Removed by modNSFW
fun fact: cows are carnivores. CW: baby chicken being eaten alive
Removed by modNSFWThe video is to prove a point really fast, but, cows actually do only eat proteins. They have three stomachs that they use to feed grass to bacterial colonies, which they then pull into their fourth stomach to eat, with any of the grass that's left un-eaten by the bacteria being shit straight out without being processed any further. They don't eat the grass, the grass is there to feed what they do eat, which is supplemented by eating any large animal small enough to fit in their mouth. I read a study once that almost all cows when dissected had at least 1 animal in their digestive system at a time.
The notion that cows are good peaceful harmless herbivores who eat nothing but grass is nonsense. Here's a video of a cow eating the corpse of a donkey. Of note: there's grass right next to the body. And it isn't just a result of cows being fucked up by human domestication, wild deer (who you cannot blame on humans malnourishing it or contaminating its feed or whatever) do it too.
constructing an elaborate worldview out of a kindergarten level understanding of biology and then getting extremely smug about it annoys me relentlessly. Cows would eat you if they had the chance
Yes, the commodity contains within it certain quantities of crystallized labor time & therefore alienated human potential & human striving. The material relations between people become social relations between things
Honestly this is going to be a blast, I haven't read Capital in... 11 years now, jeez, and just copying and pasting it here is going to give cause to reread it. Hope you like linen.
"A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.[2] Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production."
Yes, "socially necessary labor" doesn't distinguish in the particulars between human needs and human wants... they're all wants and these wants are almost never satiated. Thus the compulsion of capitalist production to socially reproduce that mode every day & every pay period & every generation
"Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.[3] So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention."