head)of the mind(because social media and the algorithm(s) are made to harvest your attention like commodity sell your soul for pennies twenty times a second and harness your attention until you're so fucked and fragmented you can't even read a book. use every part of the (abstraction of) the animal, and make it easier to extract exploitative labor from!) and... a bunch of other stuff that you now see why im not typing out, so we're here because we wanted some brief moment of community and wholeness and maybe even the genuine human connection we were promised from the internet, from society, from everything, but never got because capitalism doesn't give, it takes hostage with every inch ceded and sends you little pieces in dead drops when you beg. it will monopolize and break every promise. and we mostly haven't found it, that connection, that togetherness, because who among us even remembers how? how to be friends or lovers or comrades?
but im a little high and inclined towards poetry. so maybe, despite my attempts to keep it to a minimum, that all just sounded like nonsense.
I'm not 100% awake so this was kind of nonsensical to me but hell yeah sister media fragmenting minds and shit has got some MFers I know unable to sit their ass down and read smgdh
pronouns, clearly stated next to name. lets kill this internet assumption that everyone's a guy, yeah?
It's one of the problems with having a big tent. You'd have to explain the fundamentals over and over to a bunch of people who may just not be interested/good faith.
There was a tweet I couldn't find that went like this.
"You don't need to read theory is for illiterate Dalit women who work the fields 8 hours a day and have 7 kids not pampered western college kids whose biggest obstacle is getting over their anxiety to call the pizza take out place".
yeah you can totally pick shit up from lived experience and a ten minute conversation. but reading theory works too, and is the only way if you've never actually had to class struggle.
