The Diagonal

Posts

  • Rubin on Marx on Value

    An embarrassingly common mischaracterization of Marx, made almost exclusively by people who haven’t actually readMarx, amounts in effect to a grammar school syllogism whose premises are false and whose conclusion in any case wouldn’t follow: (1) Marx propounded a ‘labor theory of value’ (LTV) that was essentially that of ‘the British School’ of political economy, primarily…

  • Sacrament of the Robocop Nutrient: The Shrinking Metaphysic of the Fun-Factory and the Plasticine Future Human

    The Green Gerber Robocop Nutrient (GGRN) is now to nutrition what the generic plastic pellet is to 3D print manufacturing.  All ‘processed foodstuffs’ are now custom-engineered Aristotelian ‘accidents’ imparted to one underlying Aristotelian ‘substrate.’ In effect, ALL is now being stripped-down to these elemental Aristotelian categories – elemental substance and chosen accident.  The substance is…

  • ‘All That Is Solid [Has a Meltdown on] Air’

    Capitalism is well known to erode, then to obliterate, all familial, cultural, and other affective-communal structures, followed by what we can call the self-structures that those structures undergird too.  First the larger structures are atomized into ‘individuals,’ then the individuals are atomized into ‘attention-bytes.’ Such is the psycho-‘productive’ ‘attention economy’ that sucks out our surplus…

  • Frankfurters: A Promethean Take

    I’ve been catching up a bit on the Frankfurt School (broadly construed) lately. Not just the Institute for Social Research itself, and not just ‘Critical Theory’s’ ‘biggest names’ – Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse, later on Habermas – but the full array of women and men broadly associated with this remarkably fluid, multidisciplinary, and productive…

  • We Who Live on the Surplus

    A crucial bit of social self-understanding we owe in part to the early Edinburgh school of political economy, especially Steuart and Smith, is that some classes of modern society live on material surplus generated by other classes of society. Smith in particular highlit the landed gentry, royal families, and clerical establishments (vide the Churches of…

  • Platform Herding and ‘Infantile Disorders’

    I hesitate to disturb Lenin’s posthumous sleep, because doing so could elicit exactly the kind of behavior I intend to deplore. But what the hell, an argument that ‘shows’ through its responses what it ‘says’ through its content might just ‘stick’ better than one with just one dimension.  So here’s the behavior in question ……

  • The Social Aggregate Read of Marx’s Kapital: A Glossary

    Introduction      In my recent aggregates-grounded Synopsis of Marx’s ‘project’ in Capital (see previous post), I capitalized (pun foreseen, not intended) certain terms of art, promising a Glossary as sequel. This is that Glossary. Some of the terms are my own, most are Marx’s as glosssd by myself in specific connection with my Synopsis.  …

  • Bataille Through Kapital: The Curse Removed from ‘The Accursed Share’

    ABSTRACT:       I’ll aim here to make Marx’s ‘project’ in the three volumes Capital – and in the crucial but oddly ignored Theories of Surplus Value, sometimes justly called ‘Capital Volume IV’ – accessible to non-‘Marxists’ (a name Marx deplored nearly as much as he did the name’s bearers).       To do this I adopt what should…

  • Getting Over Ourselves

    Increasingly it seems much of both what remains of the self-styled left, and what remains of the self-styled right, have become useless to those on behalves of whom they claim to speak. Both appear largely to have degenerated into little more than performers of self-indulgent, sentimentalist morality-plays unanchored in any historic or species reality. These…

  • Owning Our Enhancements

    For some years I’ve been pushing two ‘prophecies’: The first is the Marxian/Keynesian proposition that production-tech developments will in time make it possible for most ‘work’ to become ‘art’ or ‘play.’  The second is the Federovian proposition that health-tech developments will in time make it possible not simply for lifespans, but indeed ‘healthspans,’ to be lengthened indefinitely…