Reading Capital, continued (thread #4) Fetishism...

[blindpig]

PinkoCommie
01-19-2010, 08:54 AM

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYEQYNjtg[/youtube]

The whole world's broke and it ain't worth fixing
It's time to start all over, make a new beginning
There's too much pain, too much suffering
Let's resolve to start all over make a new beginning

Now don't get me wrong - I love life and living
But when you wake up and look around at everything that's going down -
All wrong
You see we need to change it now, this world with too few happy endings
We can resolve to start all over make a new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

The world is broken into fragments and pieces
That once were joined together in a unified whole
But now too many stand alone - There's too much separation
We can resolve to come together in the new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

We can break the cycle - We can break the chain
We can start all over - In the new beginning
We can learn, we can teach
We can share the myths the dream the prayer
The notion that we can do better
Change our lives and paths
Create a new world and

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

The whole world's broke and it ain't worth fixing
It's time to start all over, make a new beginning
There's too much fighting, too little understanding
It's time to stop and start all over
Make a new beginning

Start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over

We need to make new symbols
Make new signs
Make a new language
With these we'll define the world

And start all over
Start all over
Start all over
Start all over ...

[blindpig]

Two Americas
01-19-2010, 08:57 AM

Back ten years ago or so, there were a bunch of people from the Soviet Union showing up in Detroit including some of the best musicians I have ever met. One of them was a balalaika player who played in our band for a while. Here, everything depends upon the "sale" either of recordings or the performance. What a nightmare. All of the work behind the scenes is dismissed or ignored. But he had been paid for that work - he made a living whether he sold anything or not. Then performances were almost an after thought, not tied to selling anything. According to all of the apologists for Capitalism, there should have been no incentive for the musicians there to excel. So how come those musicians, freed up from that pressure to sell and the constant threat of starvation, were better than any we have here?

I worked for a couple of years trying to help these musicians establish careers here, and what an eye-opener. It was just about fucking impossible, and miserable as well talking to sleazy slimebag presenters and promoters and record company assholes - the gatekeepers between the musicians and any hope of eating. The Soviet musicians were all amazed - "is this what you guys have to go through here to be musicians???" We had one success - Irina Mashalov, a mezzo from the Moscow opera, who got gigs with the Met and signed a recording contract with Shandos in the UK. One world class pianist could only find teaching work, another played bars, and the traditional folkloric musicians are now working at Pizza Hut or WTFever.

There, all musicians worked and were paid regardless of their sales potential - whatever that even means - and all audiences got great music all over the Soviet Union regardless of their ability to pay or "what they were in to" or whatever.

I realized when I was working with them that we have become accustomed here to being treated like dirt, ripped off and humiliated and demeaned at every turn, with our musicianship only being seen as having any value to the degree to which we sell - "hey if you guys were really good you would be discovered" or "why don't you get out there and hustle your music like so and so did" - or else seen as a pleasant hobby activity - "hey chill out and have fun, and keep your day job." Ask the musicians who have been "discovered" what that is like. It is worse.

I was trying to explain to one musician how things worked here. His response was "I am a musician." Damn fucking right. A musician. Now there is a novel concept. He is not a self-promoter, he is not a hustler, not a personality trying to achieve celebrity, he is not striving for success, he has nothing to sell - he is a fucking musician, and one of the best I have ever worked with. Now he is a janitor.

On edit - by the way, they were not leaving the Soviet Union to escape "communist tyranny" but rather the opposite. They were being thrown on the "free market" there and the infrastructure was collapsing. Many were Jews who in the new wave of Russian nationalism and restoration of the Orthodox church were losing jobs and under persecution.

[blindpig]

PinkoCommie
01-19-2010, 11:45 AM

I was just on the phone a bit earlier with the local [link:www.jwj.org/about/contact.html|JWJ] guru discussing the US Social Forum later this year in Detroit (*which I may attend), the current JWJ fundraising effort, and generally the matter of jobs/unemployment. We were both remarking at how very little action there is on the matter, either popular or in the national leadership.

only a few moments after getting off the phone did I read your comment about alienation. Kinda made me wonder if it is not a necessary ingredient for the activation of class consciousness. Alienation being relatively nowhere around, just as is any appreciable mass action concerning the jobless, I couldn't help but find myself wondering if there was a correlation at play rather than a coincidence, estrangement giving ways these days to outright me-first survival efforts.

It's nine days since I had someone move in who was on the verge of going homeless after six months of unsuccessful job searching; he's previously been employed in corporate accounting with a median sort of income and is young, sober, capable, and responsible enough that he made it six months without income before coming to the brink. What a vile world it is when such a person can fall into the abysss of losing everything without even enough societal recognition of that reality to be characterized as cold and callous!

I can't do much, but I can take a very direct action to keep one person from losing everything...

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 08:19 AM

Not the composer of the music? Practicing musicians are like the translators, this is not to take away from the value of their labor, or the time... Its the same with actors and dancers where the directors and writers or choreographers are the genius that get translated? The translation skills and creative interpretations of the practicing artists is where the talent also comes in, practice honing the skills of course.

The visual arts really don't have a comparison to music, unless you include craftspeople who create works based on the original artist's idea? Regarding the ability to draw from observation, anyone can learn to do that (who is not handicapped in some way), and with time and practice be competent at least. Some have a greater aptitude for that, and the time needed is less and becomes lesser with practice. Observational artwork is generally given greater value by many as they say "they can't do it" (they can, they just haven't put in the requisite labor/time to do it), whereas the art that many eschew, such as non-objective, which doesn't necessarily require the time, is the art of true originality. Although many will say "oh, I can do that", they maybe cannot as they haven't learned the compositional skills/knowledge necessary, or don't have the requisite vision. Remember, it is over a century since the first "accepted" piece of non-objective work was completed by Kandinsky.

Hey, and thinking of Russian art, what about the great Constructivists? Their work requires no observational skills, but is universally accepted as highly aesthetic, I love it myself. The time required, at the time, would have been in the craftsmanship as the work was so precise...

Sorry, I'm an aesthetic nerd...

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 08:38 AM

Value has more than two meanings, many more. We need other words or compound phrases to be clear with those unfamiliar with the marxist intent, maybe?

Has anyone ever rewritten Marx with contemporary phraseology, that might help us explain him better?


(The following paragraph probably has very little value to folks here, and can be disregarded!)
I think that this is one of my problems (and who cares about that? ), one major definition, for me, of the word value, is the degree of visual lightness or darkness used in an artwork, or part of an artwork: high contrast photography only has two or three values, for instance (Black, white, and maybe a midtone). Still another definition is the degree of light or dark of a color, yellow is always high value, blue is normally low value. To me, these meanings are such a part of my everyday lexicon, that it might be affecting my flow while reading of use value etc, this is something that occured to me in writing. Maybe other terms have affects on other people in like ways? Value, for example again, might be considered only as monetary to some and to break from that mindset might be difficult, making the readings less clear?

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 08:43 AM

I consider how I might arrange my living quarters to accomodate family and friends who are currently in disintegrating financial situations. An article I posted recently regarding Haiti, does point to the fact that people are much more human and humane than the elite would have it, might be a stretch connecting to your comment, but I think not. Here it is again, on edit I'll post the original article url, I could use some help for those who are still able to post at du:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 89x7558788

http://www.slate.com/id/2242078/

[blindpig]

curt_b
01-24-2010, 09:05 AM

The labor of the composer is part of the labor congealed in the performance, as is the makers of instruments, recording equipment, etc. The act of composing includes all the labor that proceeds the writing of a score for example. If music were not a commodity, all who labor through out the process would be paid based on the work they did to bring about the performance. As it stands, buying a piece of music to perform (for the composer) or performing it (for the musician) are considered to be the moment when value is established, as if the value lies in the piece of music, rather than in the human activity that produced it.

As for art, more generally, if we agree that the production of art is a socially valuable endeavor (I of course do), then the way we determine the value of art needs to lie in the actions of the artists, not in the work of art. How we decide which artists to support is another question. We certainly can't do a worse job of it than the current method.

Being an academically trained aesthetic nerd myself (as well as being an antique dealer for many years), the History of Art, as officially offered, is as much a lie as any other discipline. It has analogies in all the liberal political and economic histories. From the Great Men theories to the History of Style (where one movement builds upon another in a linear progression) to the lack of intent in Post-Modernism, they all fought to place art in the realm of commodities. Once, that's accomplished collecting becomes a way to invest capital, and accumulate more of it (if you bet on the right artist).

It's funny, that one of our valued myths is that the life of the artist, is their greatest work. If so, we ought to be recognizing their value in their experience and labor, not in the exchange of their work as commodities.

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
01-24-2010, 10:06 AM

The History of Art is generally the History of European Art, so much is neglected about the rest of the world's art history...

"We certainly can't do a worse job of it" you know it! As I am still really trying to souse where all this fits, your comments really help to clarify...

Who could not value Van Gogh's experience and labor? His letters exhibit this so clearly, and should be read by all (such a socially conscious man...)

[blindpig]

anaxarchos
01-24-2010, 05:42 PM

Section 4.The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1...



As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

What, first of all, practically concerns producers when they make an exchange, is the question, how much of some other product they get for their own? in what proportions the products are exchangeable? When these proportions have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear to result from the nature of the products, so that, for instance, one ton of iron and two ounces of gold appear as naturally to be of equal value as a pound of gold and a pound of iron in spite of their different physical and chemical qualities appear to be of equal weight. The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.[29] The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.


The Notes:


28. When, therefore, Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons – “La Ricchezza e una ragione tra due persone,” – he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things. (Galiani: Della Moneta, p. 221, V. III. of Custodi’s collection of “Scrittori Classici Italiani di Economia Politica.” Parte Moderna, Milano 1803.)

29. What are we to think of a law that asserts itself only by periodical revolutions? It is just nothing but a law of Nature, founded on the want of knowledge of those whose action is the subject of it.” (Friedrich Engels: “Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie,” in the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,” edited by Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx. Paris. 1844.)



Is this getting easier or is it still a struggle? What is he saying here?

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
01-24-2010, 06:43 PM

I knew you were involved in art in some way, back when you were explaining socialist realism.

Anyway, could you expand on the postmodernism thing a little bit?