#chris arthur

[prousthetics]

I take single pieces of life's puzzle and lean the weight of reflection upon them till they're pulverized, then ponder the dust particles; how we're wedded to them, how they're threaded through us, how they create unnoticed galaxies in the unlikeliest places.

Chris Arthur, (En)trance, The Best American Essays 2009

[prousthetics]

In this approach, a kind of cognitive tripwire is laced around all sorts of unseen interrelationships and unexpected connections so that every step toward a description brings things crashing down and colliding together in combinations that fracture the containment of our ordinary categories.

Chris Arthur, (En)trance, The Best American Essays 2009

[prousthetics]

Perhaps my sense of mysterious entrances implicit in the mundane, entrances that are at once alluring and alarming, is no more than the sound of my own prose running away from its unrecognized echo.

Chris Arthur, (En)trance, from The Best American Essays 2009

How could it be so easy? For me to choose this piece as my favorite essay. Ever. 

[criticallyqueertheory]

As much as neoliberals might like to think that there is 'no alternative' to further neoliberalization, history is not over and even within capitalism there are possibilities for expanding limited choices and altering the outcomes people fact: there are better and worse forms of capitalism. Citizens should not be forced to accept the world as it is by being encouraged to take up a disempowered, consumerised and depoliticised ‘responsibility’ that ultimately is irresponsible as it lets us off the hook for supporting an economic system and an individualised risk management strategy that will only ever benefit the few at the expense of the many. Financial literacy education... should enable us to see that treating macroeconomic issues as individual, consumer problems is an irresponsible abandonment of our global civic duty to create relations of production, distribution and consumption that offer the possibility of universal freedom from scarcity: a goal predicated on the equality of human beings.

Chris Arthur, Financial Literacy Education for Citizens

[gemeinwesen]

Capital as value in motion is not distinct from matter in motion shifted by labor; labor acts as capital, not just at its behest. Marx says: "Labor is not only the use-value which confronts capital; it is THE USE-VALUE of capital itself." This labor is absorbed by productive capital and acts as "a moment of capital", he claims. All the productive powers of labor appear as those of capital. The category of value is rooted precisely in capital's struggle with labor to accomplish this 'transfer' of its productive powers. Since the workers are 'possessed' by capital and the material labor process is simultaneously a valorisation process, the same thing has two frames of reference. But this is not merely a matter of different ways of talking, or of the coexistence of alternative realities, it is also a matter of determination, of one side informing the other with its own purposes. Capital determines the orgnisation of production: but the character of labor, natural resources and machinery limit it in this endeavor. Although capital is hegemonic in this respect, its subsumption of labor can never be perfected; labor is always 'in and against' capital. Albeit that the production process is really subsumed by capital, the problem for capital is that it needs the agency of labor. Even if the productive power of labor is absorbed into that of capital to all intents, it is necessary to bear in mind that capital still depends upon it.

Chris Arthur, The Contradiction of Capital

[gemeinwesen]

The capital relation is a contradictory unity. Any attempt to remove the contradiction ideologically by claiming 'all is capital' or 'all is labor' will find such a reductionist programme impossible to carry through coherently. Labor's alienation and capital's self-constitution are inseparable. It is of the highest importance to understand that the contradiction in the capital relation is not between capitalist and laborer (that is merely conflict); the inner contradiction arises because both 'capital' and 'labor' have claims to constitute the whole of their relation; hence 'capital is nothing but (alienated) labor' and 'labor is nothing but (variable) capital'. It is often said that productive labor is the essence lying behind the appearances of value interchanges and capital accumulation. However the many passage in which Marx assigns productive power to capital could well lead in a contrary direction: that capital is the real subject of production. As Marx said, labor appears then as the 'mediating activity' by means of which capital valorises itself. In sum the second view is an inversion of the first. Both views are in truth correct, although contradictory. What this means is that capitalism is characterised by a contradiction in essence. . . . But in reality these contradictory positings run into each other, such that the affirmation of the essence (whichever one) leads to its appearance in the mode of denial. Thus labor's objectification coincides with its expropriation, its positing as a moment of capital; while capital's subjectification appears as its utter dependence, not only on its personifications such as owners and managers, but on the activity of living labor. Each by being incorporated in its other becomes other than itself. Thus living labor is other than capital, but when subsumed under capital it is at the same time other than itself, alienated labor. The same thing happens to capital when it descends from the self-referring ideality of the forms of value to struggle with the materiality of production. But of course this process of mutual othering is not balanced. THe struggle for dominance is won by capital which successfully returns from the sphere of production with surplus-value, while living labor returns from the factory exhausted and deprived of its own product. Realisation of capital is de-realisation of the worker.

Christopher Arthur, On TC & Alienation

[gemeinwesen]

The capital relation is not a simple two place conflict (like a boxing match) in which Labour and Capital compete over the allocation of new value. This is because wage-labour is internal to the capital relation, subsumed by it on capital’s terms. At first sight the capital-labour relation appears as a two-place one, but in truth each pole represents its relation to the other as a difference within itself. This is a contradiction in essence because both sides claim to constitute the whole of their relation; each reduces what is not identical with itself to its own other. Capital divides itself into constant and variable components; and it claims to absorb labour to itself in the shape of variable capital; for, through the wage, it now possesses labour-power. Hence it understands the relation as a relation to itself. On the other side, wage-labour claims that capital is nothing but accumulated surplus value, springing from surplus labour. It, too, understands the relation as a relation to itself.

Chris Arthur, Dialectic of Domination and Liberation

[andiearthur-blog]

Andie Arthur and father, Chris Arthur