Aw hell I haven’t even finished chapter 1

Get hype

Holy guacamole this guy writes

Damn 1 was rough to finish on time, I was still on a trip away. But dat down today and blew through 20 pages and just loving it. Not much to mention, but I for some reason feel like I’m enjoying reading Marx (not just doing it for learning purposes with no joy) for the first time in this case. Let’s goooo

Alright, let’s get at it!

reporting in for posting duty o7

and yes, this week i have finished my communism homework on time!

Can you add me to the list please?

Nice summary!

All good points, but it should also be noted that (at least as I understand it) the US dollar is a commodity because it is the only thing used to buy/sell oil internationally (until recently).

It’s alright. I prefer doing a lot of reading all at once as that’s what I find it easiest to put in my schedule, rather than actually doing 6-7 pages every day and then putting the book down again. So perhaps that will also work out for you.

Even in the worst case scenario, you can just start reading whenever it’s convenient for you (whether that’s in a week or in six months) and you’ll have the threads to look back on at least. If anybody right now is like “god damn it, I’m behind like 20 pages now and it’s just gonna get worse and I can’t catch up and–” then that is your brain tricking you, as the reading is challenging and it might not wanna do it. You can in fact do it and you don’t have to “give up” and try again a year from now when the threads reset - you can just postpone it a few weeks or months for when you’re in a better/less busy space. And think about how great it will feel at the end when you have actually read and (hopefully) understood Capital and have become an undisputed Marxist, no ifs, ands, or buts!

You can catch up by Sunday the 14th. Don’t fall too far behind. Read 8-9 pages a day this week or whatever.

Marx’s use of the Bible is honestly really interesting. Expect to see more of it through Capital (and even more the earlier in his writings you go). It is inarguably the single largest literary, theoretical and philosophical inspiration Marx has throughout his life. Marx’s library contained at least one copy of the Bible when he died, so it’s also likely that it (like Hegel) was something he came back to time and time again.

Some more Marx-Bible facts:

In his early articles for the Rheinische Zeitung he refers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to both himself and other journalists as prophets and false prophets.

He closes his “Critique of the Gotha Programme” with a quote from the Bible identifying himself with Ezekiel.

He taught his daughters about Jesus as “the carpenter who the rich men killed”, reciting his own version of the story himself.

According to the memoirs of German socialist Max Beer (who met Eleanor Marx), Marx rarely had much to say about religion in her memory except, when her mother and sister started going to Mr. Bradlaugh’s secular Sunday services. This led Karl Marx to dissuade his wife and daughter from going there. Beer quotes Eleanor as saying: “[Karl Marx] told mother that edification or satisfaction of her metaphysical needs she would find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in Mr. Bradlaugh’s shallow reasonings”.

Some Jewish socialists have actually claimed him for the Jewish prophetic tradition, for example Abraham Shiplacoff’s speech in the 1910s said (originally in Yiddish):

Marx was a prophet, no less so than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. With honest conviction and courage he proclaimed the economic liberation of humanity. He appealed to the workers of the world and inspired them with his conviction that they are destined to fulfill the great task of abolishing poverty, thus putting an end to wars between nations and classes, and, in doing so, realize the great thousands-year-old dream of human brotherhood.

Marx’s constant references made me curious so I looked into it, and the Bible has a shocking number of condemnations of poverty/oppression and outright critiques of markets, class, urban/rural divide, and so forth. The commodity-fetishism section from last chapter is especially neat because Marx secularises prophetic condemnations of idol worship, even using the same phrases (e.g. “work of their hands”).

If Marx was writing today, Capital would include stuff like “If by means of increased productivity the socially necessary labor needed to produce a pair of jeans is halved, then the value of those jeans also falls by half, as if Thanos had snapped his fingers at it.”

Marx wrote about religion and especially Christianity a lot in the 1840s. Mostly about how it is an alienated form that dominates over the people whose minds produced it. Sound similar to commodity fetishism?

This footnote excerpt from ch1 is relevant to the money discussion in ch3. Marx was not a fan of utopian socialist proposals of labor money, or alternative money that avoids the pitfalls of abstract labor by counting directly as social labor. Eg. if you work for 1 hour you get a 1-labor-hour token.

”It may therefore be imagined that all commodities can simultaneously have this character [of money] impressed upon them, just as it can be imagined that all Catholics can be popes together.”

He’s dunking on Christians with their own book.

Funny the guy selling bibles is the one buying brandy, too. What’s going on in his life?

My favorite fun fact about Marx is that when Proudhon wrote a book called “The Philosophy of Poverty” in 1846, Marx hated it so much that he wrote an entire book-length takedown of it, published in 1847, and called it, brilliantly, “The Poverty of Philosophy.”

Yeah it’s pretty cool. Usually analytical thought is heavy on logic which focuses on states, so a formal contradiction in logic implies an invalid state based on given definitions. But Hegel’s dialectics focus on process instead of state. A contradiction is then a motor for change, a movement from one state to another.

The other nice thing about Hegelian dialectic for analyzing processes is that a contradiction can be investigated productively, whereas in pure logic, a contradiction is always negative: it negates the premises without positing something in their place, some new understanding of the contradictory premises and what makes them both true from different perspectives.

I think it’s that and that for two commodities to be exchangeable they have to be the product of mutually exclusive private production.

Now, I never did finish reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, but this reminded me of the kind of anthropological analysis Graeber covers in a lot more depth. I definitely recall him describing the same phenomenon.

His essay On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations goes into it a bit. Highly recommend.

There is definitely a disconnect between Marx’s view on fiat money and the modern view. That is mainly because Marx was writing in the mid-1800s, and up to that point, almost all fiat currencies had been horrible failures. They led to economic problems in revolutionary America and revolutionary France. Even the Confederacy tried to make its own fiat currency in Marx’s own lifetime, which hyper-inflated to worthlessness in less than three years. So, if it seems like Marx does not spend a lot of time talking about money disconnected from the gold/silver standard, that’s because it was a pretty rare and mostly unimportant novelty at the time he was writing. The USA did not fully abandon the gold standard until 1973. So, “modern monetary theory” definitely goes beyond Marx’s ideas of fiat currency, because Marx was more focused on production, wealth accumulation, and the capitalist system as a whole than the money which mediated it. To put it another way, there wasn’t a lot of “data” at the time about what a fiat currency behaved like in the long-term. And without that data, Marx couldn’t speculate or draw meaningful conclusions.

I think there’s a couple things worth keeping in mind:

At this point every economy he was aware of worked this way, it would be difficult to anticipate the kinds of insane financial developments that have happened since. So it’s possible that we won’t get there because the conditions of the time weren’t sufficient to get to an analysis of a phenomenon like this.

I don’t have the book in front of me so I’m not sure if it’s part of this week’s reading but he gets into credit money in this chapter, which I think more superficially resembles fiat currency, although I think the discussion of silver and copper already hints at the possibility that a government’s fiat can force the market to separate money from embodied value in gold. I think this might suggest that it’s possible through enough force to enforce a symbolic currency, although that might break the theory in a way I don’t understand so I stand ready to be corrected.

I’m taking this from snippets of the Capital w/ Comrades pod and Graeber’s Debt book so grain of salt with my syncretism, but I have this half finished idea in my head that the dollar could be like, a commodity made out of state violence and its capacity to extort labor value by force. The money supply, as I understand it, is controlled by credit in the government that is given to banks, and backed by the guarantee that violence will be employed to return the money by extracting taxes, global south resources, and forcing the world to let us change the value of our obligations to them when we change the value of our currency. It’s the promise of labor value to be extorted essentially.

Or maybe that’s silly, but it’s the idea I’ve had bumping around this week while I read.

Edit: sorry for the screed, feel free to ignore, but working ideas out like this is really helpful for me to learn so I appreciate your indulging me.

US dollar is linked to oil (oil being bought/sold in USD), it is strongly linked to a commodity. Fiat money having value bc the state wills it is an illusion.