DJP
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“Even the Guardian is surprised by pro-war anarchists protecting Ukraine”
Perhaps those anarchists should have read that Makhno book instead of photographing the cover of it.
“The history of recent years will afford considerable weight to their argument, for the Ukraine has seen a parade of all manner of authorities and, when all is said and done, these have been as indistinguishable one from another as peas in a pod. We must demonstrate that a “blow-in” State power and an “independent” State power amount to just about equal in value and that the toilers have nothing to gain from either: they should focus all their attention elsewhere: on destroying the nests of the State apparatus and replacing these with worker and peasant bodies for social and economic self-direction.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/makhno-nestor/works/1928/12/national-question.htm
“Would like to know your logic for your refusal to consider ‘works of art’ to be commodities.”
1. A commodity is a useful thing produced for the purpose of exchange.
2. The value (but not the actual price that it sells for) of a commodity is determined by the amount of average socially necessary labour time necessary to reproduce it.
3. “Price” is the amount of money that something exchanges for on the market.
Works of art are not produced for the purpose of exchange. (You could argue against this definition. But here I am making a distinction between art and crafts)
A work of art (for example the original painting of Picasso’s “Guernica”) cannot have value because it is not a reproducable thing. As there can only ever be one original work it couldn’t have a value determined by average socially necessary labour time either. To have an average you need at least two things.
Despite the two points above, “Guernica” could be sold – current estimates place it’s price in the region $200 million. But this price is determined solely by what the market can bear. It has nothing to do with “value” in the sense of SNLT.
If we are talking about prints of “Guernica” we can talk about these being commodities, as they are reproducable, are produced for exchange and therefore have value.
“Producers (wage workers) in a factory do not produce useful things ‘for the purpose of exchange[ing]’ them really. Still, the useful things they produce are all commodities.”
Of course, the workers in a factory are not the people selling the goods. But the whole fact of them being there depends on the aim of the product being sold so as to be transformed into money.
“Evidently, if, to be a commodity, ‘a useful thing’ has to be dependent on its producer’s intention to exchange it for something else, it’d be impossible to find a commodity in mountainous heaps of industrial products under capitalism, I’m afraid to say.”
So you think all useful things are commodities? That’s definitely not what’s written in the first couple of chapters of Capital.
Prakash wrote: “I make a distinction between value and market-value. No value means no market-value, hence no market-price.”
Aren’t you actually saying here that “value” and price (is this what you mean by market-value?) are the same thing, not different? How do you see what you call “value”, “market-value” and “price” as being different?
Are you trying to understand Marx’s theory in Capital or are you trying to put forward a theory of your own?
Either way, you seem to be tripping yourself up by conflating “valuable” with “value”. “Value” in Marx’s sense relates to the amount of social necessary average labour time that it takes to produce a commodity. In Marx’s theory a commodity is not *just* a product of human labour. It’s a useful thing, produced by labour, that is produced for the purpose of exchange. Not everything that can be sold is a commodity – think about works of art, uncultivated land, honour etc – these things have a price but they do not have ‘value’ (in Marx’s sense) since they are not commodities.
ALB wrote; “Their political consciousness has not evolved beyond the view of those who vote for parties to form a government to do something for them.”
I think this highlights the contradictory nature of much “direct action” activism neatly. They make a fetish out of not pursuing parliamentary political action, yet their tactics are only concerned with influencing parliament. Reformism by the extra-parliamentary route.
“A reviewer had given it five stars and rated it excellent.”
You think all reviews are written by actual genuine people? That’s kind of cute. Fake, computer-generated reviews are a problem on these platforms.
Why would it be “more cost effective” to pay for a leaflet drop when there isn’t an election than when there is an election?
Because people wouldn’t be saturated with materials from political parties then, so the pamphlet (might) have more impact.
Obviously, my comments about standing in elections are just that, my tuppence worth. I was forgetting the difference in cost in local and national elections. But still wonder if continually standing in elections, and only getting a handful of votes, has a negative publicity effect.
If you stood as Mr Blobby you probably would have got more votes.
I wonder why you guys still think it’s worth contesting elections in the current climate? Surely there are better, and more cost effective ways of getting publicity? Like paying for a leaflet drop when there isn’t an election for example.
It’s the fact that we know of nothing valuable that happens to have no labour embedded in it that appears an incontestable argument for the law of value discovered by Marx.
This was not Marx’s argument. You seem to be confused about what Marx means by “value”. Plenty of things that we could not live without, and which are therefore highly valuable, are definitely not a product of human labour, air and sunlight for example.
Marx doesn’t argue that the “value” of an individual commodity = it’s “price” (not even in the long run), in fact it’s important for his theory that they do not. For Marx the “value” and “price” of a commodity are not the same thing. We cannot see the “value” of a commodity directly, only indirectly through it’s price. But other things influence price other than value and things that are not commodities can have prices too.
I think you mean “Sotsialisticheskiy Vestnik” (Socialist Courier)? As far as I know, it was a Russian language publication with no links to the WSPUS. But I could be wrong…
Endnotes has started publishing weekly correspondence on the Ukrainian situation from someone sympathetic to socialism. They have also published an interesting Manifesto against the war.
pgb: “The unity of nations is defined by what they have in common as against other groups, and not by their internal homogeneity.”
This seems like a contradiction to me. If what makes national unity is a perception of a shared characteristic / characteristics then the most unified nation would be one where the most people share that characteristic i.e one that has a high amount of internal homogeneity.
“you may have missed the fact that many workers identify with a nation state as citizens, not as mere subjects”
Not at all. It is because of the fact that most workers identify with the nation state that we are having this conversation, not in spite of it.
“Class identity etc. did not prevent English, French or German workers from seeing Britain, France and Germany as in some sense “their country” in World Wars I and II. Tragic it surely was, but it’s an historical fact.”
Well yes, but I’m not sure how this goes against the argument that nationalism is not a concept that socialists should be using or promoting.
“But it is an ideal yet to be realized, and therefore has limited relevance to what’s going on now in Ukraine where what you call “illusory ideas” of nationalism are very much real in the minds of those who hold them and thus help explain why Ukrainian workers, including many ethnic Russians, fight in the name of “their country” against a primordial nationalist like Putin.”
Yes, nationalism does explain why some Ukrainians and Russains are putting their life on the line. Illusionary ideas (religion / nationalism / race etc) do play a real role in the world, I don’t know how anyone could deny that.
Actually I think it’s a bit cheap to play the moral high ground or to try to offer advice to people in Ukraine right now. No-one there is going to see our words anyhow. The question is how do we, as a small minority with little influence, respond to what is going on there. I think playing the flag waving game is counter-productive to our aims. I also think that saying that not “taking sides”, or criticising the Ukrainian state, strengthens the Putin regime (as Kliman and friends did in that article) is a touch melodramatic and also overestimates the influence we have in the world.
“Thanks for the reference to gegen-kapital. It’s very long and I haven’t had time to read it yet.”
It is a little long. If you’re short on time just jump to the section on self-determination.
Why on earth would anyone read, let alone quote the Daily Mail?
Because it confirms and validates their already existing beliefs / prejudices / hopes. There’s no other reason anyone else would look at it, except for a laugh.
As we are talking about national self-determination perhaps it would be good to remind people of this article. PGB it would be good to know what you think about it, and how relevant it is to the Ukraine conflict.
https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/en/since-you-mentioned-us/
