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.
