> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Part 5 - The Object: Money #### 19 - Hope is a movement of the subject against an object: a breaking against the binding This chapter focuses on Marx's analysis of the logic of capital. a) If commodity, then value. Marx's analysis starts with commodity, and the fact that use-value and exchange-value are competing notions of value. If I cook a meal for friends, then that is use-value. The validation I get is from their enjoyment. If I cook a meal in order to exchange it for something else, then that is exchange-value. The validation I get is what I can receive in exchange for it: either money, or another commodity. The problem with exchange-value is that there is constant pressure to produce things faster. If we don't, then what we produce will be worth less and less of other things. > Richness, to be accepted as socially valid by this society, must exist as a commodity. If I cook a wonderful meal for my friends, that is my private affair; if I cook a perhaps-not-so-wonderful meal for sale, then, if I succeed in selling it, my cooking receives a social validation, it produces a social value. b) If commodity-value, then labour. > Our activity is bound or tied or determined in a way that is beyond our control: determined by market forces, the flow of sale and purchase, over which neither we nor anyone else has conscious control. In so far as our humanity is related to conscious determination of our activity (a fundamental element of Marx’s view), then labour dehumanises. And at the same time, it is this process of dehumanisation or abstraction that brings about the social binding that constitutes society. The binding-abstraction channels our activity into certain patterns every day, patterns that dehumanise us and constitute a society that is destroying us. Labour (understood not as freely determined activity but as abstract, alienated labour driven by value, by the pursuit of profit) is the core of the binding that holds us in our place in the train of destruction. c) If commodity-value-labour, then money. d) If commodity-value-labour-money, then identity. e) If money, then capital and exploitation. f) If capital, then state. #### 22 - Unbinding the binding: Revolutionising revolution Holloway uses the Marxist term "value", which I find rather confusing, because there's a folk notion of value as something positive. I'd prefer to be more specific and call it "market value". He believes that Marxists have mistakenly focused on "surplus (market) value", framing the struggle as a class war between the working class and the capitalist class. This takes the form of battles over wages and work hours. But this doesn't question the initial step of converting human activity into "labour" and creating "market value". I wonder if value can be connected to NVC, as that which contributes to human needs. Walter Benjamin viewed revolution as pulling the emergency brake of history (ie modernity's single story of progress). He would have approved of Hospicing Modernity. (I'd be curious to read more about Benjamin from Walter Löwy's book Fire Alarm) Capitalism has a binding logic. Or as David Fleming would put it, it's the opposite of slack. So the revoluton is an unbinding. We need to create slack. Money is the great binding force. It is like a belt which entrains everything with an iron logic. It is not enough to loosen the belt, for the logic is so incessant that it will simply tighten all over again. We need to step off the treadmill completely. There's an analogy with Geoffrey West's [[Reference Notes/Books/Scale|Scale]]. We are moving towards a metabolic heart attack. #### 23 - Richness against the commodity: the world faces two ways. These are some of the powerful images used to describe capitalism: - Capital is a powerful logic of harnessing. - It is a murderous logic. - It is a cohesive tendency. - It is a train made of progress, development and realism, leading us to extinction. It categorises all misfittings as irrational. - Capital is like a multi-headed hydra. Voting a different government in isn't going to change anything. No state can stand up to this global drive for profit. The movement of money creates winds and floods and storms. > All the capitalist forms of social relations are struggles to contain the push towards other ways of doing things, other ways of living. Each step in the logical chain, each form of capitalist relations, contains (or seeks to contain) a latent force moving in the opposite direction, a latency that sometimes explodes volcanically and unpredictably, but that is always there. It is dignity, pushing against and beyond the capitalist forms: richness against the commodity, use value against value, doing against abstract labour, gift against money, mutual recognition against identitarian personification and classification. At every step, there is a misfitting, an overflowing, an in-against-and-beyond. ### Part 6 - Think Hope, Think Crisis #### 24 - A theory of hope requires an understanding of the weakness or crisis of its object, the hoped-against. > Hope is the determination to ensure that capitalism comes to an end before it leads to the extinction of humanity. > We have already mentioned the metaphor inspired by a story of Edgar Allan Poe: we are in a room in which the advancing walls threaten to push us into an abyss. We are desperately hammering on the walls with our fists, trying to find a way to break them. But the walls keep on advancing. We desperately need to make the banging with our fists connect with a structural fault in the wall itself. But not just that, we need to find a hidden fault line that will make the wall fall outwards in the direction that we want it to go. Because there may also be faults that will make the wall fall inwards, on top of us. A theory of crisis is about finding the fragility in the walls bearing down upon us. It is also about connecting that fragility to our efforts, so that the walls fall outwards. Crisis in this sense is simply the midwife for new openings. It's necessary to reframe crisis and connect it to hope, otherwise we risk crisis leading to 1930s style fascism. #### 25 - Crisis is inherent in capital. ### 29 - Capital today is increasingly fictitious. Money is ill. > Georg Simmel, whose book on The Philosophy of Money was published in 1900, begins his long discussion of the substance of money by stating that: "Through all the discussions of money there runs the question as to whether money, in order to carry out its services of measurement, exchange and representation of values, ought to be a value itself; or whether it is enough if money is simply a token and symbol without intrinsic value, like an accounting sum which stands for a value without being one." > The symbolisation of money is accompanied, necessarily, as Simmel points out, by the growth in ‘safeguarding the functional value of money through community institutions’. The ‘community institutions’ in question are usually the state. It is the state, especially through the central bank, which has the task of ‘safeguarding the functional value of money’, of ensuring that the dollar or the pound or the peso is as good as gold. The fear of the rulers becomes concentrated in the fear that the state may not be able to secure the value of money. More specifically, the owners of wealth (the capitalists) fear that the controllers of the state (politicians and functionaries) may give way to popular pressures and weaken the relation between money and value, in order to guard against unrest or simply to win the next election. For that reason, the formal autonomy of central banks from their states has been an important issue in recent years. ### 30 - We are the subject of the crisis of money. [Brzezicka 2020-06-15 - The Rabbles, the Peoples and the Crowds: a Lexical Study](zotero://select/items/1_V3JC55ZZ) - The rabble is undefined. It is the opposite of identitarian politics. It is defined only in negative terms, as something outside of the social order. > The term "queer" can be understood as a refusal to answer the basic question "Who am I?" at all, since any possible answer is always determined by existing social order. Participating and "losing onself" in the mob can be understood as going further and refusing to even ask the question, since any attempt to name a crowd or its participants is in itself transcendental. ### 31 - Putting off disaster is the central principle of political economy. The abandonment of the gold standard opens the way to mob rule. Keynes was a short-termist, not a long-termist. He was interested in protecting the prevailing power structures for as long as possible: > Whereas many in the Marxist tradition simply elide crisis and restructuring, making it into an almost hyphenated crisis-and-restructuring, it is Keynes who is aware of the difficulty of the transition. In effect he says: ‘this transition from crisis to restructuring is a difficult and dangerous process in which the thin and precarious crust of civilisation is at risk, for people will not for long accept the levels of unemployment that crisis creates. We must smooth the process by committing resources from the future. We must take them from the future because, by definition, the crisis-ridden present is not producing sufficient value. Borrowing from the future is not a problem because anyway in the long run we are all dead’. # Quotes