Holohedron - Liberators

Show my comrade some support! His album is dropping next month and he's been in the DnB scene so long he's a veteran, with radio shows around the world and an international album dropping with a major label.

Give his samples a listen and watch how he kills a track faster than you can say BPM.

Xenofeminism: 'If Nature is Unjust, Change Nature!'

Special thanks to the collective of 6, Laboria Cuboniks, and norb, writer for postfuturum.com, for publishing my personal reading of their queer-feminist movement,Xenofeminism.

What is particularly unique and intriguing about this movement for me is its creative re-inventions of Marxian concepts, carrying a strong emphasis on the relationship of alienation to emancipation, with an intersectional queer-feminism that is both (trans)humanistic and techno-socialist in its integrated, theoretical approach and praxis with respect to connecting a futurist post-gender society without female oppression to a counter-hegemonic global society of universal liberation. It rigorously maintains its logic of the necessity of feminist resistance within the broader framework of a socialist political configuration still concerned with work-based politics, and the conversion of the knowledge sector's cybernetic technologies of capitalism's metabolic self-valorization and market discipline as a weapon womyn and the global working class can use as instruments of self-emancipation.

In short, it provides a new universe of possibilities for the realization of a contemporary model of species-being, of our real, human faculties and nature, by resisting all the old essentialisms and absolutes for perpetuating heteropatriarchy and capitalism, and situating itself within the logic of capitalism's competitive mechanism, where technological innovations are introduced into labor-saving productive methods on the market, in order to expropriate its mass of objectified digital, machinic, and intellectual labor, and collectivize this assemblage in the foremost interest of those most marginalized by its exploitation of surplus labor, where their identities are constituted and developed through practical, feminist and socialist-based struggle.

My article introduces two concepts - the psychotextual and the textualsomatic - I hope to bring to bear on their analysis. It is a modest contribution, and I would recommend doing a thorough reading of the provided links before checking out my article on postfuturum, which you can viewhere.

The Function of Emojis in Communicative Capital: Real Hallucinations, Actualized Possibilities, Intensive Processes of Individuation

The 'Emoji' as the congelation of the morphemic units in a written proposition is unified into an 'auditory image' of thought in a visual signifier without an image to which it must be referred except itself, or arbitary vocal utterance to attach to Thus the hypertextual devolves the tier of the mental representation on the linguistic terrain upon the lower 'subconscious' tier of pre-linguistic process of interiorized stimuli and externalized mental, endogenous sensory perceptions.

The virtual becomes the 'hallucination' of the desire without the linguistic content required to rise to consciousness and gain ego stability, but is real. The virtual sign's meaning defers to the next sign in the interminable concatenation of sign-reproduction in a nihilistic, closed logical cycle of posing the object in thought through subjective comprehension and sublation. Each successive positing of the predicate in this logical syllogism reposits the subject as an object comprehending its own nature. Thought thus reflects on itself, as knowing becomes self-knowing which knows itself in the totality of its determinate phases, and the reappropriation of the object in the subjective Notion of the process's totalizing self-consciousness in the Absolute Idea. Each time the syllogism terminates it begins anew.

The escape from this nihilism, and the speech repressions excluding those practices outside of the popular discourse is strategic counter-discourse and counter-hegemony: to pose these actualized objects of thought in their virtual manifestation consumed to further the circulation of material production in places where another object was meant to follow in its circular syllogistic motion. This resitituates the philosophical-logic onto the historic field of open logical systems of reproduction.
The emoji is used for a circumscribed purpose. Rather it is 'meant' for such. The emoji as the virtual commodity of communicative labor can disrupt the disciplinary relation between power and its subjects by its use for other than what its exchane-value demands it be used by the individual for a pre-defined mode of satisfaction. This production of desire reproduces the desire for fascism, for the power that dominates us, until we disrupt the circuitry of the Commodity and Capital formula: C-M-C' by interjecting something useless and thus without market value in the process of the commodity's changing places in the market with money, again with a commodity, and so on. These local interventions, through collective action, can produce global consequences, the revolutionary overthrow of nihilism by existensialism and positive humanism.
‪#‎situationism‬ ‪#‎contingency‬ ‪#‎economics‬ ‪#‎affects‬ ‪#‎bodies‬ ‪#‎technology‬

Crises of Bourgeois Production: Historical Contradiction in the Spheres of Production and Consumption

In my last two-part article, Objective Forces of Capitalist Accumulation and the Subjective Experience of the Process, I showed various general poltico-historical categories arising in the developed form of capitalist production. I ended it on the note of the forms of crisis bound up in the contradictions this stage in the development of productive society necessitate within the conditions of its existence. But these are general categories, and here, as I stated was the purpose I had in mind for doing this, I wish to discuss their specific manifestations historically. In a word, this last article will be the pivot around which we proceed from the general, abstract forms - where the bourgeois economists end their polemical defenses - to the concrete and specific content of these forms as they reveal themselves openly in crises, where a critical study of this mode of production can truly begin at the point where the bourgeois economists forego theirs. If this is not the reason for explicating these general forms, we will only find ourselves in a pedantic metaphysical tautology, where we understand the causes of these as essentially being nothing more than the conditions of their existence.

But these conditions may exist as a possibility without being realized in actuality, and Marx demanded this be understood in terms of actual existing productive activity, where these forms of crisis and production assert themselves in specific manifestions under which the factors in the inherent contradictions of money and commodities, on the one hand exchange value and use-value on the other, or production and consumption more broadly, bring about this contradiction's realization as crisis at a definite, determined stage of production, namely the developed form of the bourgeois mode of production. These contradictions erupt in the sphere of reproduction of capital, or what is another word for the sphere of circulation, where commodities are transformed into money and money is transformed into commodities by seller and buyer, respectively, in the simple act of exchange, but become further separated from each other as two independent, mutually correlated phases or aspects of exchange, and in their separation are violently forced back together in crisis, and in their unity violently torn asunder. What I mean by this will be elaborated as we substantiate it through a historical elaboration.

It is my contention that Marx's 'Theories of Surplus Value' most directly engages this historical criticism, so this will be the main work to which I will be referring when I elucidate Marx's theory of crisis. Readers must assume that this is the work from which Marx is either quoted or referenced unless otherwise stated.

Finally, I will argue that crisis becomes the historical conditio sine qua non of the contemporary stage of capitalist, which I have described in several other places as either hypercapitalism (corresponding to hyper-imperialism), neoliberal globalization, or global market fascism. To define these I will draw on the contributions of contemporary social critics and historians as well, and in a future article take on a more thoroughgoing definition of these terms and their political significance. For now, I suggest that the two-part article on which this one is based be read if the reader has not yet taken care to do so, and recommend two of my other articles for bringing the clearest theoretical frameworks to bear upon the present article's treatment of bourgeois crises in general, and especially its present stage of perpetual, or permanent, crisis: The False Neutrality of Neoliberal Market Fascism and Marx's Capital and Kafka's The Metamorphosis


This is the stage that we find ourselves in today, one that gains its power from the crisis of its own regime, from which it both draws its power and exhausts its productive wealth in a totality of antagonisms between its complementary factors, and in this totality unites the different antagonisms by stitching them together in increasingly intensified tensions, of which intensified exploitation of labor-power is the greatest one to concern us as we consider socialist alternatives for a post-capitalist global regime no longer dominated by capital's law of value, or the surplus value that is the mechanism by which capitalist production is carried on as the primus movens of the appropriators of labor-power and productive capital as commodifies. I will conclude by showing that this accumulation of surplus value, today, has for the basis of this permanent crisis economy the unmediated contradiction inherent in capital, viz. the organic composition of capital, which struggles to overcome the limits of constant capital (fixed capital, machines, tools, instruments of production, productive technologies, scientific operations, and all other capital used in labor-saving production through intensifying the rate of exploitation) against which living labor, and its labor-power as a commodity, finds itself thrashing in the contemporary production process of capitalist globalization.

It is scarcely necessary to revisit all of the arguments by political economists (Say, Ricardo, Mill, Smith, etc.) addressed by Marx and refuted in turn, except in connection with the production of surplus-value highlighted by Marx's attacks against their utopian assumptions about the bourgeois mode of production. Utopian, most of all, is political economy's denial of the possibility of absolute capitalist overproduction, i.e. a general production of the articles of exchange in excess of their demand for immediate consumption, and the consequent market crisis, characterized by the closing down of a portion of society's productive forces, increased unemployment, halted credit, and lagging consumption. Sure, they agree, that this can occur in particular branches of industry; but the notion of a general crisis in which those branches of industry struck by overproduction reciprocally trigger a crisis in general, is dismissed as an impossibility. To prove this, political economy must put forward a fatal assumption that capitalist production and exchange are carried in the same manner as bartering, on a larger scale. If this is true, all buyers are sellers of commodities, and all sellers would be buyers, when they meet in the market and exchange commodities for commodities. This proves misguided, and Marx appeals to two observations to disabuse political economy of this naïve representation of the bourgeois mode of production: first, not all purchases of commodities are meant for direct and immediate consumption, but for consumption as capital, i.e. intermediate commodities, used in the production of another commodity by the buyer, whose goal in purchase is not personal satisfaction, but accumulation. Second, Marx observes that, the purpose of capitalist production from the standpoint of the commodity owner being the realization of a surplus-value, i.e. a value greater than that which the owner advances in labor as wages (variable capital) and means of production (constant capital), there is an increasing independence of the act of buying from the act of selling. In fact, these two acts comprise opposing but complementary phases of exchange, and while a buyer may wish to transform their money into a commodity, sellers may not wish to turn their commodities immediately into money, but must, under pain of the necessity of expanding production in competition against other capital owners, reproduce the labor-power and means of production used in the first cycle of production. This reproduction is nothing but circulation, on ever-expanding scales, of capital and money, in which some of the commodities are reconverted back into capital instead of money. That is, they are converted back into an embodiment of some use-value, or what is the same, an embodiment of some individual, particular form of material labor either in wages or means of production, including machines and raw materials, to be exchanged in the future for a quantity of money embodying a greater portion of abstract, general labor. Abstract labor is the measure of a commodity's exchange-value, determined by the labor-time socially necessary on average for the production of a given commodity. Because capitalists compete to produce more than other capitalists at reduced costs and shorter intervals than others, by increasing the rate of exploitation of labor, the tendency is for a smaller part of the social value produced in social production to go into each commodity. On the one hand, since surplus-value is the difference between the value of labor measured in wages and greater value produced by labor and realized in consumption, the class of wage-earners cannot absorb all of the value made by their activity collectively, because it is compelled to give up more of its labor than what is returned to it in the form of commodities. Therefore, they cannot realize the total value of their labor-power, and some of it, after it is appropriated by the capitalist owner of commodities (wages and means of production), is neither destined for profit or consumption by capital, but rather for its reconversion into the capital advanced in production. These separate, independent acts of exchange - buying and selling - are expressed in Marx's formula:

C-M-C'

Where C is the value of commodities and M is money, and C' > C. This is not the same as the formula for simple exchange:

C-M-C

Here, the owner of commodities exchanges the product that is from its standpoint an exchange-value, for another commodity that it demands as a use-value. The money it turns its product into in the act of sale, it reconverts into a commodity in the act of purchase. If this were all that capitalist exchange consisted of in all of its different phases of production, there would be an absolute equilibrium between supply and demand of commodities in general, and overproduction would not exist.

Objective Forces of Capitalist Accumulation and the Subjective Experience of the Process, Part 2

Part one of this investigation centered mainly on the violent expropriation by Parliamentary decree of the small independent farmer or handicraft worker's means of production from his labor-power. In this second part, certain key Marxist categories will be brought to bear upon the analysis of the process hitherto outlined.

The first theoretical structure in need of an introduction to the causal laws assumed to govern capitalist political economy's commodity relation is that of dialectical reflexivity, and the extension of this formulation to the commodification of labor-power. Without comprehending the reflexive force of the material world, the 'objective' and 'subjective' will be abstracted from their concrete unification. Marx rejected the Empiricist notion of the immediate experience as the standard for understanding material causality. Indeed, Empiricism carried inside of it the dogmatic acceptance of immediate, observable appearance that endangered the bourgeois revolutions which swept across France, Germany, and England from projecting an imagined social formation into the future, and interpolating this conditioned desire into mechanical materialism's simple cause-effect relation. Marxist Perry Anderson argued that such a philosophy could only succeed in achieving its bourgeois revolution in England, where empiricism dominated thought. The difference in England was that its mid-seventeenth century revolution had already risen the burghers of the middle class to a position of economic and political power. The objective bonds of feudalism, having been loosened, acted on the subjective class consciousness of the bourgeoisie, who unleashed the forces of production for the capitalist mode of production's prevailing value-relation, in which the laws of commodity production increasingly appeared as 'objective' laws of 'nature' as capitalist production grew in its scope and specialization. Marx's explanation of reflexivity imagined 'the educator who needs education.' In a word, the objective/subjective dichotomy resolves itself into a process of social being altering social consciousness, followed by the reciprocal force of this new consciousness on the material basis of existing social relations.

We might say that 'historical materialism' takes this exact view: the comprehension of social laws lies in seeing their antagonisms, those fissures in which tensions develop and contradictions emerge, first in the dimension of class and economic relations, and later through a social totality.

Totality then is the second concept necessary to understand capitalism's process of objective and subjective determinations. The totality of capitalist production is the sum of all economic relations of production grounding it in its base on the one hand, and the reflexive 'superstructure' encoding all cultural, legal, religious, and philosophical structures in the ideological formations of its definite social processes of (re)production. Marx utilizes the totality of capitalist production in Capital's methodology for understanding and critiquing capitalism and its law of value. In the part on circulation, Marx asks the reader to comprehend the wages apportioned to the working class, and the surplus value of the capitalist owner of the means of production, as the sum of all wages going to the working class as a whole, and the surplus value of social capital extracted from the capitalists as a whole. This procedure holds the tensions of the class contradictions within the system conditioning their relation to one another. It would be impossible to grasp the method of surplus value production in the context of a relationship between an 'individual capitalist' and 'individual laborer.' Such 'Individuals' are the abstract categories of material beings endemic to Marx's critique in The German Ideology.

If totality is the second category, then the third which should naturally follow is that of unity and opposition. A totality exists as a unity of aspects, constituent elements forming a whole organism, maintaining the position of monism key to the ontology of Marx's critical theory. In the Theory of Surplus Value, Marx shows that the unity of the forces facing each other in antagonistic tension within bourgeois society, only appear united in cyclical and historical crises of the bourgeois order. Otherwise, production and consumption, laborer and capitalist, value and use-value, viz. all the contradictions inherent in the general money form and in the commodity, appear to be acting independently of each other. It is when these two parts break out into full antagonism, during the crisis of the order, of both the bourgeois mode of production and of the proletariat's struggle for survival, that these appear to mirror each other necessarily. Suddenly, overproduction/underconsumption reveals the market's failure to maintain the equilibrium insisted on by the apologists of the free market, Ricardo, Mill, and Say. And in this third category the essential motion of capital in particular and matter in general is revealed as one which cannot be possible but without undertaking a process of separating the totality's parts and reuniting them organically and critically, identifying in these contradictions the possibility of transcending them.

This transcendence, or sublation, will be the fourth and final category on which the objective and subjective process of accumulation should revolve. Sublation is more than the simple act of overcoming contradiction, of its final negation. Through negation, sublation both destroys and preserves part of itself in its next permutation, setting the ground for a new antagonism, which, in a post-capitalist universe, Marx claims follows an entirely new dialectic than that in which the 'laws' of the capitalist mode of production are identified. This break represents the break with the past's subjective stage of 'primitive accumulation', during which the laws of capital are constructed by force, in the minds of that newly liberated class of bourgeoisie, and after which present themselves to all, including their own bourgeois architects, as objective, necessary laws acquiring an existence and motion independent of the subjective processes of the ruling class who called it into being.

This unity and tension between the object and subject should invite us to think about whether 'primitive accumulation' is really the simple pre-capitalist origins upon which the bourgeois mode of production is fulfilled, or if this process reappears at each stage of capitalism, and finally in its final stage as that of permanent crisis.

Therefore, the next article will deal with the theory of crisis found in some of Marx's lesser known writings.

Secular Critiques of Religious Ideas: Liberation Theology and Atheism

Judaism is the cultural tradition which shaped my identity throughout childhood. I am an atheist, but I don't doubt the culture experience of the shared historical experience, and ideological narrative, of the Jewish identity has a profound influence on how I perceive the world today. This influence is purely subconsciously intuitive and somatic: I often 'feel' Jewish, or as part of some of the members of that group who refer to themselves as Jewish.

There really is not a single, unified Jewish identity, and this is problematic for defining it under a comprehensive category. The spread of the population following their liberation from Babylonian exile under Cyrus the Great into a Jewish diaspora spanning Europe Spain and France (Iberia), Germany and Poland, the Slavic regions of Southern Europe, Russia, and of course the Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Judea, and Northern Africa, obfuscates any unifying identity, and at the same time unifies their identity through the very differences between these settled populations, and the effect the local customs and conditions had on the unique arrangement of what common elements we might identify with Judaism as a semiotic structure, or a system of signs and symbols. Whatever is common about these different interpretations may have been preserved not despite the dispersion of the population but because of it; in exile, the oral tradition of its origins as a tribal religion began its transcription into Aramaic in the Babylonian Talmud, and in the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament. I am fairly fluent in Hebrew, but as a Sephardim whose Jewish relatives lived under the rule of religiously tolerant Muslim Andalusia in Spain, I write it in a syntax so close to Arabic it might be considered a dialect of both Hebrew and Persian Arabic speech. The Talmudic writings and the Torah were written in these languages to guard the knowledge in them from the masters in their captivity. Soon, a tradition evolved that necessitated a division of labor between a literate class of transcribers and interpreters (Rabbinic scholars, of whom the High Priest was the Rabbinic leader and guardian of the temples), and a class of producers. These included masons, farmers, carpenters, shoemakers, weavers, metallurgists and dye processors. Without a nation or sovereign territory for the settlers, this hierarchy did not produce the sharper divisions of labor of the priestly castes or military oligarchies of, say, ancient Greece or the Germanic states. Even Jerusalem was a Roman principality where two Jewish-Roman Wars were fought, destroying the Second Temple during the conflicts. Because the economic and social patterns of Jews did not make it possible for an independent State of a ruling family to rise above the producing members of their population, their form of social production was closer to the Kalahari or Ubuntu semi-nomadic, lineage tribal societies of Africa, based on egalitarianism, mutual cooperation, common ownership and use of resources, and charitable giving to those families who possessed less than they needed due to the vicissitudes of natural geographic and climate factors, and the limits to their inferior political status compared to the full citizens of the empires and nations they emigrated to. The religious texts described a people chosen to repair the world by doing charitable acts, resting on the 7th day from labor to reenergize themselves to work more energetically in the 6 other days of the week toward their chosen goal of building a model society from the world of others which their utopia would liberate.
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Jewish persecution in Europe led to their acceleration of those deeds intended to accelerate the rate of this society's expansion. A global society embedding its cultural and economic patterns under a unified world system founded on these principles and commandments exists, then, in germ form, in the modest tribal ideology of its ancient Israeli population. The exploitation of the Jews and their clearancet from the common, arable landed property on which they settled sustained themselves on its usufruct were their reality in their search for a permanent territory to which their Jewish identity might be fixed and constituted by their multitude of differences in local territorial, tribal signs. The reality of this 'multitude' was its material Becoming along different lines of flight, each following a distinctly real path of evolutionary development,y theh sum of which is the virtual plane. The virtual becomes, but has no actual Being, until the Being of the Jewish identity repeats itself through recursive cycles of material reproduction within an extended series of this repeated production. The series, between any two stages within the movement, produces the same mass of this substance in the last stage as the former produced. ( proceed from here later

Objective Forces of Capitalist Accumulation and the Subjective Experience of the Process, Part 1

Today I made what I intended to be a joke in defense of feminism to a nearby male and female. Perhaps the timing or the context had not been established as much as it needed to be, but the female translated it as a chauvinist attack on women. I fumbled a bit to explain the irony of the remark, but she seemed to doubt that I was doing anything but trying to recover from a social gaffe. Of course, I am not disposed toward embarrassment enough to try to get out of offending someone if I meant to, but she doesn't know this, and rightly perceives me according to the male archetype that patriarchy perpetuates.

Eventually, to clear my name, I pointed out I was an anarcho-socialist. Both reacted with mild shock, inquiring whether or not I thought this was extreme. I told them no, because I don't believe a social organization based on advancing the material, intellectual, and productive potentials of human beings is extreme, if the word is taken to mean the opposite of 'sound' or 'rational.'

The male threw out a few of the most widely used, glib blows against the idea of collective workers' self-management: it can't exist, without a government there is anarchy, the former socialist republics' collapse prove its impossibility (many progressive developments fail over and over before they don't, and new socialist formations have arisen), etc. I pointed out that capitalism has failed as well, but he did not agree. It exists, he said, as if this were proof of success (HIV has existed for decades, but none would say it is successful in improving human life). I asked him what the backwards economies of the global market meant for capitalism's success, most of all because their backwardness is the product of the combined and uneven development of capitalism between and within global territories. The extension of capitalist production and property globally had developed an extended global division of labor, separated into increasingly complex and spontaneous branches of production, and each assigned changing and widely varying values in the totality of the production process they organize. I'm not sure what his pithy answer meant, but it amounted to, 'well that's the third world.' I certainly agree. Globalized capitalism is a system of private production that must do what any form of economic organization must try to do: preserve, improve, and provide for human needs (not the needs of a small class of commodity owners indifferent to whether their commodities satisfy anything but their next cycle of surplus value production). The 'Third World' - an outdated term since post-colonialism, but good enough for this discussion - is still a place in the world. If a whole hemisphere of the world is living at or below subsistence poverty, then global capitalism has failed as a system. It exists, yes, but not as the imaginary conceptual model in the minds of those who accept and embrace it. The same was true of Stalinism - a bureaucratic capitalist totalitarian regime - and there were countless internal and external pressures on the first Bolshevik revolutionaries to overthrow the Tsar first, then the landed Duma afterward, prepare for civil war against the moderate parties and resist invasion by a coalition of a dozen Western capitalist powers across Europe allied against the fear of its spread, attesting to the fact that even its bourgeois opponents anticipated it would without violent acts of suppression. Stalin took power after the destruction of war and the dispersion of the rurual peasantry across vast swathes of space had separated the working class from the party representing it (the guy today actually insisted there should be no political parties, or many more, which is typical of the naivete of the U.S. middle class 'independent.' So eager to be free from any required political choices, they confuse political goals with policies, and do not see that human history is the history of facing contradictions and achieving the goal of surpassing them; parties, in radical democratic assemblies, are spontaneously thrown up by members of a shared class interest, as all people are though they may not be conscious of it or what it is. Without delegates to represent their class in a council to which rank-and-file members of that class are appointed democratically, what does one propose in lieu of a Party? In the United States and other bicameral legislatures, the number of parties is irrelevant as long as the class composition of the global social hierarchy is the same. Why have ten parties representing the different sections of the capitalist class when one or two do that already, or when one is anti-capitalist? Imagine that the institutional economic schizophrenia of U.S. global imperial capital would finally be struck down if only there were no republicans and democrats, and only independents who think like both or one or the other depending on the immediate practical convenience of their choices. In fact, Republics and Democrats do the very same thing (Obama's market healthcare system is modelled on Republican Mitt Romney's proposed and authorized health care system in Massachussets when he was governor there). Perhaps they are independents who choose nothing but a label.

These arguments of course are easily knocked down, and don't compare to the were ruthless critiques by socialists themselves. If it did exist (the autonomous zones of Spain in 1932, early Bolshevik power in the Soviet Union's system of democratic workers' councils, worker delegations within the factories and in the political apparatus of the new regime, Venenzuela's steady development - without their democratically elected figurehead - toward a workers' regime based on self-management and common ownership of the means of production within and between industries as its capitalist property relations vanish in proportion and poverty rates continue to drop, and even the flashes of socialist ambitions in the U.S. during Reconstruction which flourished in Congress's growing socialist representatives and efforts to collectivize former slave plantation farmland under the 14th amendment, and the list of course goes on.) That they fell is not proof of anything but that they could exist, since to fall a regime must arise. The Vietnamese Communists brought on the fall of the two major colonial imperialist powers in Inddochina at the time - France and the U.S. - one after the other, and accomplished this resistance to their occupation through a size and efficiency in the level of their military technology's mechanization and troop levels that made the imperial might of both capitalist powers seem monstrous and invincible in comparison. Essentially, capitalism failed, if we judge its success by its logic: self-expansion and global domination. Having been forcibly deposed as rulers of a key colonial territory's economic resources and productive power, its expansion was not only halted, but forced to retreat.
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Why are these historical realities not convincing enough to the typical young white american male wishy-washy 'moderate?' ell to begin with, centrist political ideas are the ideological core of U.S. imperialist power globally. It refuses to resist anything, or to embrace anything. It plays the role of that middle class subject whose ideology is to invent the popular slogans of progressive political agendas, but failing inevitably to see them through to their concrete end once the poorer layers of workers are roused by their ideas. Once these workers fill the ranks of the middle class movement, these 'moderates' and 'independents' - who conflate their mood swings with 'free-thinking' - development more hostility to theiir poor working class counterparts than the imperial state they had set out to attack.

And this is why capitalism is a failure: it exists for sure, but in a form opposite to that which its early stages assumed under the self-conscious reorganization of Europe and the Americas by the young capitalist classes of the world. The limits of its middle class bourgeoisminan leaders' consciousness were the product and producer of the limitations on its own ideals. Its apparent principles of universal 'freedom' and 'equality' in civil society represented the mystical veil of the political State and the ruling ideology of the bourgeoisie, which concealed the reality of freedom and equality as a concrete social relation between real, living individuals. The reality of this freedom was that it had only freed the class who authored the slogans for freedom, as all classes do as they assume economic dominance and struggle for the political power to consolidate their prevailing mode of production. This is ideology, defined: the representation of particular political and economic interests as the universal interests of society as a whole.

As I attempted to explain how capital and the drive to accumulate more of it in the form of surplus value is bound in contradictions threatening to destroy it, I was told that my political orientation sounded like an 'ideology.' I was uncertain how to answer that, because I was uncertain whether he even realized that all political theory - reformism, radical leftism, social democracy, conservativism, liberalism, etc. - are the product of a dominant ideology, each expressing an aspect of the totality of contradictions and tensions its definite historical stages are all inextricably united in. Each class has its ideas about society by experiencing the social relations they enter into as members of their class. The male actually suggested ideologies are not based on economic processes, admitting without a trace of irony the ideology of the modern white privileged male in the U.S.: ideas, desires, beliefs, aspirations, morality, religion and law are the product of mental labor, by a social consciousness freed from social production under the specific form of a definite social labor process of economic production, both of renewed human-labor power, and the value embodied in its objects. The sacrifice of these objects by their producers to the owner of the economic instruments and machines they are first violently wrested from, then employed under for the sake of the productive aims of an Other, is not only unnatural, but needs a pre-capitalist period of violent displacement, state expropriation of common agricultural lands inhabited for centuries by small independent peasants, eviction of these free hirelings, and the parliamentary coup against their connection to the land of the feudal family's estate their serf and free farm laboring ancestors had shed blood to defend for centuries. This process gradually changes the material conditions into those from which the capitalist system of commodity production (production for production's sake) can grow and expand beyond all territorial frontiers. This is an evolutionary transition running over centuries, from the 14th century acts making begging and pauperism illegal and subject to violent punishment, up to Elizabeth's own amendments to the Poor Laws in 18th century England, fixing a maximum wage for silk-weaving, leather-tanning, cotton-spinning, etc., while setting harsher penalties for any worker found accepting a a wage greater than the legal maximum than for the employer paying it. In France, a beggar could by law be sentenced to slavery by whomever accused him of beggary, owning the children and wife of the convicted in accordance with the treatment of cattle or chattel livestock.

It is impossible to define the form and change of anything without tracing it back to its origins. These primitive methods of accumulating capital and capital commodities define the basis of the globalized capitalist economy of the 21st century's "Information Age." Without this period, the necessary conditions to exploit a class of laborers by a class of private owners of the global economic means of production would have been impossible. The displacements and enforced subsistence wages 'freed' the former independent farmer, or master craftsman, or the individual hand-loom linen weaver forced them to become modern workers, a class separated from the instruments of production by the class of capitalists united in newly formed political state through which the interests of capital are imposed by its administrative authority, which is in the final analysis an armed body of police and military departments paid to violently suppress the aspirations of working class interests.

The contradictions capital finds itself in are becoming clear now: in the contradictory interests of the growing population of workers receiving a falling share of the social value of labor on the one hand, and the interests of the few owners of private property, whose private ownership in reality is the labor-power of workers owning nothing but their ability to work, and ownership of labor-power's value-commodity. y forceing indepenet laborers from access to their independent work, they were 'freed' by being turned into a commodity among commodities circulated on the market, and compelled to sell themselves to whomever would purchase them at a price fixed as low as necessary to maximize labor's productivity and keep the worker alive for future exploitation, a mere object of 'consumption.' Here the commodity appears as a web of irreconcilable contradictions. Because labor is the only economic instrument that can produce 'new' value in the process of transferring the value of past labor embodied in the materials, tools, and expended instruments into the final commodity. It must be remembered that the productive elements transferred by this material process are also commodities bought by capitalists on the market. A commodity can satisfy a need or want, but capitalism extends the collection of commodities not consumed for personal pleasure (the basis of the old bourgeois ethic of frugality, today practiced behind hypocritical excess), becoming used in the production of a commodity that does, into which the value of the labor by which the productive commodity was imparted to it, and the value of the productive commodity's labor were both resolved and united.

When it is said that the 'value' of labor is transferred, we must take a moment to consider how labor's value is measured. Value is not identical to price. The price of a thing is the elementary form of expressing a specific fraction of the whole magnitude of social value produced in toto. Values of different kinds of commodities are the result of the time necessary for labor on average to produce the given commodity under avereage conditions of production (this varies between nations but for now we will set that aside). Capitalists are only interested in the value for which commodities can be realized in exchange on the market, while the buyer, say a worker using a part of his wage to acquire it, is interested in it from its opposite side, as an object that is useful for survival or pleasure. It is the commodification of labor which is the secret of capitalist exploitation: it is not the system of free exchange between free individual owners of property it presents itself as in the sphere of circulation. In the sphere of production this fraudulent contract reveals its dependence on exploitation of living human beings it must force into absolute dependence, into commodification and objectification. The exchange is between individual members of different class positions in the economic balance of power; one 'individual property owner' has for property the labor and productive tools of others , while the other property owner in the exchange owns only his or her body, brain, muscles, and energy, which early industrial capitalism sank into more degrading, crippling and deteriorating states, recruiting children and women into the most inhumane work of all, orchestrating this under the 'necessity' of capitalist laws of value. So the commodity is both an abstract embodiment of of value and concrete material object with unique properties and conditions of living production. How can it be both? The ideology of the bourgeoisie proclaiming the triumph of free labor and competition is the subjective idealized abstraction is accepted by a society so far along in the evolution of capitalist production, and so distant from the early accumulation period which laid down the foundation for the capitalist mode of existence by sweeping away the pre-capitalist relations of the landed feudal estate system - church tithes, hereditary political powers of the landlord aristocracy , feudal retainers, economic privileges and the acquisition of special posts as sinecures on retainer through bribery and simony s - that the commodity's contradiction is reproduced subjectively by the objective forces of production. The class that sets these forces in motion for its profit and self-interest is divided into different capitalist groupings according to the stage of capitalist development each has attained in relation to its present impassable limits.

--end of part 1--

Part two should be up within the next two days. The interaction I had with these two people inspired me to deal with this problem of possibility and reality in the Being of a thing or idea. Comments I encounter in interactions like these also heighten my observance of just how much a quotidian, impulsive statement can reveal about the present state of human attitudes especially in the developed post-industrial world of wealth and decadence. Other things that were said to me will be addressed tomorrow, and their political ramifications will be mapped out as they were here. By the time both parts are completed, the attitudes of the apathetic 20-somethings of white America should be critically examined in relation to the failure of the Left to advance a concrete, permanent socialist program, and what role these attitudes play in its suppression, and how this trend may be resolved - sometimes using harsh measures.