Sunday 13 October 2024

Amia Srinivasan transparent disagreeability.

In 'disagreement without transparency' Srinivasan and Hawthorne ask

: what ought one to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement?

Note there is a disagreement and see if there is some empirical observation which can be made to settle the issue.  

Faced with this question, one naturally hopes for an answer that is principled, general, and intuitively satisfying.

I've just given it.  

We want to argue that this is a vain hope. Our claim is that a satisfying answer

epistemic questions don't have 'satisfying answers'. That which is 'informative' may be very unsettling.  

will prove elusive because of non-transparency: that there is no condition such that we are always in a position to know whether it obtains.

Sure there is. You can see from the smile on the person's face that they are satisfied with the answer.  

When we take seriously that there is nothing, including our own minds, to which we have assured access, the familiar project of formulating epistemic norms is destabilized.

Only in the sense that the claim that everything is the fart of the fart I farted last Tuesday destabilizes British monetary policy. In other words, the thing simply isn't true. In the case of finding what the 'satisfying answer' is we can inquire how pleased a particular person would be with a particular answer.  

In this paper, we will show how this plays out in the special case of disagreement. But we believe that a larger lesson can ultimately be extracted from our discussion: namely, that non-transparency threatens our hope for fully satisfying epistemic norms in general.

Only in the sense that the fart I farted last Tuesday itself farts in a manner which threatens Biden's hopes and dreams. 

To explore how non-transparency limits our prospects for formulating a satisfying disagreement norm, we will put forward what we call the Knowledge Disagreement Norm (KDN).

Which will turn out to be nonsense. The correct norm is that where there is a disagreement about something knowable, we consider what empirical evidence would end the disagreement by showing one side to be in error.  

This norm falls out of a broadly knowledge-centric epistemology: that is, an epistemology that maintains that knowledge is the telos of our epistemic activity.

That is merely a definition or tautology since 'epistemic' means 'concerning knowledge'. It applies equally to a utilitarian or a theological epistemology.  

When addressing the question ‘What ought one to do, epistemically speaking, in the face of disagreement?’ it can be useful to reflect on the semantics of ought-claims, and, in particular, the way in which ought-claims are notoriously context-sensitive.

This isn't true. Either an English speaker knows what the word 'ought' means or one is mentally fucking retarded. All words are 'context-sensitive'. In this particular case, the context is epistemic and the norm is to look for empirical evidence.

For ‘ought’ is one of a family of modals that, while retaining a barebones logical structure across its uses, is flexible in its contribution to the meaning of sentences. For example, there is a use of ‘ought’ connected to particular desires or ends, as in: ‘The burglar ought to use the back door, since it’s unlocked.’  

 It is the same use as 'people who don't have the key to the front door should use the back door'. The relevant desire has to do with entering the premises, not burglary per se. I think ought is being wrongly, or unnaturally, substituted for 'should' 

There is also a use connected to legal or moral norms, as in: ‘You ought to go to jail if you murder someone.’ 

This is the same use as 'crimes should be punished'. The suggestion isn't that people should visit a jail after killing a person. 

And there is a use that is (arguably) connected to the evidential situation of an individual or group, as in: ‘He ought to be in London by now.’ 

 Again, this is 'should'. There is no deontic claim here. 

Even within any one of these broad categories, there is considerable scope for context-dependence. For example, the truth conditions of a deontic ought-claim will also be sensitive to which facts are held fixed in the conversational context.

No. They are irrelevant. Either there truly is a specific duty or people are using 'ought' when they mean 'should'.  

For example, when one says of a criminal ‘he ought to have gone to jail’, one is holding fixed the fact of the crime.

One has no power to do so. I think OJ should have gone to jail because I think he killed his wife and there was sufficient evidence to convict. But, someone with superior knowledge of the case may tell me I am wrong and supply verifiable evidence that I overlooked some crucial information which created 'reasonable doubt'.  

By contrast, when one says ‘he ought to have never started on a life of crime’, one isn’t holding fixed the fact of the crime.

No. I may say this about Joe Biden whom I believe regularly steals my TV remote. But I have no power to fix any facts whatsoever.  

Indeed it is plausible to suppose— and contemporary semantic wisdom does indeed suppose—that the semantic contribution of ‘ought’ is in general contextually sensitive to both a relevant domain of situations (the ‘modal base’), and to a relevant mode of ranking those situations (‘the ordering source’). 

Sadly, contemporary semantic wisdom is considered useless and stupid.  

On a popular and plausible version of this account, ‘It ought to be that p’ is true relative to a domain of situations and a mode of ordering just in case there is some situation in the domain such that p holds at it and at all situations ranked equal to or higher than it.

Rubbish! If you say 'where is my urine? I know I was too drunk to piss in the toilet'. My reply is to point at some yellow liquid on the floor and say 'It ought to be that pee.' You say, 'I just checked. It isn't pee. It is lemonade. Where did my pee go?' The answer is obvious. I bet you you couldn't angle your dick so as to drink your own pee. You won that bet and I owe you a tenner. If you don't remember this, I'm not going to tell you. 

Incidentally, set theoretically speaking, there may be no domain for an epistemic proposition because of the problem of impredicativity or the intensional fallacy.  

Where there are only finitely many situations, this is equivalent to the constraint that p holds at all of the best situations.

It is equivalent to nothing at all because situations may not be distinguishable or rankable.  Assuming they are doesn't mean they actually are. 

Note that this toy semantics has the consequence that finite closure holds for ought-claims. If ‘It ought to be that p1 . . . . ought to be that pn ’ is true for a finite set of premises, then ‘It ought to be that q’ is true for any proposition entailed by that set.

No. There may be no set because of impredicativity or the intensional fallacy. True, some sort of ramified type theory may alleviate the problem. But nobody has found any such beastie yet.  

This style of semantics is by no means sacrosanct,

It is mathematically unsound.  

but it is one that will be in the background of our thinking in this paper. From this perspective, the question ‘What ought one to do when one encounters a disagreement?’ can thus be clarified by considering how the key contextual factors—ordering source and modal base—are being resolved at the context at which the question is being raised.

There is no well ordering because epistemic objects are subject to the masked man or intensional fallacy. That is why epistemic disagreements require searching for empirical evidence or a 'witness'. 

The Knowledge Disagreement Norm (KDN): In a case of disagreement about whether p, where S believes that p and H believes that not- p:

we need to find a p or evidence that something which entails p actually exists 

(i) S ought to trust H and believe that not- p iff were S to trust H, this would result in S’s knowing not- p

S thinks H is untrustworthy. If S trusted H he would know H was trustworthy because H said so. But this has nothing to do with whether H is in fact trustworthy. Only actual evidence of an independent and objective kind can decide the question. 

(ii) S ought to dismiss H and continue to believe that p iff were S to stick to her guns this would result in S’s knowing p ,

No. It would change nothing. Only evidence can produce knowledge as opposed to a belief however strongly held.  

and (iii) in all other cases, S ought to suspend judgment about whether p .

This is not required. You can judge according to your own lights. A court may convict on the basis of admissible evidence. It can quash that conviction if new evidence comes to light.

KDN is sheer nonsense. These two cretins don't mention the only thing which matters- viz. evidence.  

According to KDN, one should be ‘conciliatory’ in the face of disagreement—that is, give up one’s belief that p and trust one’s disagreeing interlocutor that not- p—just in case so trusting would lead one to know that not- p.

I think I am alive. You tell me I'm a ghost. You say 'trust me. I will push this dagger through your heart. You will then see that you are dead and therefore a ghost.' I decide to trust you and know that I am dying because you just shoved a dagger into my heart. According to KDN this would be a good thing.  

Since (it is generally granted) trusting someone who knows is a method of acquiring knowledge oneself

only if there is evidence that trusting him is justified 

(i) recommends that S trust H in cases where H knows that not- p .

on the basis of evidence. But there is no 'disagreement' here. There is a stupid guy who says 'I think the cat says bow wow' and a smart guy who says 'nope. It's a dog' at which point the stupid guy says 'well, you know more about such things because you are a son of a bitch.'  

Being conciliatory in such cases will lead S to greater knowledge. 12 According to KDN, one should be ‘dogmatic’ in the face of disagreement—that is, dismiss one’s interlocutor and continue to believe p—if one knows that p.

On the basis of evidence. That's all that matters.  

What about disagreement cases where neither S nor H knows whether p ? In such a case, KDN demands that S suspend judgment. 

Which is itself a judgment.  

There are a few things worth noting from the outset about KDN. First, KDN is inspired by knowledge-centric epistemology,

i.e. knowledge is knowledge centric for the same reason I am me-centric. That's just how ontology works.  

an epistemology that takes the telos of belief and epistemic practice more generally to be knowledge. 

There is no such epistemology. We get that we need to believe stuff which aint true- e.g. we aren't as stupid as shit- for psychological reasons. But 'epistemic practices' are about knowledge and the only thing that matters is relevance. Suppose I disagree with the Pope over whether it was Moses or Jesus who said 'fuck the Police!' The relevant evidence would be provided by Holy Scripture.  

 

One might have, by contrast, a justification-centric epistemology,

would not be an epistemology. It would be casuistry or jurisprudential in nature. Similarly a sodomy-centric epistemology would seek to achieve sodomy rather than interest itself in knowledge.  

according to which the telos of belief is mere justified belief,

which is still just belief and thus the things telos is itself.  

or a truth-centric epistemology, according to which the telos of belief is mere true belief.

see above. 

The fact is if we say 'sodomy-centric' epistemology we mean it isn't epistemology at all. The same holds for any non knowledge-centric epistemology. But knowledge is gained through empirical evidence.  

Each of these alternative views could lead to disagreement norms that are analogous to the knowledge-centric KDN.

in other words they would be just as nonsensical. Only evidence matters.  

While we will not discuss these possibilities here, much of the discussion that follows applies to them as well. Second, KDN says nothing about how S and H should respond in cases where their disagreement is a matter of divergent credences as opposed to conflicts of all-or-nothing belief.

Because KDN is shit. The answer is always 'look for evidence'.  

Despite the prevailing trend in the disagreement debate,

i.e. disagreements between nutters who don't get that only evidence matters 

our discussion will for the most part proceed without mention of credences. We find this a natural starting point; our pre-theoretic grip on the phenomenon of disagreement tends to be in terms of conflicts of all-or-nothing belief.

Nope. Our understanding is that epistemic disagreements are settled by evidence. Other sorts of disagreements- e.g. those based on personal animosity- aren't.  

Third, note that compliance with KDN will not necessarily result in overall knowledge maximization.

It will result in stupidity maximisation.  

Suppose S disagrees with H about whether Jack and Jill went up the hill together. If H were to trust S, H would come to know that Jack and Jill indeed went up the hill together,

nope. Only evidence of their doing so would produce knowledge.  

but he would also abductively come to believe a cluster of false propositions based on the (false) hypothesis that Jack and Jill are having an affair. In short, KDN is locally consequentialist with respect to the telos of knowledge.

Nope. KDN is locally and globally shit. Only evidence matters when it comes to knowledge.  

Less local consequentialisms are of course also possible, and we shall return to this issue in due course. Fourth, KDN’s gesture towards knowledge as epistemic telos can be unpacked in various ways, corresponding to diff erent meta-epistemological views. On one gloss, the relevant ‘ought’ is bouletic/desire-based: what makes KDN true is that the ‘ought’ is grounded in an (actual or idealized) desire of the disagreeing parties to maintain or gain knowledge about the disputed issue.

Such knowledge can only be gained from evidence.  

On another gloss, the relevant ‘ought’ is based on a ranking implicit in certain, say, social norms, thereby rendering the ‘ought’ in KDN a kind of deontic ‘ought’.

As opposed to what? Ought is deontic or it is being illicitly substituted for a word denoting correlation.  

On a more robustly realist tack, one might think the ‘ought’ of KDN is tied to a valuational structure that is desire- and social norm-transcendent. We shall not attempt to adjudicate between these diff erent views here, remaining silent for the most part on questions of meta-epistemology.

Which is exactly the same thing as epistemology just as meta-preferences are preferences. The relevant 'intension' can contain its own meta-language precisely because it has no mathematical representation and thus no one can say what it does or doesn't contain.  

Fifth, and finally, conditions (i) and (ii) of KDN will have less bite to the extent that disagreement has the effect of automatically defeating knowledge or automatically defeating the knowledge-transferring capacity of trust.

Trust does not transfer knowledge. Study may do so. I trust the Professor to teach me but don't show up for class. I acquire no knowledge.  

Now, no one thinks that all instances of disagreement have these defeat-effects.

None do. Only evidence matters. All knowledge claims are defeasible on that basis.  

For, in many cases of disagreement— in particular, where only one of the two disagreeing parties is an expert, or where one party possesses more evidence than the other—it is obviously true that one can continue to know in the face of disagreement, and that one can come to know by trusting one’s disagreeing interlocutor.

Information remains information whether or not you trust the source.  

For example, imagine that Tim believes no one is at home; he calls Ana on her mobile from his office, and expresses this belief. Ana disagrees—because she, in fact, is at home. Obviously Ana continues to know that someone (indeed, she) is at home, and Tim can come to know this himself by trusting Ana.

No. He has received information. Will he update his knowledge base on that basis? Maybe. Maybe not. Much will depend on how he interprets evidence received as part and parcel of that information transmission. If he could hear the sounds of a noisy pub in the background, he might think Ana is at a bar. She isn't at home. She is lying.  

While disagreement does not always destroy knowledge and the knowledge-transmitting power of trust,

we may use other sources of evidence in deciding whether to trust hearsay testimony.  

it is a live question whether it does so in a wide range of the more interesting cases of disagreement.

No. The question of epistemic disagreement is closed and deader than the dodo. Only evidence matters.  

A vexed question, central to the disagreement debate, is whether knowledge is defeated in certain kinds of cases involving ‘peers’.

Only evidence defeats knowledge.  

Many favour a view on which knowledge is defeated in cases of peer disagreement. In general, the greater the number of cases in which disagreement defeats knowledge or the knowledge-transferring capacities of trust, the more cases of disagreement will be relegated to the auspices of (iii). That is, the more disagreement defeats knowledge or the knowledge-conferring power of trust, the more KDN will recommend suspending judgment.

If there is no evidence one way or another those whose motivation is epistemic is to go further down their own road in the hope of discovering a 'crucial experiment' or gaining more evidence. Thus, though currently no candidate theories for quantum gravity have yielded experimentally testable predictions, there is no reason to pursue any such theory in the hope that it will do so. 

Imagine the following situation: Sally and Harry are disagreeing about whether p.

If this is an epistemic disagreement Sally and Harry agree to disagree till some clinching evidence can be found.  

In fact, p is true, and Sally knows this, but she isn’t in a position to know that she knows this. 

Why? If Sally's motivation is epistemic, she is relying on evidence. True, she may say 'this is my intuition'. But she would need to consider what sort of evidence is incompossible with this intuition. She can ask Harry if he has any such thing or knows of a crucial experiment which will reveal it. Consider Kantian 'incongruent counterparts'. The Wu experiment settled its hash once and for all.  

Harry (falsely) believes not- p, and (as very often happens), he is not in a position to know that he doesn’t know this.

He knows what evidence led him to that belief. Let him reveal it by all means.  

Imagine further that Sally can maintain her knowledge that p by being dogmatic

She can say p is dogma of a type which can generate no observational discrepancy with the facts of the case. But dogma is dogmatic, not epistemic. 

and that Harry can come to know p by trusting Sally. 

No. He gets to know nothing. He just accepts a dogma.  

Since neither party is in a position to know the facts about knowledge relevant to KDN,

none are. KDN is stupid shit 

neither party is in a position to know precisely what action KDN demands of him or her. 

do stupid shit rather than look for evidence.  

To be somewhat more precise, we might say that KDN is not perfectly operationalizable,

it is stupid shit. Epistemic disagreements ought to lead to a search for evidence- nothing else.  

where a norm N (of the form ‘S ought to F in circumstances G’) is perfectly operationalizable iff , whenever one knows N and is in G, one is in a position to engage in a piece of knowledgeable practical reasoning of the form: (1) I am in circumstances G (2) I ought to F in G (3) I can F by A-ing where A is a basic (mental or physical) act type that one knows how to perform.

Sally ought to run away when approached by a homicidal maniac. Is that 'operationalizable'? No because homicidal maniacs may look like kindly Police Sergeant concerned that a young lady get home safely. 'Knowledgeable practical reasoning' is evidence based. Sadly, there may be no clinching evidence which allows a norm to be 'operationalized'. Still, a different norm might work. Keep a gun in your coat pocket and make sure you are always facing a guy who might mean you harm. Shoot him the moment he does anything suspicious. True, you may end up killing an innocent, but them's the breaks.  

As the case of Sally and Harry shows, KDN is not perfectly operationalizable.

It is nonsense.  

This is because one is not always in a position to know whether one knows, and not always in a position to know whether one’s interlocutor knows.

That is irrelevant to an epistemic disagreement which ends with a quest for evidence or ought to do so if the game is worth the candle.  

In other words, the relevant kinds of knowledge-related conditions are non-transparent,

because of misspecification or the 'masked man fallacy'. In other words the extension of the intension is not known or is impredicative or itself epistemic. Thus 'homicidal maniac' is an intension whose extension might include an avuncular Police Serjeant. However, 'dude who might harm you unless you shoot him first' has a well defined extension. 

where a condition C is transparent just in case, whenever it obtains, one is in a position to know whether it obtains. 

It isn't transparent. But your purpose is served if you can get away with shooting first and asking questions later. In America, there are States where you can shoot a guy on your property without first gathering evidence that they intend you harm. Since this is 'common knowledge' intruders would be well advised to only rob houses if they themselves are willing to kill the home-owner and pay the penalty for doing so.  

Operationalization is subject to error. Sometimes it is worth doing. At other times, the cost of error outweighs any possible benefit. 

//it often depends on conversational context whether, in proffering a bit of advice, one presupposes operationalizability. Suppose you are advising Jane on the giving of an award, and you say: ‘You ought to give the award to the person who just walked through the door.’ Uttered in a typical context, this presupposes that Jane knows (or is at least in a position to know) who just walked through the door. But one could also reasonably advise Jane as follows: ‘You ought to give the award to the most deserving person. I realise that it’s often difficult to tell who the most deserving person is.’ Here, one is recommending that the award be given to the most deserving person, but one by no means expects the recommendation to be operationalizable in the sense above.

The two cases are similar because the 'intension' has no well-defined 'extension'. Suppose there is a meeting. Everybody present just walked through the door. True, if both of you are looking at the door and one guy is striding across the threshold then there is a unique person picked out by your statement. But it may also be the case that the most deserving person is obvious at a glance. If the award is for 'Miss Teen Tamil Nadu' and only one teenaged Tamil girl is present then she is the most deserving of the award though, obviously, I would just go ahead and give myself the prize as I have continually done for the last five decades.  

But so long as one does not falsely presuppose operationalizability,

Everything is operationalized with some margin for error. The Tamil girl may in fact be of Telugu origin. Also, she may have a dick. Still, mistakes happen.  

it is far from clear that there is anything ipso facto wrong about articulating an imperfectly operationalizable norm as advice. After all, there can be instances in which one can’t incorporate a norm in knowledgeable practical reasoning but nonetheless has good evidence about what a norm recommends. Suppose Hanna gives you the advice: ‘You ought to put out as many chairs as there are guests.’ You have good evidence that there will be six guests, but you don’t know this. Hanna’s advice is hardly improper or useless, despite your not being able to incorporate it into knowledgable practical reasoning.

Just admit there is a margin of error and be done with it. You have knowledge of a stochastic, not certain type. So what? That's good enough for most purposes.  

Indeed, even if offering a norm as advice presupposed a sort of operationalizability, this is at most a constraint on advice at a context, not in general. That is, just because there are cases in which KDN exhibits operationalizability-failures, this does not preclude it from ever being useful as advice;

it is useless for epistemic disagreements because the right advise is 'go find evidence'  

it will count as advice in those contexts, at least, when it is operationalizable.

i.e. a crucial experiment can be made.  

So while it is false that whenever we know, we know we know,

 which is irrelevant for epistemic disagreement since only evidence matters

it is perfectly plausible that there are plenty of disagreement cases in which we both know and know we know.

In which case why not provide relevant evidence? 

In such cases, one might well know what KDN demands of one. (Of course one will never know KDN demands trust in a situation in which one’s interlocutor knows p and one believes not- p and where such knowledge would be transmitted by trust—though insofar as one knows one doesn’t know p one will be in a position to know that KDN entails that ought to stop believing p .) 

One will never 'know' KDN because it is nonsense and knowing nonsense means not knowing you yourself have shit for brains.  

If the conditions relevant to KDN were transparent, then every (rational) attempt to conform to KDN would be successful. But since they are non-transparent, (rational) attempts to conform to KDN might fail. For this reason KDN can easily fail to be good advice because trying to follow it, or exhorting others to follow it, does not guarantee conformity with it.

Nothing can guarantee that advise will lead to actions in conformity with it.  

Clairvoyant Maud. Maud is a clairvoyant, and uses her clairvoyance to come to know that the British prime minister is in New York, though she doesn’t know that she knows this. Her friends, who are members of Parliament and therefore usually know the whereabouts of the prime minister, assure her that the prime minister is in fact at 10 Downing Street. Maud, moreover, doesn’t even believe she is clairvoyant, as she has been exposed to plenty of evidence that suggests that clairvoyance is impossible. Nonetheless, Maud dismisses her friends and continues to believe that the prime minister is New York.

Nothing wrong in that. There is no epistemic disagreement here. Nobody is concerned to find out where the PM is. Otherwise, Maud and her MP friends would have started hunting for evidence.  

Let us stipulate that it is possible to gain knowledge through clairvoyance, and that although Maud’s evidence that clairvoyance is impossible means that she isn’t in a position to know that she knows that the prime minister is in New York, she nonetheless does know his location.  Then Maud, in being dogmatic, conforms to KDN; if she were instead to be conciliatory in the face of the disagreement, she would lose her knowledge that the prime minister is in New York.

No. She would merely deny it so as to be agreeable. Nothing wrong in that. I often agree with others that Julia Roberts was ideally cast in Pretty Woman though, as my Agent assured me, I would have been the best choice for a role which, in fact, was based on my own experiences as a trainee Chartered Accountant. I should explain, back in those days, Hollywood thought all Indians were thin because Indians didn't get enough food to eat. As a matter of fact, I am fat and have jiggly man-boobs. But because of prevailing stereotypes about Indian men, Julia- who is as thin as a rake- was cast in the role meant for me.  

Nonetheless, it seems that Maud is doing something epistemically irresponsible by being dogmatic.

Nope. She is sticking to her guns because she genuinely has a super-power.  

We feel a strong intuitive pull towards

stupid shit because you are stupid shitheads. 

the judgment that Maud is doing what she ought not do, for she is maintaining a belief even when she has overwhelming (albeit misleading) evidence that she isn’t clairvoyant, and thus doesn’t know the disputed proposition.

No. It is these two cretins who are being 'epistemically irresponsible' here. They stipulated that Maud was clairvoyant and then started criticizing her because this imaginary person had an imaginary super-power they had assigned to her. Why not criticize Superman for not being Lex Luthor?  

We can’t help thinking that Maud is playing with epistemic fire, exhibiting poor habits of mind that just happen, in this rare case, to serve her well.

Why should this case be 'rare'?  

Thus, KDN allows for instances of what we might call ‘blameworthy right-doing’: that is, cases in which S intuitively does something blameworthy, though according to KDN she does what she ought to do.

An imaginary person with an imaginary super-power is described as 'blameworthy' by the cretins who imagined that person. If this is philosophy what is insanity? 

Bridge Builder. Simon is an expert bridge engineer. He is constructing a bridge to span a large river, which thousands of commuters will cross each day. Simon has done the relevant calculations, and knows precisely how many struts are required to hold up the bridge. Simon’s colleague, Arthur, a more junior but competent engineer, disagrees with Simon’s assessment, saying that more struts are required.

Under some circumstances, this may be the case. An expert can determine how likely those circumstances are. The Economic rule to be applied is that of 'regret minimization' because of Knightian Uncertainty. These two cretins don't understand high IQ stuff of this sort.  

Let us stipulate that Simon not only knows how many struts are required, but also knows that he knows this.

What you are stipulating is that Simon has a super-power.  

Arthur, while almost always right himself, makes mistakes on a few more occasions, and Simon knows this. According to KDN, Simon should dismiss Arthur and be dogmatic about the number of struts required.

He isn't being dogmatic. He is relying on a super-power these two cretins have assigned to him.  

Indeed, Simon is in a position to know that he should do this, since ( ex hypothesi) he not only knows how many struts are required, but moreover knows that he knows. Nonetheless, if Simon were to simply dismiss Arthur, we would likely feel that this would be problematic.

Nope. You cretins just gave this imaginary dude a super-power. It's like if the guy who invented Superman criticized the dude for flying despite Lex Luthor's suggestion that he had no such super-power.  

 What seems problematic about Simon’s dismissal of Arthur is that Simon is instilling in himself a bad habit—that is, a habit of boldly going on even in the face of disagreement, a habit that might easily lead him to disastrous consequences.

Like Superman flying around the place despite Lex Luthor's belief that nobody can defy gravity.  

Our nervousness about Simon’s dogmatism, we would like to suggest, turns on our recognition that if Simon were in a case where he in fact didn’t know how many struts were required,

he could ask some other expert.  

the habit he is instilling in himself in the case where he does know

We are in the habit of not asking for directions when walking in a neighbourhood we are thoroughly familiar with. This does not mean we instil in ourselves the bad habit of not asking for directions in unknown neighbourhoods. It is not the case that we should ask for directions every day when we go to work or return home even though we are perfectly familiar with the route. These two cretins are stupider than shit.  

might easily lead him to act similarly dogmatically, thus building an unsafe bridge and threatening the lives of thousands.

There are safety inspectors and other such folk to ensure bridges are 'over-engineered'. Still, under some concatenation of circumstances even over-engineered bridges collapse. Look at the Francis Scott Key bridge. It could withstand collision from the sort of ships that used the canal in the Seventies and Eighties. But some twenty years ago, much heavier ships started plying the water. One such struck a pier bringing down the bridge. This wasn't the bridge builder's fault. 

Of course, if Simon were always in a position to know when he didn’t know, there would be no such risk. That is, if Simon could always perfectly distinguish between cases in which he knows and doesn’t know,

e.g. by having supporting evidence ready at hand 

the habit he is instilling in himself would be fine. But since there are not unlikely eventualities in which Simon isn’t in a position to know that he doesn’t know—again, because knowledge is non-transparent

it is transparent enough if supported by evidence 

—the habit he is instilling in himself by dismissing Arthur is problematic.

Only if it is problematic that you don't ask for directions to the shop you are looking at lest you get into the bad habit of not asking for directions when lost in the middle of the Sahara desert.                       

Human beings are not creatures for whom the absence of knowledge is generally luminous; as such, it is simply not possible for humans to be dogmatic in cases where they know and not also be dogmatic in cases where they falsely believe they know.

One can be dogmatic on matters of dogma because no evidence can refute dogma. All other knowledge is defeasible by new evidence. 

Grenade. A soldier is holding a grenade that is about to detonate, and he must decide to throw it either to his left or to his right.

He should do whatever his commander would want him to do.  

Let’s assume that act consequentialism is the correct moral theory

It isn't for soldiers. They must obey the chain of command.  

(or at least, more plausibly, that it is the correct moral theory with respect to Grenade).

In which case a soldier who deserts to the enemy could be said to have acted morally if, as a consequence of his cowardice, the enemy decides our troops are demoralized. This causes them to attack a well defended position. They are mown down, their morale crumbles, we win the war. But the cowardly deserter will still be Court Martialled and put before a firing squad.  

Then we might say that what the soldier ought to do is to conform to the following norm: Consequentialist Norm (CN): If S is faced with the choice of doing only either A or B, S ought to do A if it would produce less harm than doing B, ought to do B if it would produce less harm than doing A, and is permitted to do either if A and B would produce equal harm. Imagine that the soldier in Grenade has misleading evidence that more harm will be done if he throws the grenade to the right. If he throws the grenade to the right, then he does (according to CN) what he ought not to have done, for he performed the action that resulted in greater harm. Nonetheless, he is obviously not blameworthy for doing what he does. This is an instance of blameless wrongdoing. Now suppose instead the soldier throws the grenade to the left, because he wants to maximize the possible harm of his action. In fact, his action minimizes the actual harm done; nonetheless, we certainly don’t want to say that his action was praiseworthy.

These cretins don't get that soldiers should maximize the harm done to the enemy and minimize that done to their own side. But, speaking generally, they would have orders as to how handle such situations.  

As such, the claim that (as CN entails) the soldier ought to throw the grenade to the left does not supply the grounds for appropriate normative evaluation of the soldier’s actions.

That evaluation will be done by a Court Martial.  

Both KDN and CN, then, suffer from the problem of normative divergence. That is, both link ‘ought’ to an ordering source that implies that there is no straightforward tie between what agents ought to do and the evaluative status of their actions or their character. This, we take it, is what is most deeply troubling about KDN: it fails to secure a naturally hoped-for tie between what agents ought to do and agents’ evaluative status. 

Because KDN is stupid shit. For soldiers there is a normative tie between certain types of evidence- e.g. the colour of the uniform the enemy wears- and actions such as throwing a grenade. True, soldiers can make mistakes. This may lead to their acquittal by a Court Martial. 

 Imagine you are looking at a pointer on a dial. Given the distance you are from the dial, the particular light conditions, and so on, there exists some margin of error n such that that there is some strongest proposition p you are in a position to know of the form the pointer is plus or minus n degrees from point x, where x is the actual position of the pointer. If you were to believe, say, that the pointer is plus or minus n-1 degrees from point x, you would not in fact know this proposition.

You would know it if you had some other way to verify it. True, this knowledge might be defeasible in the light of further evidence but then all knowledge is defeasible.  

Suppose, on this particular occasion, the strongest proposition you know about the position of the pointer is the proposition p, that the pointer is within range Q. That is, for all you know, the pointer is anywhere within the range Q, a range which has position x, the actual position, at its centre.

That does not follow. Knowing something is within a range would lead to thinking it is likely to be in the middle of the range assuming a normal distribution.  

Now, note that nearly all of the positions within Q preclude knowing p.

Not if p is a statistical proposition or concerns a probability function.  

If, say, the position of the pointer were closer to the edge of Q than point x, then one’s margin for error would preclude knowing p.

See above.  

So it is very unlikely, relative to the propositions that you know (including p itself), that you know.

Rubbish! That's not how statistical information works.  

The general upshot of Williamson’s argument, we take it, is the following. Defeatism can be helpfully thought of as a view on which knowledge is what we might call a ‘minimally luminous’ state.

It isn't. Knowledge is defeasible on the basis of evidence. There is no 'minimally luminous state' for the same reason there are no 'atomic propositions'.  

A minimally luminous state is one such that whenever one is in it, it is not the case that it’s unlikely on one’s evidence that one is in it.

In which case, being a cat iff you are not a cat is a minimally luminous state. Thus, if you are a cat, it is not the case that you will find it unlikely that you are a cat because you are a fucking cat. Other 'minimally luminous states' include being a mermaid or the fart of the fart of a flying unicorn. The thing is daft.

But Williamson’s argument suggests that, given some plausible assumptions about margins of error, knowledge is not even minimally luminous.

But being a cat iff you are not a cat is. Thus Williamson, like these two cretins, isn't talking about knowledge, he is talking about nonsense.  

The problem with

trying to align knowledge with epistemic virtue.

is that it opens the door to trying to align it with being a cat iff you are not a cat. Also, why focus only on epistemic virtue? What about epistemic cuddliness? Ought not knowledge to be cuddly and cute and willing to sit in our lap making purring noises?  

There is certainly some intuitive pull to the thought that, in addition to an ‘ought’ governed by outcomes, we need an ‘ought’ that is tied to praiseworthy epistemic conduct

not to mention epistemic cuddliness or its ability to making purring noises while seated in our lap. But epistemic rape counselling too is important. Consider the vast hordes of undergraduates who have suffered serious sexual self-abuse. Should not stuff they are taught by Professors offer them gratuitous rape counselling?  

— just as it is natural to draw an analogous distinction in the moral realm between what one objectively ought to do and what one subjectively ought to do.

More particularly if, subjectively, you are a cat iff you are not a cat and Moral Science is cuddling you and giving you gratuitous rape counselling.  

That said, the praiseconnected ‘ought’ is rather more elusive than it initially seems.

Just as the cuddliness-connected 'ought' more particularly if it also has to offer gratuitous rape counselling.  

In this section we explain why. Again, our explanation will turn on considerations of non-transparency.

i.e. not knowing what you are talking about.  

A natural first pass on the ‘subjective’ epistemic ought will mimic its standard analogue in the moral sphere: one ought to do that which has greatest expected epistemic utility.

Utility is epistemic. It changes as the knowledge base changes. Moreover the supremum is unknowable. This is an impossible command.  

Suppose that there exists some fixed scale of epistemic utility in the disagreement situation that is KDN-inspired. 

Then there should be 'Aumann agreement', barring uncorrelated asymmetries between agents, as Bayesian priors are adjusted so both parties maximize their utility. But Aumann himself supplies an argument why this would not be regret minimizing. 'Discovery' is a good thing and epistemic disagreement could drive it.  

A tempting thought here is that the subjective ‘ought’ is a measure of what is best by one’s own lights. But that thought becomes less tempting once we

remember that it has the clap 

realize that whatever our gloss on ‘our lights’, there will plausibly be cases in which agents are justifiably mistaken about their own lights.

Which may be fine by their own lights. Equally, by their own lights, they may decide they are a cat iff they are not a cat and that Knowledge is giving them rape counselling.  

In that case the phenomenon that gave rise to blame worthy right-doing and blameless wrongdoing with respect to the ‘objective’ ought—namely a mismatch between the facts pertinent to what one ought to do and what one takes those facts to be—re-emerges for the ‘by one’s lights’ ought.

Not if you look for evidence in a sensible manner.  

In short, if we introduce an ‘ought’ tied to expected epistemic utility, then the phenomena of blameworthy rightdoing and blameless wrongdoing will still arise

because any cretin can praise or blame anything at all. Why is Quantum Theory not providing rape counselling to disabled African Americans? Personally, I blame Paul Dirac. He was very rude to me when I phoned him last night. Also he put on a fake Indian accent and said 'Saala haraami, mein tera gand phad doonga!' I think Dirac is very racist.  

relative to that ‘ought’, again because of the non-transparency of evidence.

but more evidence can make it transparent enough. 

Suppose, for example, that one is deciding whether to trust someone about a certain proposition that is in fact a complex theorem of classical logic.

In which case it has an equivalent Gentzen system featuring conditional tautologies. 

If epistemic probabilities are standard, at least to the extent that all logical truths are assigned probability 1,

this is not the case with a Gentzen system because tautologies are partial.  

then the facts of the disagreement will be probabilistically irrelevant.

No. There may be very low probability of finding an item which proves the rule is false. But we may have an existence proof for it all the same. However, this may rely on something like the axiom of choice or even determinacy and there may be types of math or logic which are useful but where that axiom is violated.  

The proposition will have probability 1 relative to all facts,

if it is a tautology, not a partial one. 

and the expected epistemic utility of trusting one’s interlocutor will be calculated accordingly.

No. It may be that persevering with a different axiom system opens new vistas. Nobody now thinks Brouwer was wrong to go in his own direction. But even in the Sixties, many American mathematicians thought he was off his rocker. This motivated Errett Bishop's famous paper on 'Schizophrenia of contemporary Mathematics'.  

It is obvious enough, then, that any such conception of probability will induce intuitively compelling cases of blameless wrongdoing and blameworthy right-doing.

Nonsense! Intuitionism requires 'witnesses' i.e. a specific number or construction that is required to be part of an existence proof. But even approaches Brouwer thought 'blame-worthy' can be found to have such witnesses when the underlying theory is recast in constuctivist terms. 

But it is not obvious that we can contrive a non-idealized notion of probability that will provide a more satisfying gauge of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness.

These two cretins can't contrive shit. One can certainly make a 'non-Dutch book' re. what a particular guy or committee will find praiseworthy or blameworthy if people have rational expectations and thus have 'coherent' preferences. Indeed, when estimating probable punitive damages, lawyers too might look at the composition of a jury and arrive at a figure so as to settle out of court rather than proceed with the case. 

Note that even if the operative notion of probability were subjective probability, that will not avoid the general worry, since there is no reason to expect that subjective probabilities are themselves luminous.

Nothing is luminous. It's just that, if the game is worth the candle, there is an incentive for converging to 'coherent' preferences so there is no Dutch book- i.e. probabilities are objective enough.  

This is especially clear if subjective probabilities are a matter of one’s dispositions over all bets, since there is no guarantee that one is in a position to know one’s own dispositions.

Nor is there a guarantee that this matters at all.  

But even if one thinks of assigning a subjective probability to a proposition as more akin to, say, feeling cold than being disposed to bet, anti-luminosity arguments for feeling cold will still apply.

Nothing would apply because it is easy enough to feel cold by stabbing oneself repeatedly. Blood loss will cause circulation to slow thus causing you to feel cold even if it is a hot day. Thus, if you assign a high subjective probability to benefitting from being stabbed, you are welcome to do so even in some stupid psilosophers argue that this is what you should or should not do. 

 Intuitively, we expect epistemic norms to be

about evidence 

normatively satisfying:

nope. The evidence may be very unsettling indeed. Knowledge isn't about cuddliness or getting gratuitous rape counselling from mathematical equations.  

that is, we expect them to track our intuitions about blameworthy and praiseworthy epistemic conduct.

Amia's intuitions about what is blameworthy are barking mad. Still, it is true that epistemic conduct which leads to a continual drive to acquire appropriate evidence is praiseworthy. But these two cretins won't say so.  

An epistemic norm that ties what one ought to do to a non-transparent condition (e.g. knowledge) is

not an epistemic norm. On the other hand, f you are an investigator or researcher paid to gather evidence, you are welcome to devise indirect or novel methods to do so. The method may initially be 'non-transparent', indeed, it may remain a black-box, but it can point one towards the solution for which admissible, transparent, evidence is available. The norms or protocols governing admissibility of evidence are respected and your job is done and you deserve praise.

an epistemic norm that will not satisfy this basic desideratum. To construct an epistemic norm that is normatively satisfying, then, we require an epistemic ‘ought’ that is tied to only transparent conditions; unfortunately, no such conditions plausibly exist.

I've just given them. Take DNA evidence which was not admissible at one time. Still it could be used to identify the killer and motivate an investigation that produced admissible evidence.  

As such, the hope of finding a normatively satisfying answer to the disagreement question seems like a hope unlikely to be satisfied.

And yet in any useful, protocol bound field, such answers are found all the time. 

 our intention has been to suggest that there seems to be no single privileged answer to the question ‘What ought we to do, epistemically speaking, when faced with a disagreement?’

The privileged answer is always 'find evidence'. True, knowledge is intrinsically defeasible but we can still do our best till something better becomes available.  

This thought, bleak as it might be, easily leads to bleaker thoughts.

Like, 'why are philosophy Professors so fucking stupid? Oh. It's because they failed to keep up with the Math. Well, at least I've got tenure. Sadly, this means I have to teach utter retards.'  

We have not argued for the conclusion here, but it seems that non- transparency poses a more general problem for the ambition to formulate all sorts of epistemic norms. 

It is true that a new type of evidence may be inadmissible or may be a 'black box'. However, this does not mean admissible evidence or a 'light box' might not be found and that an epistemic disagreement ends in a useful discovery.  

If so, then it is not just a stable answer to the disagreement question that will remain elusive,

Because different people may have different motivations for disagreeing. I do so because I want a bribe. You do so because you are principled. The third guy is concerned with the truth etc, etc.   

but also stable answers to all questions concerning what we ought to do, epistemically speaking.

 There is a robust answer which I have given. It does not matter if the 'knower' is some radical type of sceptic or solipsist. What matters is observing the protocols re. admissibility of evidence even if recourse is taken to 'non-transparent' methods and this is done by an investigator who is in doubt whether he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly who dreamed he was a man.  

I suppose, Amia Srinivasan who is very disagreeable because, transparently, she is neither White nor has a dick, needed a type of psilosophy which holds finding evidence to be incompatible with 'epistemic virtue'. But it seems a trifle unfair that she has to teach nonsense just so as to spew hate at White bastids wot have dicks. 

Saturday 12 October 2024

Revising Adam Tooze on Revisionism

Writing for the Guardian, Adam Tooze notes that

Facing war in the Middle East and Ukraine, the US looks feeble.

Because Biden looks senile.

But is it just an act

No. He really is senile. Still his job now is to look so decrepit, Harris looks Presidential by comparison.  

Still, Kamala may need Muslim votes to push her over the top. Till then, America arms Israel but asks them not to kill anybody with them. Harris wants to be a two term POTUS. This means she can't have the same foreign policy as Biden- who isn't even a boomer. He is actually part of the 'silent generation' which, we now understand, was silent for a very good reason. It is obvious that the world has changed and a new foreign policy is needed. But will it be isolationist? Perhaps. Obama said America's foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit. It may be that not doing stupid shit involves not having a foreign policy. Just be transactional.                  

The idea that Biden is just muddling through these global crises isn’t convincing.

Why not?  The world thinks he is senile. He can't make any big moves just in case it will help Trump. His job is to look so utterly decrepit that Harris shines by comparison. 

Look closely and his foreign policy has been as radical as Trump’s

His big swing was 'Quad' which had re-emerged under Trump but which Biden said would have a 'defining role in the region' . Everything else was incremental albeit often cackhanded or counterproductive. But is Quad a paper umbrella? The fact that Biden just said 'it's here to stay' means it will soon go away.

Writing on-the-spot histories always comes with risks. But the urgency of the situation demands it.

Not really. The elections aren't that far away. Either Israel hits Iran after the election or the signal is that the  US is abandoning Taiwan and Israel. This is a major reset. What will post-boomer diplomacy look like?  

We need some explanation for why the US is not doing more to calm the situation in the Middle East

Biden is senile. That's the explanation. He had been quick to react by air-lifting arms to Israel to the October attack because he remembered Nixon's Operation Nickel Grass from 50 years ago when he first became a Senator. But after that he dithered. Nice guy, but not Presidential material. This had been the verdict on both his earlier bids for the White House. Then, after he had retired, he was brought back precisely because he wasn't Presidential. Indeed, he wasn't even CFO material. Veep for DIE was the vibe which got him the White House. If Trump was the anti-Christ, Biden was the anti-Trump. He would make America lame again. 

and to push for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

It must be said, Biden always hated Putin and believed that Russia was in terminal decline. True, like the rest of us, he didn't predict that Zelensky and the Ukrainians would prove so tough or Putin's mercenaries so utterly crap. The other thing nobody saw coming was Hamas's atrocious war-plan. In one case, a comedian turned out to be a hero of Churchillian stature. In the other, a gerontocratic, Leninist, kleptocracy showed tactical genius of a rare order. By 'front-loading' the most atrocious aspects of the attack, they ensured that, sooner or later, they would get what all Leninist parties want- viz. unconditional support from 'useful idiots' no matter what atrocity is committed. 

There is one school of thought that says the Biden administration is muddling through.

Which enables Harris to shine by comparison. She looks Presidential. Her party has no choice but to unite around a vapid diversity hire who couldn't even run her own office properly.  

It has no grand plan. It lacks the will or the means to discipline or direct either the Ukrainians or the Israelis.

It has no objection to resisting Putin's aggression to the last drop of Ukrainian blood. Also, if we lost the war against terror, why shouldn't the Israelis take a beating for a change? 

As a result, it is mainly focused on avoiding a third world war.

Even Biden can manage to avoid pressing the nuclear button. He is senile not sociopathic.  

If so, that is a sad testament to the decline of American hegemonic ambition.

Biden's 'summit for democracy' was foolish. He has pushed more and more countries into the arms of China. Meanwhile, Putin's failures in Ukraine have soldered together a cohesive Eurasian block including Iran. My own impression is that under Biden 'strategic ambiguity' over Taiwan disappeared. How can it be resurrected? Quad? Australia will probably realize that waiting for Anglo-American nuclear submarines, which don't have nukes, is simply silly. As for Japan, that dog won't hunt. This leaves India which will never be a naval power. It will use its demographic advantage against China in the high Himalayas but its economic interest is in allying with China- this was the original 'Panchsheel' plan. America has been a destabilizing force in Asia and the MENA. Maybe it is time it just fucks the fuck off. 

No wonder there are calls in the US for Washington to develop an “independent” foreign policy – independent, that is, of Ukraine and Israel.

& Taiwan. What happens if Putin does nuclear proliferation into Latin America? Cartels with nukes won't be deterred by a wall. Come to think of it. the Israeli's had a 'smart wall' didn't they? 

But what if that interpretation is too benign?

It is too benign to say that US foreign policy is a muddle. As Obama said, it is stupid shit.  

What if it underestimates the intentionality on Washington’s part?

Washington wants to make America utterly lame so it can concentrate on scolding the world for being naughty.  

What if key figures in the administration actually see this as a history-defining moment and an opportunity to reshape the balance of world power?

The balance of world power has moved greatly against the US over the Biden Presidency. His plan was to spend lots and lots of money. But the US can't become the arsenal for democracy once again. On current projections, it may not be able to meet its own defence requirements by the 2030s.  

What if what we are witnessing is the pivoting of the US to a deliberate and comprehensive revisionism by way of a strategy of tension?

It has taken Iran decades to implement a 'strategy of tension' in the Arabian peninsula. What violent struggle can America sponsor? If Putin really does start exporting nukes to Latin America, sooner or later you will have Cartels which have countervailing power over the DEA. 

Revisionist powers are those that want to overturn the existing state of things.

Stupid powers don't know what the existing state of things actually is. This may also be true of transactional powers, but they learn from the 'discovery' they do or else stop being able to transact anything at all.  

In an extended sense, this can also mean a desire to alter the flow of events; for instance, to redirect or halt the process of globalisation.

Which started happening when the Neanderthals failed to prevent us taking over their territory.  

Revisionism is often associated with resentment or nostalgia for an earlier, better age.

So is eating hotdogs at the football stadium. Why don't they still taste great? Also, why am I as fat as fuck?

What makes us shrink from this interpretation of Joe Biden’s foreign policy is

his shitting himself and running away from Kabul. The Biden doctrine is 'American soldiers are very precious. Wait till we evacuate them before defending yourself. After that, we will criticize you for human rights violations and threaten to disinvite you from our Democracy summit.'  

the sheer aggression of Russia since February 2022 and Hamas on 7 October.

Which ought to have been anticipated. What couldn't have been anticipated was the reaction of Zelensky and his Ukrainians. It remains to be seen whether Europe creates its own army and weans itself off military dependence on the US. But this means having its own defence industry. In a multi-polar world, there must be multiple military-industrial complexes.  

The US-led west is generally seen as reactive, not proactive.

It is seen as having lost the war on terror and as declining in significance relative to a cohesive Eurasian bloc. Henceforth, it must seek to drive a wedge between Russia, China and Iran. No doubt, such a wedge would emerge in any case but the West could stop being 'proactive' in soldering together such disparate powers.  

But focus not on the process

which involves virtue signalling and fucking over your friends 

but on the outcomes of US policy, and a different interpretation seems plausible.

America truly wants to return to splendid isolationism. Europe needs more and more Muslim migrants to keep ticking over. This may be tough for the Jews and the Homosexuals and trans p but you can't deny that Muslims have a great work ethic and proper family values.  

Under Donald Trump, after all, the demand to make America great again was quite literally revisionist.

Biden's too slogans were 'build back better' and 'America is back'. Biden sought to create the impression that America had been hegemonic and had been enforcing a rules based International order and spreading Democracy and Human Rights till that nasty Trump had become President. Now he was in charge, America would lead the world towards freedom, prosperity and being nice to darkies and homos and transgender people. 

He had no interest in the existing rules of the game. He tossed trade treaties out the window. He slapped tariffs on China.

like Biden and now the EU 

“America first” was the mantra.

Rather than 'America last'.  

By comparison with Trump, the Biden team boast of their commitment to a rules-based order.

Which involved invading Muslim countries and killing lots of innocent people.  

But when it came to the world economy and the rise of China, Biden has been every bit as aggressive as, perhaps more so than, his predecessor.

He telegraphs his punches and then, it turned out, there were no punches.  

Under Biden, Washington has been committed to reversing years of decline apparently brought on by excessive favour shown to China.

This could succeed. Industrial policy needn't be utterly shitty. But what are the chances?  

The US has tried to stop China’s development in tech. To do so, it has strong-armed allies such as the Dutch and the South Koreans.

Sadly, this may result in China doubling down on R&D and taking ultimately taking the lead. The wider problem is that richer countries may have a perverse incentive to produce expensive shite. Poor countries have no choice but to go with what is cheap but effective.  

When the World Trade Organization dared to protest against US steel tariffs, the White House reaction was contemptuous.

The WTO is a joke. But the US made it that way. 

Bidenomics is Maga for thinking people.

No. It is senile shite. Thinking people tend to substitute words for action.  

In what is now called the Indo-Pacific, the US is not merely defending the status quo.

If the US can't stop the Houthis hitting shipping in the Red Sea, fuck can they defend? Just yesterday, the American flagged tanker 'Olympic Spirit' was hit by 11 ballistic missiles and two drones. There are all sorts of Islamist insurgent groups stretching all the way to the Philippines which can do what the Houthis are doing. 

Currently, Biden & Co think they have scored big by turning Myanmar into a disaster zone and toppling Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh. But, it is likely both will become Chinese clients albeit with Islamist insurgent groups operating from their soil. The question is who will control those groups? 

The very definition of the strategic arena is new.

Doing stupid shit is not new.  

In the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), Washington is putting in place a new latticework of alliances that ties India, Japan and Australia to the US.

But, if the US does not defend Israel, it will have zero credibility.  

If nothing else had happened in the past two years, the judgment would be clear. The geo-economic policy of the US towards China under Biden is a continuation of the revisionism first seen under Trump.

In other words, Biden followed where Trump had led.  

It was because it was focused on confronting China that the White House sought detente with Russia in 2021.

Since the time of Nixon, American policy has been to try to keep China and Russia apart.  

What spoiled that were two miscalculations made by Vladimir Putin. The first was to assume that his assault on Ukraine was a bagatelle. The second was to underestimate the willingness of the west to use Ukraine as a proxy against Russia.

I think this 'willingness' was a direct product of the incredible valour shown by the Ukrainians. Many had assumed that the comedian would run away and some Moscow friendly goon would have been installed in Kiev.  

Two years into the war, the position of the west has hardened into its own revisionism. In relation to both Ukraine and Russia, the status quo ante is no longer acceptable.

I think the West would accept some territorial gains for Russia. The other point is if Putin dies or is overthrown, somebody competent may take charge.  

In the Middle East, the situation is even more clear cut.

No it isn't. We had no idea of Hamas's military strength or that the Houthis could rain down rockets on ships in the Red Sea. The question now is whether the Muslim Brotherhood can revive its political fortunes in Egypt (if so, Israel can't afford to leave Gaza) and Saudi Arabia. The bigger question is when and if Hanafi Hamas will break with Shia Iran.  

Here, too, the Biden administration was not looking to escalate. Trump’s Abraham accords between the United Arab Emirates and Israel had opened up a promising vista. But Russia’s growing ties with Iran, and China’s involvement in the region darkened the picture.

Actually, we'd have been relieved if China brokered a deal between Hamas and Israel. Perhaps they could turn Gaza into a thriving manufacturing centre. 

Once Hamas launched its attack on 7 October, and once the Israeli government’s determination to end the modus vivendi with Hamas and Hezbollah became clear, Washington gave the green light.

Biden's knee jerk reaction was to start a big air-lift- like Nixon's 'Operation Nickel Grass'. But Hamas's resilience changed the picture. Moreover, people who had been appalled by Hamas's atrocities are now their unconditional supporters. What percentage of young Americans fall into this category? If it is growing Harris is likely to pivot on this issue- or appear to do so- more particularly because her husband is Jewish. 


The US is paying for more than 25% of Israel’s rampage as it physically annihilates Gaza, victimises the West Bank and sets about uprooting Hezbollah. It has pulled allies such as Germany and the UK into line.

Under Starmer, that may change. Labour can't afford to alienate Muslim voters.  

It is shielding Netanyahu against the reach of international justice.

Israel has nukes. The Hague doesn't want to be turned into a pile of radioactive dust. Islamic terrorism has been bad. Jewish terrorism would be worse because Jews are hella smart.  


Of course, unlike in Ukraine, the US has continued diplomacy. But to what effect? First and foremost to keep Iran boxed in and the powerful Gulf states on side.

That's failed. The Gulf countries are asking Biden to stop Netanyahu bombing Iran's oil facilities even though it is other oil exporters who have most to gain.  

Meanwhile, Israel is wiping out Iran’s network of influence

but young high quality recruits must be pouring in. These are kids of whom Mossad knows nothing. It will have to build up Humint from scratch. 

and annihilating the 1990s vision of a two-state solution.

Which the PLO and Hamas annihilated all by themselves.  

In all three arenas – China, Ukraine and the Middle East – the US will say that it is responding to aggression.

It is prepared to fund, but not to fight. But the money too may run out.  

But rather than working consistently for a return to the status quo it is, in fact, raising the stakes.

Is it really? Biden may have had some such delusion. Does Harris?  

While insisting that it supports the rules-based order, what we are witnessing is something closer to a revival of the ruinous neoconservative ambition of the 1990s and 2000s.

The neocons were pals with a guy whom they thought could replace Saddam. He promised to love them long time and give them lots and lots of money.  

With regard to China, the revisionist strategy was clear from the start.

What is clear is that it has failed. If Harris wins, she is bound to piss off the Indians who will withdraw from a Quad which is too costly. Ultimately the economics involved in the division of labour means that India must develop weapons systems in partnership with poorer, more reliable, countries. But, as China and India face a common problem in Myanmar, why might this not be China? Let us see what happens after the Dalai Lama dies. Interestingly, Biden had attacked Trump for being the first POTUS not to meet the Dalai Lama. But, he himself neglected to do so. This calls into question the support that the State Dept. are claiming to extend to the Tibetan government in exile. Here, it is India's position which matters. If Harris becomes President, she might well make an equation between Kashmir and Tibet. India will then go back to its traditional anti-Americanism. The question is whether China is interested in a modus vivendi. 

In Ukraine and the Middle East, Washington has responded to events. But that isn’t evidence against strategic intent.

It is evidence there was no fucking strategy. Intending to have one, doesn't mean you have one. 

Using your enemy’s aggression, the desperation of your friends and the ruthlessness of your allies to your own advantage is simply smart policy. Washington has not been entirely reckless. Biden has resisted the most radical calls for engagement in Ukraine. He pulled out of Afghanistan

he postponed the Trump negotiated pull out but, because he called President Ghani plain Mr. Ghani, that expert on failed states soon had to run away from his failed state. America's retreat from Kabul was shambolic.  

and has refused to put American boots on the ground.

He firmly believes that American soldiers should be wrapped in protective foam and kept out of harm's way.  

At some point the White House may decide that ceasefires are necessary.

At some point it may ask its allies to surrender. The enemy won't take kindly to any such requests.  

But there is more going on here than simply muddling through. First the Trump and now the Biden presidencies are willing contributors to the controlled demolition of the 1990s post-cold war order.

Biden willingly contributed to a great erosion of American power and credibility. Trump may not care greatly about either. He wants to make profitable deals. Ultimately, everything is transactional. If he gets back into the White House, there are lots of things he can very quickly do to improve the lives of Americans. Sadly this requires a foreign policy which does not consist in mindlessly doing 'stupid shit' even if it be of the Obama/Biden stripe. 

Wendy Brown on Capitalism

I use the term Capitalism to mean a regime where capital formation is mainly done through capital markets. The problem is that there have been plenty of Capitalist countries where financial markets were opaque or limited in scope. Still, in so far as they competed with other countries and were successful, the outcome would have been the same as if there had been efficient capital markets and pro-growth preferences (i.e. lower time preference). 

Competition for scarce resources is what gives rise to endogenous Capital formation in some areas whereas the inability to defend or otherwise secure a territory will give rise to low or negative Capital formation. 

All this is obvious to anyone who has eyes in his head and has travelled a bit over the last six decades. 

Prof. Wendy Brown is eight years older than me. She understands nothing about the world she has grown old in. She takes her views from a drunken journalist who was born two centuries ago. 

She writes in the Nation 

Only a few centuries old, capitalism’s unprecedented mode of producing for human needs and generating wealth shapes present and future conditions of earthly existence more pervasively and profoundly than anything else humans have made.

This is nonsense. Capitalism means 'private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit'. It has been a feature of human life since at least the agricultural revolution. The earliest writing systems appear to have evolved from tokens, featuring pictographs, used in commercial transactions 11,000 years ago. It is likely that the first written records relate to the administration of 'State Capitalism'- i.e. a despot controls territory and seeks to extract as much profit as possible from it.

But, it appears, even at that time there were merchants who entered into contracts with suppliers and customers who lived far away and whom they might never see. Even marriages were subject to contract. In one of the oldest known such documents, dating back 4000 years, a woman agrees to purchase a slave to bear her husband a child if she herself turns out to be barren. After the child is born, the slave may be sold. 

 One might argue that so long as such capital can be used for profitable conquest, we are not speaking of pure Capitalism. But, in that case, there was never any pure Capitalism. There were Kings or Emperors and oligarchies extracting wealth from colonies.

Equally, a Communist country, like China, could use private property and capitalist entrepreneurship for its own purposes just as Western Democracies could build up a massive public sector for their own purposes. 

What changed the world was transoceanic commerce which in turn led to bigger markets and thus 'non-convexities' (economies of scope and scale) which in turn drove Scientific research and technological innovation. This was a 'run-away' process where War was the mother of invention and the need to mobilize entire populations for industrial wars of attrition led to a disappearance of a territorial aristocracy. 

It affects the entirety of the planet’s surface and crafts both possibilities and challenges for all life upon it.

China is probably already more important. It appears that if the Globe transitions to renewable energy, China will have played the biggest part. But one can't say the profit motive for specific Chinese private property owners led to that outcome.  

It arrays 8 billion homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation.

No. It is absent in parts of the world where poverty and desperation are at their worst. Even if people in such places are able to assert property rights, they can't 'pursue profit' because they are subject to great uncertainty and thus must 'regret minimize'. 

It contours all social relations and subjectivities, from practices of work and leisure to arrangements of kinship, intimacy, and loneliness.

Nonsense! Traditional societies may feature dowries or bride price. Capitalism permits women to substitute income for progeny. That is why the fertility ratio can drop below replacement level in such societies. 

On the other hand, it is true that if you are a friendly sort of chap, you can incorporate yourself as a company offering friendship and then, if people really like you, you can have an IPO and buy a super-yacht.  

In addition to class,

which has nothing to do with 'Capitalism'. That's why rich peeps throughout history have tried to marry into more cultured families with a distinguished lineage. 

it constructs and mobilizes race and gender

Did you know that the Rothschilds invented Bleck peeps? But it was the Suntory Corporation which invented vaginas. You can bet they made a big profit on it.  

in continuously changing yet persistently exploitable ways.

Actually, Capitalism flourishes more when price, wage and service provision discrimination are destroyed.  

It powers technological revolutions

War does a better job. Profit is a poor motive compared with not being conquered and enslaved.  

and scatters the discarded remains of past ones everywhere on earth and in orbits circling it.

People do that. Isms don't. Incidentally a lot of space debris is of Soviet origin. It was Communists, not Capitalists, who got to outer space first.  

It birthed the Anthropocene—

Currently, this is pegged to the mid twentieth century when Communism, Fascism and Racialist Imperialism were more in evidence than Capitalism. Two World Wars and then a Cold War meant that Capital markets had only a limited role in allocating investment funds even in the USA.  

the epoch in which human and “natural” histories are now permanently and dynamically entwined—and within it, the Great Acceleration: the short half-century in which fossil fuel use intensified so radically as to inaugurate what scientists term the Sixth Mass Extinction.

The Soviet Union was and is a big oil exporter. All sorts of regimes use fossil fuels. 

And it incited the development of finance,

Which had developed long before the 'great acceleration' 

artificial intelligence,

in which China may take the lead if that's what its leaders want 

and other practices animated by digital technologies that bode ever more intense and paradoxical ways to both serve and dominate the species that invented them.

Perhaps this lady's microwave oven is dominating her. Mine is occasionally rude to me but I pretend I am a vacuum cleaner. That's a type of appliance which is notoriously thick skinned.  

This essay is adapted from the foreword to the first English translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 in 50 years, published by Princeton University Press.

There are some smart peeps at Princeton. Wendy isn't one of them.  

Mainstream social science identifies capitalism as an economic system based in markets organized by free competition and spurred by the profit motive. But where is the power to make and destroy worlds in this formulation, to draw everything into its orbit, to permeate and transform every physical and psychic cell of earthly life?

Nowhere. Also Capitalism can't very meanly refuse to supply you with a dick with the result that you have to pee sitting down.  

For Marx,

who was pretending that 'exploitation' occurred if an employer could make a profit buy hiring a worker. He himself got his maid-servant pregnant.  He was a shitty cunt who pretended that the real bad guys who set up factories where women could earn better money and avoid being raped by their employer.

the thinness and superficiality of the mainstream account not only shrouds capital’s power and plunder

and the fact that it refused to give Wendy a dick 

but ignores its conditions of existence, the social relations constituting and constituted by it, the protean orders it creates, transforms, destroys, abandons.

It doesn't who makes good investments or how they are financed. What matters is that if good investments aren't made, productivity will fall relative to rivals who seek control of that same territory. If you are highly productive, you can always hire mercs to fight for you or purchase more advanced weaponry to defend your territory. But this can be done by sensible people running any type of regime. 

Indeed, what Marx’s work forever challenged was not only capitalism’s exploitative nature

exploitation of the most extreme sort existed long before any 'ism'.  

and commodifying effects,

commodities existed even fifty thousand years ago. It is conjectured that our species gained an advantage over the Neanderthals because we participated in long distance trade networks and they did not.  

for which he is readily known, but the reduction of economics to markets

there is no such 'reduction'. You need to figure out what you really need and can afford to buy before you get to the market.  

and thus to a domain of knowledge and practice imagined to be independent of social relations,

Economics, like Accountancy, the Law, Medicine, etc. is meant to be 'independent of social relations'. You hire an expert in one of these fields and you expect him to serve your interests just as well as he would his friend or relative.  

histories, laws, family forms, politics, policing, religion, language, representation, and psyche.

It was Communism which wanted to get rid of 'history, laws, family forms, religion etc.'.  

In its place, Marx developed an understanding of political economy as the distinctive mode through which we build entire worlds

we do no such thing. We may make some changes to what we find and some of those changes may, for weal or woe, endure after we have died or retired. Marx's political economy proved to be entirely mischievous. It enforced a tyranny worse than that of the Tzar or the Manchu Emperor. Thankfully, the 'worlds' it built perished or were transformed into something less actively horrible.  

through our singular cooperative powers—transforming nature, elaborating divisions of labor and organizations of ownership, producing wealth, creating ways of life, institutions, social forms, subjects, and subjectivities.

But all this had already happened. Marx was merely whining about the condition of the poor. But they would only stop being poor when their productivity went up and there was more competition for their labor power.  

The discipline of economics, then and now, slices markets out of these worlds and studies them as if they were an independent field of conduct and knowledge.

The 'discipline of economics' doesn't matter in the slightest. People can make money by studying markets just as they can make money by studying diseases of the body and finding cures for them. You may complain that a medical researcher completely ignores various gesture political or ideological shibboleths but the fact is, to be successful, researchers need to ignore everything outside their own area of interest. True, some 'disciplines' are shit. They have no 'independent field of conduct or knowledge' because shit is just stuff that comes out of an asshole. Much of Econ is such shit but some of it is useful enough. In any case, to qualify as a Solicitor or an Accountant of a Banker or Actuary, you need to pass an exam in Econ 101. That means there is a market for guys who teach the teachers of Econ.  

For Marx, understanding capitalism means grasping all of its conditions,

only an omniscient deity could do so 

requirements, drives, mechanisms, dynamics, contradictions, crises, iterations, and above all its world-making and world-destroying capacities, its life and death drives:

Marxism certainly had a death drive as well as a Gulag drive. 

Even at its birth, capital exhibited this power as it wrenched labor from the land

There were cities in pre-historic times. Marx himself spoke of the 'idiocy' of rural life.  Serfdom was introduced to stop rural folk running away to the cities. 

to fill factories and cities that it would later empty

London hasn't emptied. New York, on the other hand, is a ghost town.  

in an era of dispersed global production.

 Global production has always been dispersed. Perhaps Brown thinks darkies like me were hanging from trees by our tails eating bananas when her own people were working in factories. 

As it developed, it would transform everything humans needed first into a source of exchange-value

Everything has always been exchanged.  

and then, with financialization, into a source of speculative value.

Speculation exists even if there is no money. I think the next harvest will be bad and so stockpile grain. If I am right, I can exchange grain for slaves or gold or gems of various types. 

Producing new ways of life at every turn, its drives to extract, commodify, and monetize every living and fossilized element on earth also laid waste to whole regions, regimes, nonhuman species, and landscapes.

Communist countries could wreak greater environmental destruction. But humans were changing the natural world even at the time of the Neanderthals.  

Marx knew that this unprecedented order of production and destruction, extraction and exploitation was not easy to see or understand.

It was easy enough for guys who made lots of money on the Stock Exchange.  

This was especially so because it took place under the sign of freedom—free markets, free humans,

Slavery existed when Marx was born.  

and the free circulation of labor, capital, and commodities.

In some places, not others. But those were places where such freedoms had been secured by Courts and Parliaments over the course of centuries.  

Grasping capital’s power and reach thus necessitated broadening and deepening the scope of political economy,

which is what the Marginalists did by adopting mathematical methods 

departing from economists’ calculative economic frameworks for historical, philosophical, social-theoretical, and even theological ones.

i.e. writing nonsense. This did help gangster regimes to kill lots of people.  

It requires leaving what he called the “noisy sphere” of the market not only to enter the factory (posted with its sign, “No admittance except on business”)

Brothels too discourage sight-seers. But Universities too eject stupid Socioproctologists like me who wish to examine the various assholes they employ as Professors.  

to see where wealth was produced, but to adopt a framework that accounts for the perversity and illusion of markets coming to stand for the whole. It requires understanding why capital’s complex and distributed workings are less visible to the eye than previous modes of political economy,

e.g. theocracies which burned witches and heretics. It is very easy to spot Satan or to see with your naked eye that the old woman who lives down the street flies around on a broomstick.  

how its freedoms obscure the drives and effects that make it the greatest system of domination ever made or inhabited by humans.

Which is why millions of Americans ran away to Soviet Russia. Indeed, the Berlin Wall was built to keep out those fleeing Capitalism.  

All of these requirements are counterintuitive to those who equate capitalism with markets, where buyers and sellers, supply and demand, money and price, are the only things elemental and visible.

Just as old ladies accused of witch-craft found the charges made against them 'counter-intuitive'.  


What was necessary to capture and analyze capital’s vastness, power, complexity, and opacity, then, was not merely a new description of it but “a critique of political economy,” Capital’s subtitle.

i.e. stupid, paranoid, lies.  

Political economy itself has a dual venue and meaning for Marx: It refers to practical arrangements, to practices of knowledge

Marx knew shit about Physics or Mathematics or Biology.  

and, as we shall see, to their complex cogeneration and entwining.

Which people who were successful in business and politics knew way more about.  

Critique of the practical arrangements entailed discerning both how capitalism worked and did not work,

If you know how it works, you can become very rich and can give lots of money to the poor.  

its engines and drives, its structural crises,

If you can predict these, you can make a killing on the Stock Exchange 

and its wide ramifications and effects beyond markets. Critique of knowledge practices related to political economy included both its popular and erudite forms—the language of capitalists, the language of scholars, and the language of those in between such as that of left polemicists and journalists.

I can critique Terence Tao. Did you know he has a penis? How can anyone take his mathematical work seriously when he is clearly nothing but a RAPIST who is sodomizing the Environment even as we speak? Not till every mathematician has chopped of their dick- and clitorises are tiny dicks- will my proof of the Reimann Hypothesis be accepted.  

Critique of erudite knowledge in turn comprised scope, method, and conceptualization as well as content. Marx’s task in Capital was enormous.

He failed. Get over it.  

That said, critique was something Marx had honed since his college days,

he had a PhD in Law. But nobody in their right mind would employ him as a lawyer. Still, if the 1848 revolution had succeeded, he might have acquired some local importance.  

though as Paul North notes, it took a new form in his late-life study of political economy. Marx knew what the archives were and how to handle them.

Nope. He didn't know English law. He was also unaware of the empirical 'Political Arithmetic' tradition of King and Davenant who carried forward Petty's work. He did know Petty and Boisguillebert but didn't understand their context. 

Thus he writes-

Petty reduces use-value to labour

No. He says, ceteris paribus, this would be the case provided labour was mobile between occupations. It wasn't. Still, he provided an argument for higher taxes on labour which would reduce the burden on corrupt landlords like himself. But this would also inevitably lead to a demand for greater representation for labour in parliament. 

without deceiving himself about the dependence of its creative power on natural factors.

People can move to where 'natural factors' are more favourable.  

He immediately perceives concrete labour in its entire social aspect as division of labour

No. He perceives that only in competitive industries with high labour mobility would this be the case. Assuming such conditions actually prevailed (they didn't) labour was more productive than appeared to be the case and thus could be taxed at a higher rate so as to reduce the burden on the rich.  

 This conception of the source of material wealth does not remain more or less sterile as with his contemporary Hobbes, but leads to the political arithmetic, the first form in which political economy is treated as a separate science.

 The first 'political arithmetic' in England was the Domesday book. Petty's survey of Ireland (from which he personally profited greatly) was its equivalent for that country. 

But he accepts exchange-value as it appears in the exchange of commodities, i.e., as money, and money itself as an existing commodity, as gold and silver.

No. Petty knew about the ill-fated fiat money scheme in Sweden in the 1660s and lived long enough to see the hugely successful bank florin of Amsterdam receive formal recognition in 1683. As a businessman, he knew that credit creation was possible- if your credit was good because you were known to be smart and scrupulous. Petty was a great admirer of the Dutch.  

Caught up in the ideas of the Monetary System, he asserts that the labour which determines exchange-value is the particular kind of concrete labour by which gold and silver is extracted.

No. This is a misunderstanding. He was saying there would be a correlation of this type. He wanted a Government sponsored Statistical Board to confirm if this was the case. Davenant & King's empirical estimation of the demand curve furthered his project. But, it was obvious, that the rough and ready 'labour theory' would give way to something more fine-grained and with better predictive powers. You can begin with a simplification, but as the evidence comes in you can have a more and more sophisticated 'Structural Causal Model'.  

What he really has in mind is that in bourgeois economy labour does not directly produce use-values but commodities,

only if it is under the direction of land-lords or businessmen. Otherwise, it would engage in subsistence agriculture supplemented by hunting and occasional cattle raids or gaining employment as a mercenary or pirate or whatever. 

use-values which, in consequence of their alienation in exchange, are capable of assuming the form of gold and silver, i.e., of money,

they aren't. Petty could buy a loaf of bread in return for a small silver coin. But the bread did not itself become silver.  As for 'alienation', in law it merely means stuff you have the right to sell. I can sell my Chanel frock. I can't sell my wife. 

i.e., of exchange-value, i.e., of materialised universal labour.

You can sell fruit growing on a tree you own even if no 'labour' was involved in its ripening there.  

His case is a striking proof that recognition of labour as the source of material wealth by no means precludes misapprehension of the specific social form in which labour constitutes the source of exchange-value.

The opposite is the case. Petty was good at estimating things based on simplifying assumptions. But he didn't think those simplifying assumptions were true. We might say 'the typical family has 2.4 children' even though no family has forty percent of a child. Still, this estimate is useful enough for policy purposes.  

Brown writes of Marx that

He knew how to look beneath and through the concepts that political economists deployed to discover their premises or predicates,

e.g. saying Economists think there are families which have forty percent of a child. How fucked is that! 

how to artfully invert (or “evert,” as North suggests) received formulations and antimonies,

so as to talk nonsense 

how to reveal the many-sidedness of seemingly simple or unified elements of political economy.

Thus if I say 'Wendy is a woman' you could say 'Wendy has a job. Did you know jobs were invented by Men so as to RAPE the Environment. This proves Wendy has a dick and is currently sodomizing lots of trees and bushes. That is typical male behaviour. Clearly Wendy is a man. 

And he knew how to discover relations and processes, histories, violence, and capacities in seemingly inert things, indeed how to make things “speak”

 e.g. a passing cloud just told me that Wendy is fucking Brazilian Rain Forest in the ass. She is one horny dude!

such that they could appear as agentic elements in a system.

e.g. Wendy's fucking lots of trees in Brazil.  She is an agent of Neo-Liberal Patriarchy. 

Marx had also argued since his youth that bourgeois representations, both popular and erudite, bore an intimate if perverse relationship to the world they emanated from and depicted and that this relationship was part of what had to be investigated in order to surface power and the illusions protecting it.

Nothing wrong with critiquing 'Just So' stories or simplified models. If you do so on the basis of empirical research, Society may find it useful. If you blabber nonsense, some bunch of gangsters may use your nonsense to justify their atrocities.  

Critique thus always entailed a triple move

if it is shit. If it isn't only one move- viz. empirical research- is entailed.  

—critique of thought or representation, critique of actual arrangements and dynamics of power, and a critical or symptomatic reading of the relation between the intellectual and the practical, or, to use Marx’s terms, ideal and material life.

But any paranoid cretin can do this type of critique. Did you know Joe Biden has a dick? This proves he is raping trillions of Nethan-Yahoos. That is why Hamas is so angry.  

Only this triple move could reveal bourgeois political economy and political theory as harboring crucial features of what it represented in distorted form, features that included the distortion itself.

Did you know bourgeois political economy eats only dog turds? You think that the law requires you to dispose of your dog's faeces for a hygienic reason. Actually, all those dogs turds are collected and fed to bourgeois political economy. Proletarian Sociology has protested against this because it is only given cat turds to eat.  

The classical political economists were therefore invaluable building blocks for Marx’s thinking.

Because he didn't understand what they were saying.  

On the one hand, they developed an early if incomplete labor theory of value, a version that could not answer the most fundamental questions about capital (What is the constitutive relation between labor and capital? Where does profit come from? What makes the entire system move, expand, falter, and crash?).

Guys like Petty and Ricardo could answer it well enough because they had plenty of capital. True, investing that money involved some risk. Profit was the reward for risk. Otherwise you could lend money on the basis of a mortgage agreement. What you received was 'interest', not profit. If, like Petty, you had acquired a big estate in Ireland, you received 'rent'.   

On the other hand, this very incompleteness pointed to the self-obscuring manner in which capital appeared in the world

there was nothing obscure about it at all. Entrepreneurs either borrowed money or granted a share in the profits. This enabled them to take bigger risks.  

and provided clues about the kind of critical theory required to reveal its true nature.

It was the type of critical theory which enables me to reveal Wendy's true nature as a dude who keeps fucking to death various Brazilian trees and bushes. 


Marx’s great work is widely understood to center on a core revelation: Capital is the coagulated effect of the labor it exploits,

If you got rich through your own hard work, you exploited yourself. You also probably raped yourself. You disgust me.  

and capitalism incessantly ramifies this exploitation in time and space.

Only because dicks exist. Who invented the job? It was a dude with a dick. Anybody who does a job is a dude and is incessantly raping not just the Environment but also the Black Hole at the centre of our galaxy.  

In his famous turn of phrase, “Capital is dead labor that acts like a vampire:

thus if your Mum and Dad are retired and get a pension, they are actually vampires. Drive a stake through their hearts! 

It comes to life when it drinks living labor, and the more living labor it drinks, the more it comes to life.”

Vampires don't actually exist.  

Capital’s requirements of increased labor exploitation over time—exploiting more workers and exploiting them more intensively— and in space—ever expanding markets for its commodities—constitute the life and death drives of capitalism, drives that are as insatiable as they are unsustainable.

Because dicks exist. If they didn't there would be no such thing as a job- including a blow-job. Ban dicks immediately! 

They reduce the masses to impoverishment,

Communism does that. Capitalism does the reverse.  

concentrate wealth among the few,

The opposite is the case if you look at the net present value of entitlements even for jobless people in advanced Capitalist countries.  

and pile up crises that spell the system’s eventual collapse,

Communist countries have plenty of crises which involve massive 'purges'.  

overthrow, or, as we have later learned, reinventions through the social state, the debt state, neoliberalism, financialization, and the asset-enhancing and de-risking state.

As opposed to the worker's paradise that is North Korea.  

Since growth is essential for what Marx called the “realization of surplus-value” or profit,

It isn't. Entrepreneurs will still get paid for combining the factors of production even when the economy is shrinking. The problem is they may fuck off to somewhere which is growing rapidly. 

capitalist development becomes an almighty shredder of all life forms and practices, including its own recent ones.

Very true. Capitalism caused the end of slavery and the burning of witches. As an American, Wendy disapproves of this.  

From small shops, family farms, and cities to gigantic industries, rain forests, and even states, everything capital makes or needs it will eventually also destroy.

Communism has done worse.  

In Marx’s summary, “Capitalist production thus advances…only by damaging the very founts of all wealth: the earth and the worker.”

Communist countries may produce lots of guns and nukes and Gulags. They can fuck over both the earth and the worker with greater ferocity than Capitalism.  

If capital’s basic life and death drives—global searches for cheap labor and materials; unregulated, untaxed production and investment; and new markets for its commodities, which together eventually generate systemic crises—are the essential story, why did Marx not tell it simply and straightforwardly, especially given his ambition for a working-class readership?

 He was German and had a PhD in worthless shite. 

Why instead does Capital comprise hundreds of pages of complex formulations, difficult abstractions, and long theoretical detours into everything from the nature of the commodity to the nature of money to the nature of value?

The guy was trying to prove he was smart. But smart peeps who understand the economy can make a lot of money.  

And why so much engagement with classical theorists of economics and politics?

He didn't have the Math to understand the Marginalists. To be fair, the Germans ignored Gossen.  

Why a dense scholarly treatise on capitalism rather than a bold account of its productive and destructive powers?

Marx's enemies were other Socialists, not Capitalists- like Engels. His big shtick was how all the other Leftists were stupid and ignorant. Only he was wise- and maybe also Engels who gave him money.  


We might begin to answer this way. Capital is not only a critique of political economy but a philosophy of political economy, and more precisely an account of why philosophy is required for an understanding of capital.

Misunderstanding it and everything else. Philosophy makes you stupid or drives you bonkers.  

It is a philosophical critique of unphilosophical approaches to political economy, those not alert to its many elements beyond markets (including law, politics, militias, and police but also language, mystification, and theology), those that do not interrogate political economy’s fundamentals (labor, capital, value, money, the state) to discover their genesis, nature, and constitutive relations with one another, and those inapt to examining the relation between capital’s surfaces and depths.

In other words, sane people who do well for themselves in the real world.  

Capital’s philosophical orientation is present in its opening lines, where Marx introduces an order of appearance that he will have to disassemble and analyze to get at the true nature of his object.

This involves talk of scary vampires.  

Marx begins:

The wealth of societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production appears in the form of an “enormous accumulation of commodities.”

Which is what China had in the seventeenth century. But it wasn't Capitalist. It was Confucian.  

The individual commodity appears as the elementary form of that wealth.

But the individual commodity- e.g. a piece of meat or a flint axe- existed before anybody had any wealth to speak of.  

Hence our investigation begins by analyzing the commodity.

It is a Tarskian primitive which is beyond definition or analysis. Marx distinguished goods from services. His commodities are goods. But services are required for goods to enter the market. Thus his analysis was ab ovo useless.  


The verb “appears” suggests that capital is bound up with representation.

Because it is a word. Language is 'bound up with representation' including the representation of imaginary or magical things- e.g. Vampires. 

But bound up in what way? More than a cover to be pulled off so that the truth might be revealed,

anybody can say that underneath her clothes, Wendy has a dick which she uses to rape Brazilian trees. That is the truth Capitalism prevents you from recognizing.  

capital’s many distracting and seductive semiotic surfaces are a vital part of what capital is and does.

Like Wendy who pretends she is a woman.  

Neither separate nor precisely false, intrinsic to the system yet mystifying it, capital’s surfaces are simultaneously essential, dissimulating, and clues to understanding its structure and dynamics.

these clues lead you to discover that vampires are real 

In Marx’s hands, these appearances and their unreliable relation to the truth become a broad heuristic for grasping capital as processes and mediations, transmutations and transmogrifications, and as depletable and enhanceable—anything but an obdurate thing.

Marx should have said 'England is great because, over the centuries, it has curbed arbitrary or criminal power. Thus enterprise has flourished. Oven the course of my life there has been a massive expansion in the franchise and vast sections of Society have risen into affluence. Much much more progress is inevitable thanks to the expansion of State funded education, reform of the Poor Law, increased rights for women, etc. Imitate what is good in England. Don't babble stupid Hegelian shite.'  

They also signal that even as it covers and homogenizes the world,

Disraeli said Britain had not conquered India. It took payment in order to administer India according to its own immemorial laws and customs. It was obvious that no 'homogenization' was occurring. 

and promulgates its freedoms as universal,

they weren't because women were denied many of them at that time.  

capital exercises distinct practices of division and separation. It divides different spheres of economic activity (production and exchange)

which have always been separate 

and between social and political realms of power and identity (civil society and state).

which have always been separate 

It separates humans from their labor (as labor-power)

which is what happened when a guy who had killed a deer bartered half of it for food or clothing.  

and from the product of their labor (as commodities). It divides labor itself ever more finely and will eventually divide processes of production so complexly and extensively as to generate what we today call global supply chains.

Which already existed. 

It divides finance from production, management from ownership, ownership from control, and more.

All this had been true in ancient Greece or China or India.  

Above all, it divides owners from producers.

The English word 'farmer' means a guy who rents land, hires labour, and borrows money as working capital. Such farmers had existed since after the Black Death.  

Paradoxically, these divisions and separations underlie capital’s capacity to create historically unprecedented concentrations of wealth.

When Gibbon commenced his History, London had a smaller population than Rome at its height. In many countries, wealth was most concentrated in antiquity. The Roman Villa- even in England- had central heating and piped water for bathing. It would be many many centuries before the English gentry enjoyed such amenities.  

Together, these mediations, transmutations, divisions, and separations make every single-sided analysis of capital a mirage—precisely the mirage that bourgeois political theory and political economy orbit around.

The bourgeoisie- i.e. upper middle class- don't give a fuck about Professors of useless shite. Guys who understand particular markets can make a lot of money. Money talks, bullshit walks.  

Yet, Marx will insist, the mirages are vital in leading us to the truth ordering the whole. Capital’s presentation as an “immense heap of commodities” is not a red herring:Rather, it is part of what must be explained to understand its true elementary form, namely the labor process coagulated in commodities, which does not appear on their surfaces.

Nonsense! I can tell some labour has been expended on the fruits and vegetables I buy at the supermarket. It is not the case that they are hanging from trees.  

The same is true of the capitalist marketplace more generally, where buyer and seller (including of labor-power itself) both appear “free” because the conditions producing them are invisible there.

Just as Wendy appears a woman though she is actually a dude incessantly raping Brazilian trees.  

In short, understanding capital requires grasping its generation of mystifying appearances as endemic to its production process.

things don't 'generate mystifying appearances'. Stupidity may cause us to be mystified by a bunch of grapes we purchase at the supermarket. Understanding Marx may help us see that Vampires where involved in the process by which those grapes became available for our consumption. This suggests we should also buy a string of garlic. 


Marx foretells this need in his own preface to the first German edition of Capital. Preparing the reader for the difficult conceptual work ahead, he writes: “All beginnings are difficult” holds for every branch of science and scholarship.

Smart people ensure the beginnings are easy.  

The first chapter—and especially the section that contains my analysis of the commodity—will therefore be the hardest to understand.

Unless you understand it is nonsense. Without services, no goods could enter the market. Neglecting services means your theory is ab ovo shit.  

The value-form, which in its fully developed shape is the money-form, has little content and is actually quite simple.

Nope. Valuing assets is complicated. Only for 'fungible' items- i.e. those which can be quickly and relatively costlessly sold- can we 'mark to market'.  

Yet for more than 2,000 years, the human mind has failed to comprehend it,

Nope. There were plenty of experts in valuation who used complex mathematical formulae. Marx didn't know about this because his pal Engels was a shitty businessman who had a job in a firm part owned by his family.  

while much more complex forms that have much more content have been analyzed with at least some degree of success. Why? A whole body is easier to study than its individual cells.

The reverse is the case.  

Furthermore, microscopes and chemical reagents are of no help to us when we analyze economic forms.

But statistics and 'structural causal models' are very useful.  

Our power of abstraction must do the work of both things, for in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of labor products, or the value-form of commodities, is the economic cell-form.

No it isn't. Cells remain cells over time and place. Prices vary greatly. If the labour theory were true, there would be very little price volatility. 

To the untrained eye, analyzing these forms appears to be an exercise in splitting hairs. And in fact it is such an exercise—in the same way that microscopic anatomy is.

No. 'Microscopic anatomy' is useful. Marxist shite is a mischievous nuisance.  

Stare as we might at the misery of the toiling masses juxtaposed with the opulent lives of capital’s owners, only through what Marx calls our power of abstraction can we understand why this condition exists, what produces and perpetuates it.

Why is Beyonce rich while I am poor? I put my twerking video on TikTok but it didn't go viral. Clearly this is because of some vampires on Wall Street.  

This peculiar and distinctly human power of abstraction,

e.g the one whereby I can affirm that Wendy is raping Brazilian trees 

Marx says, parallels microscopes and chemical reagents for its revelatory capacity, yet it is purely intellectual, a feat of mind rather than one dependent upon external instruments.

It would be great if cogitation while just seated in an armchair could unveil all the secrets of the universe. Sadly, the human brain has no supernatural power.  

Moreover, abstraction does not magnify or separate components, as laboratory instruments do, but develops registers other than manifest ones

e.g. vampires and invisible werewolves  

for critically representing processes constituting the object. And unlike social scientific modeling, it entails linguistic inventions to produce formulations that invert and theorize the relation of the concrete (illusory) and the abstract (real) to get at the truth of the whole.

So, the fact that I am an elderly and very ugly Tambram is illusory precisely because it is concretely true. In an abstract, and therefore real, sense, I am prettier than Beyonce and it is my milk-shake which brings all the boys to the yard.  

With abstraction, then, Marx does not aim simply to get underneath capital’s self-representations—its “enormous accumulation of commodities” or “relations among commodities which are actually relations among men.”

In which case some guy who plucked a cucumber is having sexual relations with some other dude who shoved that cucumber up his arse.  

Rather, abstraction reveals capital’s concrete elements and dynamics,

in which case guys who do it would be billionaire fund managers.  

their historical and social genesis and their constitutive relations with each other. This, for Marx, is the work of critical theory,

or schizophrenia 

and it is crucial to understand Capital as such a theory and to appreciate political economy as requiring it.

No. It is enough to know that Marxism has fucked up wherever it has been tried.  

Put differently, Marx places the philosophical question of what is true about a philosophical object

nothing is true of a philosophical object. Socrates defined such things as stuff about which any argument whatsoever could, with equal plausibility, be made. In other words, it was confined to questions which had not been 'closed' by some other discipline.  

at the foundation of his critical theory of capital.

which was stupid shit.  

Bringing philosophy into the material sphere to explain capital and criticize previous accounts of it alters both crude understandings of materialism

what exists is an illusion. The truth is vampires are running everything. Also, Wendy is incessantly raping Brazilian trees.  

and the meaning and practice of philosophy such that it becomes critical theory.

Of course Capital is not only theory—its splendid pages include several kinds of histories, economic formulas, social descriptions, literary riffs, polemics, jokes, and more. However, Marx features capital as a relentlessly theoretical subject, and one whose theoretical requirements

e.g. vampires 

are novel and challenging. This is not only because capital involves complex representations and dissimulations but because it is a system of intricate social relations and powers that flow beneath its surfaces.

This is also true of the social life of chimpanzees.  

With our eyes, we see factories, laborers, capitalists, bushels of wheat, or money.

but no vampires. Shame.  

We see capitalists and workers, wealth and poverty, comfort and toil. We do not see what has brought any of this into being, the relations among these things, or the premises, conditions, dynamics, conflicts, and crises of the entire system.

Sure we do, if we work in financial services.  

We do not see the production of “free labor” (labor stripped of its capacity to sustain itself except by working for a wage);

we can't see it in England because the work-shy can get the dole.  

we do not see socially necessary and surplus labor-time, exploitation, or alienation.

because nobody knows what is necessary or 'surplus'. Tax economic rent and it may disappear with bad consequences for allocative efficiency.  

We do not see histories or social relations comprising capital and labor and bringing them into being as classes. We do not see the “dead labor” coagulated in every commodity. We do not see the drives that make capital voraciously and ceaselessly expand. We do not see the histories, spatialities, connections, and effects that together produce the totality of what capitalism is and does.

Economists get quite sizable grants to study the actual economy. Some stupid professors, however, are welcome to talk paranoid nonsense.  

To understand capital, then, we need to see otherwise. This is the work of theory, a term that comes to us from the Greek theoria—meaning to see or watch from an intellectual or actual distance—in order to see more or other than one sees in the midst of things.

Theoria is like the Sanskrit 'darshan'. It originated in the custom of sending observers to different towns to see how they performed various rituals. A distinction was made between dogma regarding what can't be seen and what in Sanskrit was termed Vigyan or science based on empirical observation.  

Theoretical work is not ancillary or optional for understanding political economy but fundamental precisely because from money to markets, profit to productivity, nothing reveals its constitutive histories or processes, the nature of its relation with other components and to its dissimulating appearances.

You can buy a book on economic history if you are interested.  

Every element is objective, yet none expresses its origin, place in the system, constitution, or power through its facticity.

Very true. I was talking to a cauliflower I found in my fridge. It couldn't even tell me its name let alone where it came from or which Vampire had been involved in its distribution. Thankfully, my power of abstraction was able to reveal to me that Wendy's sodomization of Brazilian trees had so outraged certain vegetables that they had come to London to complain to King Charles- who is well known for talking to plants. Sadly, evil vampire captured them and sold them to a supermarket chain.  


Capital requires theory in part because it is a master separator;

whereas Marxism is a master masturbator 

its power, efficiency, and even protection from its enemies derive from all that it divides and pulls apart.

Capitalism is constantly pulling at Wendy's todger.  

Again, it separates workers from the means of production (through the enclosure movements),

which, in England, began in the 12th century and had nothing to do with capitalism 

from their products (through alienation), and from one another (through free labor, extensively divided).

There was serfdom in the 12th century.  

It separates the sphere of production from the spheres of exchange and consumption.

Previously, people went to the field to eat the wheat growing there.  

It separates capital from land, finance from industry, state from civil society, town from country.

Previously, towns featured vast forests. Capitalists told those forests to fuck off. They became sad but only complied when Capitalism threatened to send Wendy to sodomize all their trees and bushes.  

The mediations that emanate from and secure these separations systematically invert their relations of generation and dependency,

True Marxists shove food up their arses and shit out of their mouths.  

from positing capital as a priori, the source of all wealth, to positing the state rather than civil society as the locus of freedom and equality.

The State provides remedies for the violation of rights. True, a 'civil society' may be able to maintain its own police force and militia. But if so, it operates as a State.  

Capital also requires theory because it simultaneously massifies and disperses: It socializes the productive process and implicitly collectivizes labor, yet it produces and depends upon a distinctly atomized form of freedom, one in which the worker is free to dispense of their own labor-power and is thrown on their own means (wages) for survival.

Not if the work-shy can avail of various benefits or entitlements.  

As proletarianization emancipates workers from overt control by feudal or slave masters, and bourgeois revolutions enfranchise them as citizens with rights, they are not only freed from servitude and formal political subjection but emancipated from all forms of dependence and protection.

No they aren't. The country still needs an army.  

The free circulation of capital and labor and the emergence of commodity-based survival breaks up forms of association that provisioned life through interdependence,

Nope. Families continued to exist as did Churches and voluntary associations of various kinds.  

producing atomized consumer society in its stead.

Consumers can act collectively.  

This “freedom,” however, is installed within a machinery of capitalist domination, one that evades control even by the wealthy and powerful.

because of vampires 

The atomization makes possible the domination; the domination produces the atomization; “freedom” is essential to their coproduction. Such an operation of power is historically novel

No. It is likely that a businessman of today, if transported to ancient Sumer, would soon get the hang of how to transact business.  

and, as with the many separations and divisions in political economy, is what theory brings to light.

I spent some time in Soviet Russia. There was more 'atomization' and domination there. Families sharing a flat were terrified that someone amongst them might be an informer for the secret police.  


As we learn to look behind the dramatis personae of power that distract even the most politically savvy (and who litter Marx’s work so that he can reveal their puppet strings),

Bismarck is pulling Lassalle's strings.  

we finally see political economy for what it is: namely, modes of production featuring relations and forces that animate history and that organize social and political orders dominating us until and unless we develop a new mode featuring collective ownership and control.

Also we should abolish scarcity. After that it would only remain to ban death. Did you know that Biden was bribed by the Undertaker's Cartel? That's the only reason Americans continue to die.  

Put differently, on Marx’s account, capital’s opaque surfaces—where reifications and fetishisms are in play

not to mention vampires 

—signal an order of political economy that has ripened into a totality, one comprising these unseeable relations and forces whose effects are unprecedented and only graspable theoretically.

which is also the case with vampires. I think Countess Dracula has been raping me in my sleep thus draining me of both blood and jizz. That's why I can't hold down a job.  

This is the complex truth into which Marx inducts his readers in the book’s first half. It is a truth that features the disjunction between how capital appears and how it actually works as a disjunction produced by capital itself and as an explanation for the failures of previous political economists.

 

Similarly, Socioproctological theory can show how the disjunction between how Wendy appears and how Wendy actually works is a disjunction produced by Wendy herself. This explains the failure of everybody else to notice that she is incessantly raping Brazilian trees. 

In Marx’s own words:

As accepted modes of thought, forms of appearance

e.g. that Wendy does not have a dick 

are reproduced spontaneously and without mediation, while their hidden underpinnings have to be discovered by science and scholarship.

Wendy has a dick and is incessantly raping Brazilian trees. Cauliflowers tried to protest this dastardly action and King Charles was ready to grant them an audience. Sadly, evil vampires kidnapped them and sold them to Waitrose.  

Classical political economy has come close to stumbling onto the true state of affairs, but it hasn’t consciously formulated what it has found—and won’t, as long as it remains in its bourgeois skin.

Did you know it peeled off that bourgeois skin from a fat chick? Hannibal Lecteur helped Clarice find a Senator's daughter to whom this was about to happen. But the true culprit was Capitalism which had skinned alive a different fat chick who was on her way to see President Biden to complain that Wendy keeps fucking Brazilian trees. They don't like it. That is why rainforest is shrinking and Globe is getting very hot under the collar. 

And the practical revolutionary promise?

Gulags and mass starvation were the performance not the promise.  

Apprehension of capitalism’s predicates and drives, relations and circulations, points to what must be overcome: exploitation, alienation, living to work rather than working to live,

which is what great scientists and artists do 

and ubiquitous domination by a machinery under no one’s control.

Wendy is terrorized by her dish washer.  

Concretely, there is connection across divided spheres and separated activities, cooperation hovering just below the atomization, and the great vulnerability of capital to organized resistance from labor, its source of sustenance.

What great vulnerability? Company Unions can help raise productivity or, as in Germany, take lower wages during bad times.  

The workers unite not merely to redistribute wealth

which happened when the Bolsheviks took power. Smart workers ran the fuck away.  

but to suture estranged spheres of activity and reconnect life with work, workers with one another, production with need, humans with the powers they have unleashed in the world. At this point, what was mystified becomes transparent,

viz Wendy is fucking Brazilian trees to death 

and theory no longer has to struggle with so much:

'The religious mirroring of the real world won’t vanish until the workaday world’s practical relations become consistently transparent,

e.g. when your Boss sodomizes while shouting 'my jizz up your rectum is compensation for the surplus value I'm extracting from you!'  

rational relations among people and between people and nature.

e.g. Wendy's relations with Brazilian trees.  

'The form of the social life-process—i.e., the material production process—will not shed its foggy shroud of mystery until it becomes the product of freely associated people, planned and controlled by them.'

With the result that their country turns to shit and smart peeps run away. Look at Venezuela.  

The brilliance and enduring relevance of Marx’s anatomy of capitalism rest in his formulating of its object as at once singularly theoretical and material,

e.g. Wendy whom Socioproctological theory reveals is fucking Brazilian trees to death.  

as human made yet beyond human control, with more power to set the conditions for all planetary life than anything the species has ever unleashed.

Wendy is unleashing plenty of her jizz on innocent Brazilian trees.  

The world we inhabit today is unimaginable without capital but also without Capital.

Nonsense! Plenty of people have never heard of Marx. They can imagine the world well enough to make plans and succeed in life.  

Both forever changed worldly imaginaries, as they changed Marx’s own.

Henry George was more important.  

Both also set permanent intellectual tasks before us, including that of developing and revising Marx’s thought to take the measure of capital’s complex iterations and transmogrifications in the century and a half since he wrote.

Can we be stupider and crazier than Marx? Sure. Why not?  

To name but the most obvious of these: There is the rise (and fall) of the regulatory and social state,

which hasn't fallen at all.  

and of the middle and professional classes.

Wendy is now a starving prole.  

There is the growth of the corporation and, with it, transformations in the nature of ownership, management, and stratifications among workers exceeding anything Marx imagined.

Because he was an ignorant cunt.  

There is the rise of finance,

which rose long ago. There was a time when a rich dude could bail out the Government, or buy the Suez Canal, all on his own.  

with its radical transformations in the production and concentration of wealth, in class formation and reproduction, and in the relation of private and public, capital and states.

not to mention Wendy's fucking Brazilian trees to death thanks to Wall Street vampires.  

There is the emergence of thousands of autonomous economic zones that “perforate” the conventional economic and political fabric of nation-states.

Vampires have taken-over down-town. 

There is globally disseminated production and, with it, new iterations of the racial stratifications accompanying capital accumulation since its inception.

Mauretania still has slavery and 'racial stratification'. This proves it is an advanced capitalist country.  

There is the (always partial) commodification of care work, which, as it moves from household to market, remakes gender, kinship, and family forms. 

Sadly my jizz has not been commodified. Sperm banks told me to fuck the fuck off. Only good looking or talented peeps are allowed to masturbate on the premises.  

There is the supplementation of commodity production by the service, information, and platform economies,

which always existed. 

and the transformations of capital and labor each entails.

Which occurred long ago. 

And there is what Marx termed “the free gift of nature” giving way to widespread recognition of planetary finitude and fragility, a recognition incited by catastrophic climate change and species extinction chains.

Even Marx didn't say 'free gifts' were also inexhaustible.  

Do these and other developments, as well as capital’s proven ability to remake itself in relation to various regimes, technologies, political demands, and opportunities render Marx’s great work anachronistic?

Yes. 

If, for example, the “labor theory of value” no longer explains the production of all wealth, or the crisis of the planet today rivals human misery and injustice as an indictment of capitalism,

and Marxism which was responsible for plenty of ecological disasters. Still, as Indira Gandhi said, in the global south, it was poor people, not wealthy capitalists, who were responsible for most of the environmental degradation. 

should we still read the book?

Read it and laugh heartily.  

In his introduction to a new translation of Capital, Paul North reminds us that the term “capital” descends from the Latin capitalis and Middle English caput, both of which meant “head” and were linked to owned wealth (originally in the form of heads of cattle).

The word pecuniary comes from the Latin word for cow. So what? We are speaking of bullshit here.  

In the framework of the classical political economists whom Marx takes to task, capital/head and labor/body are radically separated and autonomous from each other.

There were no full time 'classical political economists'. There were full time Marginalists who did in fact help countries and enterprises improve outcomes for everybody.  

This separation and imagined autonomy are replicated in the capitalist factory in the relation between boss (head) and workers (bodies), and again in the separation of production from exchange— laboring bodies produce the value of commodities but in the market, Marx says, they have value “only in relation to each other”—like talking heads.

This is nonsense. The Capitalist may appoint a professional manager. But the source of Capital may be the workers' own Pension fund.  

Heads cut off from bodies is also the framework through which Marx reflects on the history of the division of labor,

which is silly. In a family business, there is division of labour. Daddy makes clocks. Sonny boy travels around selling them. Mummy keeps the books. They aren't cut off from each other at all.  

“which only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears.”

This may have happened a million years ago.  

And it is how Marx theorizes the relation of the bourgeois state to civil society:

There were never a 'bourgeois' state. One might say 'King Louis Phillipe presented himself as a champion of the bourgeoisie'. But this 'Citizen King' belonged to an ancient royal family. 

Identifying the former with idealism in both senses of the word and the latter with material life, the material-ideal relation in this realm reiterates and consecrates the mystifications of the capital-labor and head-body relation in political economy.

Wendy's head appears that of a woman. But her body is raping Brazilian trees to death. Wake up sheeple! Throw off the 'mystifications' engendered by Biden's reign of terror.  

A head-body estrangement and inversion are thus everywhere in capitalist societies

because of vampires 

and everywhere part of the problematic that Capital theorizes. Born from and sustained by labor, capital appears separate and self-made,

Just as your savings and share portfolio appear separate and self-made rather than the product of your labour, enterprise and thrift. That's why you don't mind handing over all your wealth to me. 

and it makes an entire order in this image. Circulations of commodities, money, and capital in markets appear detached from the lives, labor, and production that generated them.

Wendy is making an argument against Capital Gains Tax or, indeed, any tax on Capital. It may appear 'separate' or something inherited or acquired through divorce, but actually it represents the blood sweat and tears of labour which already paid Income tax.  

Divisions of state from civil society, product from producers, production from exchange, wage worker from socialized production—everywhere the body and head are separated and their relations of dependency inverted or disavowed.

 Very true. Yesterday, the Mayor of a Mexican City was beheaded by the cartel. However, because of Capitalism, nobody in Mexico objected. After all, body and head are separate rather than dependent on each other. The fact that the Mayor's head is in one place and his body in another is no reason to get angry with the cartel. 

The head-body figure is not one on which Marx dwells, yet everything in his analysis follows from it, from his mocking personifications of the capitalist strutting self-importantly around the factory without understanding what produces his wealth,

He doesn't know it is the workers. The fact that he pays them is because he likes giving away his money.  

to the narratives of the misery of the English working class,

because of immigrants from poorer countries who drove down wages 

to commodity fetishism, where relations among humans metamorphose into fantastical relations among things.

e.g. machines turning into vampires 

It is also present in Marx’s account of capital itself as both a critical theoretical object (the head can only be explained through the body that keeps it alive) and a revolutionary object—the head must be cut off!

Sadly, Marx didn't cut off Engels head.  

This deep ontological and epistemological critique of capitalism and its political, cultural, and practical detachment from the many forms of life it saps or destroys, harbors the continued relevance of Marx’s work, especially in regards to our age’s two most significant challenges: financialization and ecological catastrophe.

Chop off Biden's head. That would make everything better. Also, if you pay into a pension fund, you are a Capitalist and had better chop off your own head.  

Financialization today ransacks housing, healthcare, childcare, education, union-protected jobs, farming, neighborhoods, fragile lands and waters, and more.

Only in the sense that it forces Wendy to fuck Brazilian trees to death.  

It does so not through commodification but speculative monetization.

did you know that Wendy fucking Brazilian trees to death is a non-fungible-token (NFT) which I am willing to sell to you for the low low price of $ 9,999?  

Asset managers, private equity funds, real estate investment trusts, and continually proliferating derivatives, not to mention debt financing of everything from states to schools, intensify capital’s predation on life and its spectacular production of inequalities as they consolidate remote investors into vampiric powers feasting on the blood of anything for short-term returns.

If you have a mortgage or student loan, you are in league with vampires. If you are retired and getting a pension, you yourself are a vampire. Chop off your own head! 

Human needs, toxic production and extraction, poor regions or states, natural or unnatural catastrophes, other financial institutions, even “healthy” capitalist entities brought to quick death after being drained of their value—all are game in the world of finance, a world that entangles everyone and everything in its webs.

Marxism is worse. People kill you or send you to the Gulag and then grab everything you own.  

Or, to return to the head-body metaphor, with finance, capital has grown yet another head,

that of the pension fund investing the savings of working people 

this one more monstrous than anything Marx imagined in its detachment from the earthly life whose blood it sucks.

Workers are sucking themselves off! Even Marx could not have imagined such depravity.  

And what light might Capital shed on the planetary ecological catastrophe unfolding in the 21st century?

None. 

Especially since Marx joined his contemporaries in differentiating humans from “nature” and followed Aristotle and Hegel in casting us as bound to incessantly transform nature for our own comfort and benefit?

Whereas what we should be doing is encouraging trees and bushes to sprout out of our rectums.  


Capital’s voraciousness for profit,

is like this lady's appetite for fucking Brazilian trees to death 

its growth through production for consumption or financialization of assets, and its wanton indifference to anything without exchange-value

Capitalists are keen to gain non-fungible assets- e.g. awards for philanthropy or the love of beautiful spouses and charming children.  

—these are obvious drivers of climate change, species collapse, fouled lands and waters.

which exist under all sorts of regimes.  

Life itself, made into an instrumentalizable, exploitable resource, is at the heart of capital accumulation,

Vampires are the living dead. Also there are zombies who want to eat your brain.  

and has become a feature of general consciousness and general practice. Quotidian existence indifferent to conditions for a thriving planet arises from capital’s production of our estrangement from what sustains life, both human and nonhuman.

That's why when refugees from North Korea come to South Korea, they find it queer that people don't talk to vegetables or enter into complex sexual relationships with fish and trees. Wendy, however, fucks Brazilian trees to death.  

Just as commodities in the market do not announce the social relations that produced them, they do not carry on their surfaces the violations of earthly life through which they are constructed, transported, used, and eventually shed as “waste.”

Wendy is shedding plenty of 'waste' and flushing it down the toilet. She should eat her own shit and thus put the nose of Big Food out of joint.  

Consequently, throughout most of capital’s reign on earth, few have been alert to the enormous ecological costs of its wanton practices of extraction, production, consumption, and disposal.

Plenty of Capitalists- e.g. the Goldsmith family- have been conservationists. But so have aristocrats and religious prelates.  

As capital’s cleaved processes, atomizations, and radical disavowals become features of consciousness, as all in its orbit detach from the provenance and processes of the multiple products sustaining them, as the head everywhere separates from and exploits the body,

by sucking it off thus draining it of jizz 

the well-being of earthly life is an inevitable casualty. This problem was not a primary focus for Marx, even if he eyes it when discussing the depleted “fertility of the soil” effected by large-scale agriculture. More important in analyzing and addressing our 21st-century ecological predicament are his critical theoretical notions of estrangement and reification, of a head that imagines independence of the body that bears it,

I suppose Wendy's head does want to get away from a body which incessantly fucks Brazilian trees to death 

and of capital’s relentless expansion and growth drives, which together produce new needs

like the need to pretend some long dead German nutter had anything interesting to say 

along with new devastations of all earthly life.

more particularly the Brazilian trees Wendy is fucking to death.