Horner's Corner

On the oft forgotten duality of surplus value
Moishe Postone has written about value in a capitalistic society that is completely dominated by its very own structures of the capitalistic culture. For Postone, surplus is not just about the labourers overproducing for owners to reinvest, surplus is the actual measurement of wealth.– Tricia Wang

I get the impression that some people are having problems with what Zizek says about ‘immaterial labour’, rent etc in his recent article The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. It’s been claimed to be incoherent, or heterodox or whatever. I don’t think that it is incoherent. As for unorthodox, I don’t think so either, but who cares? The Marxist approach is that capitalism constantly metamorphoses its means of expropriation, exploitation and domination. Accordingly, critical thought, rather than stopping in its tracks with a frozen set of a-historical categories, must do the work of thinking critically about the present historical context/conjuncture, not just that of the Nineteenth century. We should care  about getting it right, not about being being orthodox. Anyway, as an aid to this debate -which in part boils down to the role of labour as creator of value, I suggest that the place to look for the origins of Zizek’s view is Moishe Postone. His book Time, Labour and Social Domination seems to me to be to be an example of genuine critical social and historical thinking, whatever one’s views as to his arguments (and they certainly require our attention, rather than any kind of unthinking affirmation or rejection). One of the key concerns of Postone’s critics seems to be the apparent demotion of class struggle in his work; but whether the analysis that he subjects ‘productivism’ to (and related belief that a solution is to be found in unleashing the productive force of an unalienated workers in a post capitalist scenario) really comes to this, I doubt.

Here’s bit of Postone, and some links to follow up, for those that want them.
Fast Tube by Casper

Click here for a very critical review of Postone’s book, here for something more balanced (arguably!).

 

Fast Tube by Casper

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A little review of a few chapters of Fred Jameson’s new book, Valences of the Dialectic

The first essay or introduction (it borders on both), “Three Names of the Dialectic,” is hard reading. Harder, I think, than Jameson usually is. Things get a much better in the two following chapters on Hegel, and the last chapter (or two) on Ricoeur is a masterpiece, over much quicker than you expected, like a good movie. That said, “Three Names” does excellently what many have tried and few have actually accomplished: a full-on characterization of what dialectic is about. This is, no doubt, why it is so tough, for Jameson is not concerned just with the Hegelian dialectic, but all of it–indeed, when he allows himself the luxury of just confining his analysis to just Hegel, things get more concrete (and that’s saying something, as you’ll soon see). Where Jameson particularly succeeds though is in showing, not how this diversity reduces to one particular thing we can clearly grasp–the dialectic, which is only the first name of the dialectic in this first chapter–but just how diverse this old thing really is. By spraying dialectic around, then sluicing it in certain directions–indeed showing us many dialectics (dialectic prefaced with the indefinite article is the second name) the whole thing seems much richer, more expansive, more exciting, than the old definitions we carried in our heads before picking up the book.

Read the rest at Working notes: Three names.

It seems to have become fashionable to quote Marx’s famous line from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Grazing on the Web I came upon others using these bons mots to refer to a political battle in Hungary over the legacy of 1956. Then there’s one comparing Obama’s Nobel to Carter’s. Lot’s of people like to crack wise about “the third time” with a frisson of clever self-congratulation. Some guy on the Democraticunderground.com, a blog, conjectures that what Marx meant by this is that things keep changing all the time.

Although many use this expression, no one seems to have bothered actually to have read The Eighteenth Brumaire. Marx was not merely coining bons mots, he actually meant something when he wrote this. The two events Marx was talking about were first, the French Revolution, which he took to extend from 1789 to 1814, and second, the French Revolution of 1848-1852, of which The Eighteenth Brumaire is a history.

Marx follows this famous line about tragedy and farce with one almost equally famous: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” This also used to be quoted often, but now isn’t, I suspect because it makes some people uneasy to suggest that men make their own history. After all, if they get the idea that they can do something, they might decide to make something other than what the rulers have in mind. Marx is not treating history as a scientific phenomenon worthy of observation. Science is a discipline that postulates the impossibility of acting with a purpose. It expunges purposes from the pantheon of causes. Marx, a firm believer in human action, that is action with a purpose, is trying to explain its difficulties. People often take the farce line to mean that the first time, the tragic one, is serious, and the second, farcical one, is a kind of joke. But Marx is making the point that whenever people want to act they usually can only act in a pattern taken from the past. People act in a way that they know. Thus the first French Revolution took on the trappings of Rome to bring about the Bourgeois Revolution. Once the revolutionaries overthrew the ancien régime, the Roman garb came off and they settled down to moneymaking in a world free of the complicated obligations and ties of the ancien régime. The Revolution of 1848 imitated the Revolution of 1789 precisely because it was not a “real” revolution. For whereas the Revolution of 1789 threw off its Roman costume once it had accomplished itself in the abolition of the ancien régime, the Revolution of 1848 continued to imitate the earlier revolution because it had so little to accomplish: it was a farcical revolution. In the end it all vanished behind Louis Napoleon’s conjurer’s handkerchief.

Read more via Swans Commentary: The First Time As Tragedy, by Michael Doliner – mdolin48.