Rie

value-form theorist

[an1llusionist]

In quite a different manner I once heard a common old woman who worked in a hospital kill the abstraction of the murderer and bring him to life for honor. The severed head had been placed on the scaffold, and the sun was shining. How beautifully, she said, the sun of God's grace shines on Binder's head! — You are not worthy of having the sun shine on you, one says to a rascal with whom one is angry. This woman saw that the murderer's head was struck by the sunshine and thus was still worthy of it. She raised it from the punishment of the scaffold into the sunny grace of God, and instead of accomplishing the reconciliation with violets and sentimental vanity, saw him accepted in grace in the higher sun.

[fuckyeahchinesegarden]

Plum blossoms in quyuanfenghe, west lake, hangzhou, china (photos by 炎真，Eclare）

[celestial-fang]

This might be my new favorite outfit (hanfu and Dunhuang dance costume mixture)

[hanfugallery]

Chinese hanfu in song dynasty style by 茱萸CORNUS

[hanfugallery]

Chinese hanfu in blue

[estrellasrojas]

Are you aware of Edw*d's break from Marxian economics and the reasons for it? Do you have any thoughts on it? Basically the big thing is they came to believe "political economy" as Marx understood it was never actually a thing and was actually a bunch of disconnected thinkers that Marx cobbled together for the sake of his critique, so Marx's project in Capital doesn't actually have anything to offer us in terms of understanding economics.

Their understanding of Marx in the first place is rooted in Michael Heinrich, Moishe Postone, and the Open Marxists.

On the topic of Marxian economics, have you read Henry Grossman and/or Paul Mattick?

Censored the user's URL just to be on the safe side.

Edwad’s critique is fine and he’s right that John Ramsay McCulloch can’t really be taken as the final authority on this subject. Marx having a really weird conception of the history of economics has been a source of a huge body of secondary literature trying to work it out that started with Rosa Luxemburg, Isaak Rubin, Roman Rosdolsky, and Henryk Grossman. Marx’s Capital is really more in the vein of Enlightenment political theory texts like Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes or Adam Ferguson’s History of Civil Society.

Ultimately I think Marx fabricating or constructing the object of his critique is acceptable for what he’s trying to do, which is to show the communist potentials contained in capitalist society especially through drawing various social forms out from the contradictions of abstract labor and the formal political equality that implies it. As he got into the later editions of Capital he started trying to shift away from presenting it as a critique of this readymade coherent intellectual entity called political economy and in the French edition (the last one he edited) he even removed the subtitle “critique of political economy.”

The real point Marx was interested in was the relationship between capitalist production and communism which he had already begun exploring in his debates with democratic revolutionaries like Wilhelm Weitling, August Willich, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I think the influence of those debates on the structure and content of Capital is much more interesting to explore for its relevance to the socialist strategic debates that Marx was intervening in. Especially for where Marx points out how utopias imagined by workers (including Weitling and Proudhon) were capitalism immanent, more or less an idealization of their own position, even while the united political actions of workers implied a very different social ethic than the norms which prevail in capitalist society.

I would argue that the chapter on struggles over the working day is ultimately the key that brings the stakes of the discussion of the value form, commodity fetishism, and money back to the issues of the tactics and strategies of class struggle for that reason. It’s in the struggle to limit the working day against the power of capitalists that Marx locates the emergence of a dividing line between “our time” and “the capitalist’s time” which he later ties to the notion of communist free creative time beyond mere necessary labor. This is similarly what motivates some of his infamous positions on the need for socialists to promote polytechnical labor for children, for him it was a strategy to teach them the skills necessary for self-governance and communist planning. But this is a position I’m ultimately in the minority in taking

[edwad]

for clarity's sake, the real thrust of my argument isn't simply that mcculloch shouldn't get the final say on the history of the discipline (although that's true of course) but that marx's critique has epistemological concerns which compel him to appropriate and analyze the categories of political economy. to me, this means that articulating a difference in perspective which simply assumes "various social forms", "contradictions of abstract labor", etc is to suppose that marx begins halfway through the analysis without wondering how or why he got there. it's very important for marx that these categories emerge critically, rather than something which he simply picks up thoughtlessly. if the theoretical field he's in dialogue with doesn't meaningfully exist, and if his categories are developed by conceptually working through marx's understanding of that field, then that poses problems on the other side for the social validity of the categories themselves. no amount of productive misreading can patch what ought to be an epistemological account. at best, he simply becomes an angry economist who ought to know better.

i also don't think the removal of the subtitle from the french edition is as significant as you're suggesting, or that he moves away from this over time. if anything, his sole contribution to anti-dühring (written after the french edition) is the chapter where he goes over dühring's conception of the history of political economy. to me, this was very clearly something which he felt had real political stakes and wasn't just something which could be glossed over. if he gets that history wrong, i think there are real consequences for the way his analysis holds together and i also think that *he* believes this as well.

[estrellasrojas]

I am skeptical about treating Marx as investing himself in a disembodied truth-procedure in his epistemology, as from the 1844 manuscripts onwards he identifies needs as his starting point for science, and he lays out his critique of political economy as the ideological reduction of needs to the same abstractions that society already renders in practice on proletarians by allotting them the fate of little more than working for a living and living to be an instrument for this work process. While some, usually inspired by Louis Althusser, may argue that he experienced an epistemological break after writing the Theses on Feuerbach in 1845 and critiquing his earlier humanism, I think that this problematic is what ties his life and work together as a whole, even if a differentiated whole that could go in many directions motivated not by a single source but by a variety of tactical and strategic needs for his project of communism.

I think it’s important to note that in the chapter of Anti-Dühring that you refer to, Marx also chooses to identify the earliest iterations of political economy as the commentary of political philosophers like Aristotle and Xenophon on household management. While we could contest the textual veracity of a genealogy from the classical Greek political philosophers to David Ricardo and Adam Smith, I think it is for Marx it is generalization that is made for a political use. This is a discourse that Marx identifies as bound together from many by their shared stakes rather than the stakes being bound together by the single-minded coherence of a discourse. While the community and its needs being managed are different across historical time, geography, and the concerns of the discursive authors, they can be treated together under the generalization of “polity” or in Marx’s case “society.”

Marx identifies political economy as a discourse associated with the history of political philosophy, but one which he considers to have become an independent and supreme science over and against the ethical and aesthetic aims characteristic of ancient political philosophy through the ascent of the bourgeoisie in the West and its subordination of the management of the common good of the polity to the accumulation of wealth. He derives his concepts accordingly from the practical concerns of needs, labor, and property as they transform with the organization of social intercourse.

Marx began to engage with these problems (in the 1844 manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy) in order to intervene in debates about the nature of production, exchange, and planning in a communist society. While the other communists tried to derive this from their attempts at planning a ready-made new society in the form of colonies (New Harmony, Icaria etc), Marx wanted to demonstrate how there was already a seed of communist planning in capitalist society that could be derived through a mass political struggle to reorganize this society and its wealth into a self-governing association of producers. He himself described what was unique about his analysis in line with his concern with these concerns. In his January 8, 1868 letter to Engels, he lays out what was new about his approach and what he considered to be the stakes of his critique:

“That the economists, without exception, have missed the simple point that if the commodity has a double character—use value and exchange value—then the labour represented by the commodity must also have a two-fold character, while the mere analysis of labour as such, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc, is bound to come up everywhere against inexplicable problems. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception.”

This very same association of dual commodity with dual labor is his contention with Aristotle’s economics of the polity (rather than the single household alone) in the chapter of Anti-Dühring. He identifies that in the Politics, Aristotle refers to the dual nature of any object’s use, in that it is simultaneously useful for its unique characteristics (for example, a lighter for its ability to spark a fuel into a source for a flame) and is a generic article of use, a use-value which can be exchanged for any other useful thing with both considered as part of the pool of the polity’s wealth of use-values. Referring to the historical emergence of capitalism as a global mode of production since Aristotle’s time, Marx links this dual character of use (singular and common, united by the generic that wealth takes as money) to the dual character of labor as both a singular ability of a particular person, usually bound in some way to their persona (as in the case of a weaver who has created a signature design), and as a unit out of a total, generic force of production that can be disposed of to produce many particular forms of wealth and in class society is managed by a few rulers, or in capitalist society owners, in accordance with their intentions for the polity.

Marx’s critique of other communists centers on their answers to this problem posed by the division of labor and class rule to the organization and management of the society’s wealth and labor. Those like Étiennne Cabet, for example, recognize that each individual worker can be considered a unit of the total social labor, but they do not always appreciate that capital and the money system already treat individual products as units out of the total wealth, and they typically reproduce capitalist management’s reduction of needs and wealth to their generic, average form. Marx calls them levelers across multiple texts, and for him this means they do not account for the unique, differentiated, and unequal needs of individuals.

This issue with Christian humanist communism impels Marx to attacks their moralistic criticisms of capital as a distortion of a more true and good social order that is supposed to already persist beneath the artifice of the ‘illegitimate’ monopolization and appropriation of the community’s wealth. That sort of reasoning guided the attempts of Proudhon and others to create money systems that are free from capital accumulation, because they do not appreciate the imperative for a communist planning that does not simply treat the generic form of labor-wealth (as money) as a fixed idea that simply needs to be put into a different role but places the general wealth at the forefront of the accounting and decision-making of the communist polity or cooperative association as a means for the flourishing of individuals. While, characteristically for his time, he adopted the language of positivist science to defend and vindicate the veracity of his project, I think the fact that this political-ethical aim bound his life and work together across time is the most significant consideration for debating his claims. His work has to be understood as partisan, a discourse that he gathers and contributes to as an advocate for a particular factional tendency in society. There are of course many other lines of inquiry and conceptual associations in his work, but this is what motivates him throughout

[aletheyass]

“why do you want this job” i literally don’t

[baeddel]

But there was another mode of exploitation [apart from primitive accumulation], which Marx too noted, his remarks remaining for long a mere item in the controversy between Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai Bukharin. He had held that an advanced country when selling its manufactures to a backward country, exchanges its own product of a few hours of labour time with products of a far large number of hours of equivalent labour from the other country, so that ‘the richer country exploits the poorer one’ (Marx 1959: 232–33; Marx 1971: 105–06). This important observation meant that the seizure of markets of backward countries under the banner of free trade, initiated what were formally mere acts of exchange seemingly gainful to both parties, but which in fact enabled advanced capitalist countries to make enormous profits at the cost of the exploited country.

It was Arghiri Emmanuel, who in his Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (1972), showed, without reference to the labour theory of value, how high wages in core capitalist countries were being maintained by concentrating high-priced capital goods manufacture at home while transferring labour-intensive manufactures to backward countries, where ample supply of labour kept the costs low. This, as Emmanuel put it, was ‘imperialism of trade’; but as Professor Prabhat Patnaik (2016: 77) has observed in the pages of this journal, imperialism in the economic field essentially implies ‘the imposition of income deflation on the “outlying regions”’.

Irfan Habib, review of Zak Cope's The Wealth of (Some) Nations—Imperialism and the Mechanics of Value Transfer (click)

[dialectrician]

This comes up in Grossman, where he points out that Lenin (and I think Bukharin) fails to justify why, considering that the more productive countries inherently exploit the less productive ones through trade, the most advanced countries had to export capital to the periphery in order to exploit them.

In other words, why didn’t Britain just keep reinvesting its profits in its own industry and rule the world forever.

[clayzen]

merlin hermes <3

find more of my art on Instagram @clayzen_

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

if you understand that Mormons are members of a cynical and control-hungry religious cult which exercises every conceivably available tool at its disposal to control, restrict, and extract wealth/labor/social prestige from its members to the benefit of the patriarchs in control, and that women, children, and those not willing or able to conform sufficiently are abused into compliance with a brutality and a regularity that should stagger the conscience of every feeling human being, BUT you think Amish people are cute and quaint and it's funny that their produce stands sell weed now, you have fallen hard for a PR scam

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

if you don't rely on cutesy semi-candid photographs and you spend any time in the northeast especially in spitting distance of pennsylvania, you will eventually see a woman less than 22 with 4+ children walking behind a man with her eyes downcast like she shouldn't look her betters in the eye and the energy of a whipped dog and if that doesn't inspire a couple questions in you and you're too busy buying rhubarb from her bearded husband, i hate you

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

isn't it so charming how they prohibit modern technologies like electricity. and also feminism

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

exactly. like. i know they're a regional thing even within the USA but if your exposure isn't through media and you just see them sometimes growing up, the thing is that you can kinda fucking tell

[cookinguptales]

So back in 2020, an investigative journalist named Sarah McClure wrote a long-form article called "The Amish Keep to Themselves. And They’re Hiding a Horrifying Secret."

(cw: rape, sexual assault, CSA, incest, domestic abuse, religious abuse, etc.)

The article, as you might have gathered from that list of content warnings, is about the widespread sexual and physical abuse in Amish communities and the way that their patriarchal and insular practices make that abuse almost impossible to prosecute.

I read that article when it came out, and that's why I went to a screening of McClure's new documentary, Keep Quiet and Forgive, at the Philadelphia Film Festival last month. We were also lucky enough to have a Q&A with Sarah McClure and it was really eye-opening.

(For those who want to watch it, I believe she said the doc will air on PBS next year.)

One thing I was really struck by when watching the documentary was the way that almost all of these women (and yes, a few men who'd been sexually abused by other men) had left the community. It makes sense; would someone still in the community ever talk to an investigative journalist? It's not likely.

Almost all of them had lost their entire support system when they'd spoken out about their abuse. Their families and friends shunned them. They got hate mail regularly from their former neighbors. Whenever they went to court dates, they had to face not only their abusers but their entire former community, who would turn up to support the accused in court.

The few who were still in the community were either going to meetings secretly or were largely being shunned. One of them, a woman who still identified as Amish but whose entirely community had turned on her when she'd testified against her wildly abusive husband, ended up leaving the community entirely by the end of the documentary. She looked so much happier.

Where I'm going with this, though, is that these people often lose their friends, family, and community when they leave. So they've started creating community of their own. The documentary showed a lot of meetings between former Amish women who would band together to support other Amish women through the process of leaving and testifying against their abusers. There were group therapy sessions where women would finally get to talk about what had been done to them. Conferences where they discussed future steps. Meetings with activists to create change. Podcasts by victims of abuse who wanted to reach out to others like them.

Groups like The Amish Rescue Mission are working to provide support to victims of abuse in Amish Country, including providing Pennsylvania Dutch interpretation services when necessary. There are lots of small survivor support groups on Facebook, too.

I don't generally add to posts, but I did want to spread this information, reporting, and list of resources to anyone who might benefit from them. I am no expert, but I wanted to link to some people who are.

Help is available, but it is often inaccessible to people who, let's be real, are not generally going to be super online. So I think it's important to spread information however we can in the hopes that it can carry as far as possible by word of mouth.

[estrogenesis-eeveeangelion]

saw another cutesy post about ha ha look amish people selling weed ha ha. taps the fuckign sign

[karrakazz]

i hate mystical self help bullshit, but not for the reason youre thinking. mostly cuz if i went thru all the study and ritual and stages of initiation for some mystic order and the greatest truth i learned was like "forgive yourself" or some bullshit id kill everyone. i want powers.

[hollowwhisperings]

writing about hanfu: a guide

so! you have learned what "hanfu" is! congrats!

now i have to tell you, very politely, to forget the word "hanfu".

in most xianxia or historical chinese settings, where characters are assumed to be speaking in chinese, &/or have never been outside of china? all "fu" (clothing) is "hanfu" by default.

because most chinese people (mainland AND diasporic!) are han chinese and han chinese have been the ruling majority for pretty much all of china's history.

(primary exceptions are the mongolian-lead yuan dynasty & the manchu-lead ming dynasty but, in chinese fiction, it is always non-han chinese garments that are specified as such)

with this history in mind, it is almost always anachronistic to specify to chinese characters that something is chinese: the term "hanfu" was only invented when western dress became the assumed default!

so, when incorporating traditional chinese fashions in your english language work?

use descriptors such as "wide-" or "long-sleeved" when meaning these kinds of top garments

"frog-buttoned" or "wide-collared" when referencing manchu shirt styles (such as the modern qipao/cheongsam)

"trousers" is valid (if you're worried about being misunderstood, you can specify that they're "silk" or "wide-legged")

"robe" or "dress" for a single layer of full body hanfu; "robes" for multiple layers.

underwear is anachronistic pretty much everywhere, historically: historical dress uses an "inner layer" or "inner robe" for hygienic purposes. "shift" works too but is more associated with medieval european dress.

if looking up the history of sanitary napkins or loincloths feels daunting, you could sidestep the issue entirely with "undergarments".

"boots" or "slippers" for shoes (but you can also just say "shoes")

no one is wearing heels unless they're from a video game

"stockings" for socks

fabrics can be safely assumed to be "silk" (rich elite/inner layers of the middle-class); "cotton" or "linen" (commoners/inner layers/when exercising). you can also just say "cloth" or "fabric".

(other fabrics did exist historically, wool & hemp for example, but stereotypical hanfu moves like silk and most xianxia characters end up rich enough for it)

most closures will be tied, buttoned or belted. hooks are plausible and so are clasps. zippers do not exist.

(unless you're in a modern setting where characters are regular people buying off taobao)

generally speaking, you only need to use another language's terminology when there is no english equivalent or there is a strong cultural nuance that would be missed. the latter is only true of hanfu when worn IRL, in the modern era, by real people (typically at graduations or weddings).

for more specific terms and insights on traditional chinese dress (hanfu & otherwise), i recommend checking out @ziseviolet and other dedicated chinese-by-chinese fashion bloggers.

if you've been hesitant to write in a historical chinese setting, i hope this post has reassured you that you don't need to learn pinyin to do it. it's scary to write a culture you're unused to! these tips are chinese-specific but the same logic broadly applies to all non-eurocentred cultures.

(the big exception is the names of people and places: don't translate these into english until you have a REALLY strong justification for it. even then, don't treat machine translation a being a reliable source when it really isn't.)

i am but one person with approximate knowledge of many things: these tips can help ENG writers keep readers immersed in CN settings. that's all.

[hagiomoto]

Not previous russia anon but something related to Russia and the ussr: I lean toward the Menshevik Marxist take (note: I do not like most Mensheviks cuz of the WW1 stuff except Martov and the internationalists) that the October Revolution was a mistake because Russia wasn’t capitalist enough and that the time wasn’t ‘ripe’ enough for a socialist revolution in Russia and instead it led to the more capitalist western European powers realizing the dangers of socialism to their class interests/becoming more aware of said dangers which led to the failure of stuff like Rosa Luxemburg’s uprising. Now I do not think the entirety of the ussr’s history and the history of the russian revolution was a complete failure but I think it gives us more examples of how not to do things than it gives us examples of how to do things.

This is so funny....you people (Mensheviks) are still around.....the world is full of wonders.

I disagree with your statement about the condition not good enough for October Revolution, but somewhat agree with the last part....but only for certain things.

[an1llusionist]

I think most of the historical lessons that can be learned on what not to do comes from the Mensheviks and the SRs. They were incompetent to an insane degree. The Mensheviks were extremely cautious, avoiding pulling out of the war because they believed in the necessity of a capitalist transition, meaning they had to be able to finance this transition requiring them to trade with their allies, meaning they had to stay in the war. It was so unbelievably convoluted and stupid since a revolution in Western Europe (which was a very real possibility!!) would have made their plans moot.

The SRs on the other hand noted the importance of the peasantry in the coming revolution, but they were so caught up in getting political power "the legitimate way" that they were completely outmaneuvered by the Bolsheviks, who took their program (which to be honest didn't really matter since the peasants have already started taking the land, but gave the Bolsheviks additional legitimacy amongst the peasants).

The irony of the Mensheviks and the SRs is that despite them being supposed Marxists (or inspired by Marx), they did not learn the political lessons of the Paris Commune, which was to not be concerned with doing revolution "the right way".

[hanfugallery]

Chinese hanfu in style of warring states period by 徽音子

[machinot]

Evil haunted dead wife picture locket that makes u hallucinate memories of a dead wife u never had frolicking in a wheat field and running across the beach and baking a big cake and she puts a lil frosting on ur nose and painting the walls on a house you never lived in

[honouredsnakeprincess]

I think some people on this site should consider that "critical support" does not mean "uncritically agree with everything the country you are supporting says or does, and come up with apologia to justify how their bourgeois nationalist policies are secretly in line with a grand international plot to break american hegemony and usher in socialism globally"

[honouredsnakeprincess]

I sympathize with many of the positions I see, but I swear that some of you seem like the type who would have looked at the Japanese Empire, seen that they were at war with the United States, and then taken their word on it when they said they were fighting against colonialism.

[an1llusionist]

W.E.B. Du Bois for some reason (negatively polarized by white supremacy resulting in his abandonment of principles)

[an1llusionist]

“international revolutionary propaganda of the deed” is an insanely funny euphemism.

lenin was right to criticize them, but seeing the analysis by radek, it’s almost painful in retrospect seeing how the international revolution was defeated.

Karl Radek: The International Situation (April 1918)