Beaver [he/him]

is going to be the pinnacle of the empire lol

How dare Russia harm our advisors, this is tantamount to an act of war!

Vote for me, and we can bring order to the galaxy

(Even Darth Vader promised to end the war, lol)

Imagine that, getting shot while trying to invade someone’s castle.

Some thoughts on vol 1 overall:

• Capital vol 1 doesn’t talk about how to build communism. This is a very obvious point, but I just wanted to get it out there.

• It was an interesting but impactful choice to intersperse chapters that mainly talked about how fucking outrageous and unjust the treatment of workers in 19th century England was. This is important to the overall goal of criticism of the economic system in England, and the similar ones emerging on the continent. It’s so easy to just talk about systems abstractly and scientifically, that it’s essential to rub our noses in the outcomes. I think if there’s one takeaway that I had from reading this it’s the importance of making the connection between the worker’s actual, lived conditions, and the way that capitalists make choices specifically to impose those conditions on the workers.

• I was surprised by how different the Samuel Moore and Ben Fowkes translations were. When I would quote stuff in comments here, I would look up the Samuel Moore version online, and find that the text was quite different than my printed version.

• One of the major themes, and contradictions explored is the idea of Capitalism as an emergent property of free, un-coerced people engaged in commerce with equals… but also, that people in Britain absolutely did not want to engage in capitalism, and had to be violently coerced into the system during the enclosure period. That’s kind of the big fundamental lie that capitalist evangelists still preach, that this is all voluntary.

Soon our memes will be so esoteric that even other terminally online leftist won’t understand what the fuck we’re talking about

My library’s copy of vol 2 is in notably mint condition… which I think means the no-one ever reads it.

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Nice, now they have a big pile of money, instead of useless stuff such as government services.

It sucks that this strategy seems to be working, and that libs seem to keep getting blindsided by it. Even though right-wingers explicitly, loudly talk about how their end goal is to eliminate public school entirely and have taxpayer-funded private christian schools as the primary educational institutes.

We’re almost there! Karl has been a lot of big promises about stuff that he’ll cover in volume 2, lets see if he follows through.

So many money-making innovations! Such as:

• Proprietary subsystems that must be serviced by commercial contractors
• Having parts manufacturing located in every single congressional district to ensure that the program will never be cut, only expanded
• Modularity to entice buyers into expensive mid-life upgrades
• Lots of buzzwords about capabilities, to distract such things as quantifiable specs

When talking about this with my lib friends, I suggested that maybe if Ukrainans went back in time to 2022, they might have decided that suing for peace in exchange for land would have been a better outcome than all the death and destruction that was about to come. He immediately retorted that, if we went back in time, that we should have spent a trillion dollars on weapons and marched on Moscow. I expected strong pushback during that conversation but I honestly didn’t expect “we should have had an even more horrific war and given even more money to the military industrial complex”

It also really changes the meaning to of what is said by dead labor as well.

Reading summaries of Marx makes you think “oh, it’s a metaphor”

Then you actually read it and it’s like “um, this is less metaphorical than I thought”

This hits close to home.

My family is trying to get few windmills installed on our farm, but there have been a lot of roadblocks. The biggest has been the predicably gross process of getting special dispensation to get around zoning issues. There are apparently a lot of new consulting firms that specialize in quashing windmill projects that will robo call local homeowners, and they’ve been working overdrive to fuck over every attempt at development (the farm is on the far outskirts of a major city, and so all the surrounding homeowners are annoying exurbanites).

And then on top of that, a lot of manufacturers of windmills seem to have dramatically cut their growth plans, both in response to the development pushback, but also in anticipation of a Republican takeover of the federal government and a corresponding reduction in any subsidies (still a major part of the business plan of any environmentally-friendly endeavor). And so even if you have the go-ahead to build, the lead time and prices are spiking… which is the opposite of what you want as a society if you actually want to deploy a lot of wind power, but is great for profits.

There is an unbelievable amount of potential windpower capacity in the US, as well as tons of capital that’s trying to chase returns. This is super basic stuff: generating more energy cheaply and cleanly lowers the costs of inputs for every other aspect of your economy, and without negative externalities that kick costs down the road. That China can build it, and the US can’t, really exposes the lie that somehow the American System is this dynamo of advancement in comparison to Collapsing China.

They finally managed expel the Italians, and now they’re complaining about it? Truely, the English will never be happy

Damn, I wonder what happened in Ukraine in the 90s that caused the birth rate to drop so much

I agree, I don’t think executions are a morally valid activity for a society to engage in. And in a practical sense, it’s much more important that criminals be caught and convicted consistently, and prevented from continuing to hurt others. She should be stripped of her wealth, and under permanent house arrest, and be allowed to continue working and contributing to society… but under the close scrutiny as some who is known to have hurt a lot of people, and would probably do it again if given a chance.

From the end of Chapter 18:

The capitalist pays the value of the labour-power (or, if the price diverges from this, he pays the price) and receives in exchange the right to dispose of the living labour-power itself. The length of time during which he utilizes this labour-power is divided into two separate periods. During one period, the worker produces a value that is only equal to the value of his labour-power, i.e. he produces its equivalent. Thus the capitalist receives, in return for advancing the price of the labour-power, a product of the same price. It is the same as if he had bought the product ready-made in the market. During the other preiod, the period of surplus labour, the utilization of the labour-power creates a value for the capitalist without costing him any value in return. He is thus able to set labour-power in motion without paying for it. It is in this sense that surplus labour can be called unpaid labour.

Capital, therefore, is not only the command over labour, as Adam Smith though. It is essentially the command over unpaid labour. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest or rent) it may subsequently crystalize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labour-time. The secret of the self-valorization of capital resolves itself into the fact that is has at its disposal a definite quantity of the unpaid labour of other people

I like this passage because it summarizes the very core arguments about what is actually happening in a Capitalist economy.

It’s also clarifying about why Marx uses specific terms such as “labour-power” and “surplus labour”, instead of more common business colloquialisms. Terms like “profit” have social baggage that have served to disguise the exploitation that is happening right in front of our faces.