Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Things are not looking good in Brazil.
do brazilian elections have the same bias as US elections, where votes for “right” candidates are generally counted and reported before votes for “left” candidates?
According to some rumors that I have read in a Telegram channel, it seems so.
This is the latest count
with this trend, is it likely that brazil will go to runoff elections?
If Flavio’s count doesn’t go beyond 50%, then it seems highly likely that a runoff election will happen.
am i right in thinking that flavio is likely to win the runoff? it seems as though the majority of the third-party votes are for far-right candidates
It is difficult for me to make an educated guess because I don’t have as much insight as a Brazilian comrade.
Hopefully, someone with better insight might come along and give you their perspective.
my mistake. i thought i remembered you saying somewhere that you were brazilian, but i must have been thinking of someone else.
😕
I have mixed feelings about romance. Sometimes I’ll sort of forget about it like it doesn’t even matter. Sometimes I’ll really yearn for it hard like it’s a huge deal. But I don’t know how much of the 2nd one is cultural influence of putting romance on this huge pedestal as like the best thing since gluten-free sliced bread. Like a good partnership would probably help me a lot, but it’s also not going to solve my problems on its own and a bad one could make them worse. I think the more important thing, probably, is to unfuck my brain with regards to attachment more generally. I tend to have that thing going on, I forget the exact term, where you seek attention and then want to run when you actually get it. Fearful… anxious… something or other. I could just look it up. Anyway, I have come a long way in emotional stability and self esteem I think, but it could still be a lot better and unfucking attachment is probably a significant part of that so that attachment is a source of security and stability instead of a combination of desiring it and fearing it. My gut tells me I’d actually have a pretty easy time having long-term relationships, platonic or otherwise, if I didn’t have the fear/avoid thing in the mix, along with general insecurity about my capability to maintain relationships over time and distance due to my distractability and sudden dropoffs of interest; but then, judging relationship maintaining with distance as a factor is pretty unfair, as most human beings throughout history did not have the internet and such, they could just know the people who were right there and not have to think about it beyond that. My gut also tells me I need to eat healthier and that holding onto anxiety is bad for its digestion. It’s not even speaking in english. I don’t know what language the gut uses. Communicates through “this feels good” and “that feels bad” I guess.
I have mixed feelings about romance. Sometimes I’ll sort of forget about it like it doesn’t even matter. Sometimes I’ll really yearn for it hard like it’s a huge deal.
I believe this is the orientation called “Aro-spike.”
It’s genuinely crazy that Chiang Kai-shek/Jiang Jeshi was about 5 minutes from getting deposed only to be saved by the Japanese invading Manchuria.
Context:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident
Not saying Wang Jingwei would’ve been…good or better [its wang Jingwei]. But it certainly would have been interesting.
Plus its massively ironic and funny Chiang was saved because he had to “fight” the Japanese.
I got metal shrapnel in my eye today and it had to be drilled out by a doctor. Sounds horrific but at my job it was a badge of honor so in a dumb ass way I was looking forward to it too. I swear these people are just build different.
Still no luck in joining a political org. I feel like it would be a bit of a waste to join a Trot or Ortho leaning org that operates as a niche. On the other hand it might be the most serious option. Maybe I should just start with the union.
I also shoot my shot with someone way out of my league and it somehow worked and now I have to think about when I will drop that I also have dozens of Star Wars extended universe books.
I am sorry to hear about the shrapnel!
It would be worth joining a political org anyway, maybe you connect with someone who can introduce you to someone else…
I can’t wait to get into more of those Star Wars books, man. I really enjoyed the prequel novelizations so far.
holy shit, wear some eye protection lol. good luck on the date.
The stupid thing was that I was wearing eye protection but it somehow got into a tiny gap between the glass and my head
No such thing as “out of your league” people are just people. Some people have confidence and some have starwars books. Maybe your new friend likes both?
some, they say, even have both…
Shot shooters get to carry a dozen or so corpses. Don’t sweat it.
Seeing people torture brains of flies on youtube is gonna turn me into a vegan pretty quick.
I am kind of curious, I used to be conservative and then right-wing libertarian. I was never a liberal. I wonder if liberal propaganda is less extreme. I had some traces of the alt-right pipeline which I had to do away with although I don’t know if there is a similar trap for liberals.
I see liberal ideology nearly everywhere. In education especially. It may seem less extreme, but it is omnipresent.
I would disagree that it is less extreme because the erasure of violence is the framework it hangs upon
That’s why it only seems less extreme.
Could someone help understand use-values?
Is use-value something a commodity has, or something a commodity is? (or is this question incorrect?)
Relevant quotes from The Capital:
In the following quote, he defines an use-value as being inseparate from the thing:
The utility of a thing makes it a use value.[4] But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity.
Here Marx kind of talks about use value as separate:
To resume, then: In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim.
I suspect this confusion may be just an artifact of the specific words chosen for the English translation.
As far as i can tell in the German original text Marx uses the terms “use value” and “use item” somewhat interchangeably, at least in this section. But clearly, if you read further the entire section, which is about the distinction between the use and exchange value of an item, you see that what he means is that use value is a property of an item.
Feel free to run the original German text through a few different translators to get a feel of what some alternative wordings might be:
Your first quoted passage
Die Nützlichkeit eines Dings macht es zum Gebrauchswert. Aber diese Nützlichkeit schwebt nicht in der Luft. Durch die Eigenschaften des Warenkörpers bedingt, existiert sie nicht ohne denselben. Der Warenkörper selbst, wie Eisen, Weizen, Diamant usw-, ist daher ein Gebrauchswert oder Gut. Dieser sein Charakter hängt nicht davon ab, ob die Aneignung seiner Gebrauchseigenschaften dem Menschen viel oder wenig Arbeit kostet. Bei Betrachtung der Gebrauchswerte wird stets ihre quantitative Bestimmtheit vorausgesetzt, wie Dutzend Uhren, Elle Leinwand, Tonne Eisen usw. Die Gebrauchswerte der Waren liefern das Material einer eignen Disziplin, der Warenkunde. Der Gebrauchswert verwirklicht sich nur im Gebrauch oder der Konsumtion. Gebrauchswertebilden den stofflichen Inhalt des Reichtums, welches immer seine gesellschaftliche Form sei. In der von uns zu betrachtenden Gesellschaftsform bilden sie zugleich die stofflichen Träger des Tauschwerts.
Second quoted passage
Man hat also gesehn: in dem Gebrauchswert jeder Ware steckt eine bestimmte zweckmäßig produktive Tätigkeit oder nützliche Arbeit. Gebrauchswerte können sich nicht als Waren gegenübertreten, wenn nicht qualitativ verschiedne nützliche Arbeiten in ihnen stecken. In einer Gesellschaft, deren Produkte allgemein die Form der Ware annehmen, d.h. in einer Gesellschaft von Warenproduzenten, entwickelt sich dieser qualitative Unterschied der nützlichen Arbeiten, welche unabhängig voneinander als Privatgeschäfte selbständiger Produzenten betriebenwerden, zu einem vielgliedrigen System, zu einer gesellschaftlichen Teilung der Arbeit.
(I copied a little more than your short quoted passages so you can see the full context.)
I think the following part illustrates this interchangeable use of the terms “use value” (in German “Gebrauchswert”) and “use item” (“Gebrauchsgut”):
Ein Gebrauchswert oder [Gebrauchs-]Gut hat also nur einen Wert, weil abstraktmenschliche Arbeit in ihm vergegenständlicht oder materialisiert ist
(My addition in the square brackets is just to clarify that Marx here, i.m.o., is using a typical German syntax where a compound word can be abbreviated when its first part was already used in the previous compound word.)
Translated:
A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it.
I think this is some unfortunately imprecise use of language, but that is how Marx wrote it.
Thanks for the detailed answer
Use value is something that a commodity has because of how people use it. Rare earth minerals were essentially without any use value for most of history but now they have significant use value.
The value is imparted by its use but it can only be used that way because of its properties.
A commodity has use value in so far as it can be used by a human being to do something. Without humans it is just a chunk of matter. But the ways in which a human can use it is particular to it’s matter.
These commodities are all made by human labor. The act of producing a commodity which is useful means that the labor is useful because it produces a useful commodity.
I think it’s pretty interesting how much Marx probes each object with different lenses in his work. Like you said, a thing can be a natural-form (chunk of matter) or value-form (how humans see it), labor is abstract or concrete etc.
I have read about dialectics before but seeing how Marx does it and how his German is translated, it confused me quite a bit, hence the question. Still, commodity is a pretty cool thing to study.
Also, I liked your last sentence. Pretty great summary.
Yes, a key part of reading Marx is understanding which set of abstractions he is using at a given moment. He operates on different levels of abstaction at different points and writes as if he is just testing them out to see if they work, so you need to think about which one applies at a given time.
I used to be pro-death penalty but I’ve come around on it. The state shouldn’t have the ability to kill you, especially if they can’t guarantee that you’re superhuman and can survive a lethal injection. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ahead-rare-execution-lone-woman-tennessee-death-row-says-peace-rcna600279
It’d just be mindless cruelty to do anything more.
Lethal injection is creepy cause it tries to sanitize execution as something less grisly than what it is, so that people can sit back and pretend like it’s “clean” and “painless”, and wash their hands of it, when it’s neither clean, nor painless, nor even guaranteed to work.
I do think there are contexts where execution has its place, like in revolutionary war for gaining and then maintaining power where you’re up against people who will literally kill you if you don’t, who have committed immense war crimes and are a danger to have around, but pretending like it’s not a brutal struggle and thinking you can wield it as some kind of sanitized tool of justice is twisted. And even then, it’s not automatically necessary, like in the story of the CPC reeducating the “last emperor of China” after they had power.
But US “justice” is a joke and it has, last I remember checking, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Racist, sexist, settler trash system cosplaying as “democracy”.
Tired of people saying how your body will get significantly worse over time. I’m already in immense pain walking, you telling me this shit gets worse?
FWIW, your body can get better over time too! Aging can certainly make things more injury prone and such, but you can also be in good health and good shape even at an older age. Some things are affected by genetics, some of it’s environment, some diet, exercise, mental health, etc. It’s not a thing where you inevitably slide downhill and everything just gets worse over time. Far more complicated than that. If it were a simple downhill trajectory, then everybody who dies of natural causes would be dying at the same age.
i’ve had back pain since i was 16 🥲
The psychology of wealth is weird. I’ve never had money in RL in that way, but I’ve had experiences in an online game before where, due to RNG / rare item drop, I came into “wealth” in the game temporarily. Notably, not the capitalist kind of wealth where it is tied up in investments and so on; more akin to winning the lottery. The reason I call it weird is, like, when that kind of thing happens, I start doing this thing that goes something like: I don’t want to spend too much of it because then I will be low on in-game funds again.
But it’s not like the game requires you to have a lot of money on hand. It’s not like in RL where it’s important to save because if you don’t, you could end up without money for essential things. The worst that happens in a game like this is you gotta do some events/activities to gradually get funds back. Yet still, it’s like some part of my mind gets tangled up in this fear of losing the spending power itself? The perceived flexibility that comes with having those funds available that theoretically could be spent if something I really want comes up. But being ruled by this fear actually means I spend less often and therefore get things I want in the game less often because I am afraid to lose it.
As it is just a game, the “just have fun with it, it’s a game” mindset usually wins out eventually. But it feels like such a weird hangup to have at all and it feels like a little window into something a little bit like the way rich people think under capitalism, especially if they weren’t born into wealth; they know the feeling of artificial scarcity and so become all the more afraid of going back to it when they are free of it, and this motivates them to do whatever it takes to never have to go back, no matter how capitalist it is. This is somewhat guesswork/extrapolation as I haven’t exactly interviewed rich people on this, but I find it fascinating when a simulation can spark, perhaps, a kernel of insight into something real.
What game was it? Lots of online games have a black market where game currency/items can be traded for actual currency, which makes me wonder if there’s value in doing a Marxist analysis of game economies (Runescape, Counter-Strike, etc). If a means of transfer exists between in-game and actual currencies it appears somewhat analogous to crypto. Although with crypto there’s not much direct labor-power involved compared to a game like Runescape where you have to manually do in-game actions in order to generate wealth.
Guild Wars 2, so no way to actually turn it into real currency that I’m aware of (unless you sell your account or something); I mean, you can convert “gold” (game currency) to “gems” (game store currency) but gems can’t purchase anything other than GW2 items, which are all virtual and contained within the game and your account.
But that is an interesting thought. I’d be curious to read such an analysis.
Also, it occurs to me, one area of potential interest about GW2 in terms of economic analysis is the internal design of the economy. Though I’m not real familiar with the specifics, there are players in the game who play the trading post like a game of its own, amassing in-game wealth with things like flipping, or (anecdotally I’ve heard) with organized attempts to control the market for specific items in order to make more off of them. Ultimately, GW2 devs can step in and wreck this pretty easy by adjusting how easy it is to obtain items, but a particular one I recall this happening with is the “black lion weapons”, which are uncommon or rare drops from GW2’s lootboxes. GW2 devs solution to this (as I understand it) was to have these items come back every so often on a rotation, so that supply would not become too rare. But nevertheless, you can see how certain items like this end up with fairly consistent, high cost to buy from other players on the trading post, suggesting people are actively manipulating it. As opposed to more random range of listings and availability if they weren’t.
One player on reddit even actively admitted to doing market manipulation with the essence that drops from this item: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Chest though I don’t know if they are still playing now
And there is potential analysis to be done in how people like this are probably being allowed to exist in a game economy because, in some cases, they actually make it more stable, even though their greed is not good for players; the company itself can benefit from it if it becomes harder to get certain rare items as a result while having consistent supply listed, such that players will be tempted to spend real money on gems, convert it to gold, and then buy the item off the trading post.
I hadn’t considered the relationship between high item prices, item availability and its benefit to the company, but that’s very interesting. Something similar happens in OSRS. There’s a huge price difference between mid-game, late-game and end-game gear, to the point where the average player (most of the playerbase are adults these days) really doesn’t have the time to sink into the exorbitantly long grinds to acquire either the items directly or the in-game currency needed to buy them. Buying in-game currency ends up being a no brainer for them because it’s the path of least resistance. Spend 6 months trying to get one item, or get it immediately and move on to the more interesting content.
In the case of OSRS I think the majority of actual prices aren’t so much due to market manipulation or flipping, although both do occur. There’s been some big scandals in the past involving clans and market manipulation so it’s a bannable offense. Rather, there’s a lot of item sinks that have been implemented to prevent supply getting to the point where it starts crashing the price. Regardless though the company still has the same interest, being keeping in-demand item prices reasonably high to sell in-game currency.
While I was coming home today, I was stopped by a couple who asked me to buy something to eat for them, since they were homeless and hungry. We went to a minimarket and they brought some bread, cookies, tuna, etc. to the cashier. I used all the money I had to buy them that stuff. It wasn’t that much, yet it costed a lot- I had to use all the money I had with me, 22 euros! (Initially I couldn’t even afford it, so they had to place a few things back) Were things always this pricey?
Hopefully it helped them a bit.
Have a great week everyone! Taking good notes for your studies is a fantastic way to both internalize what you read, and to create quick reference points for review.
As always, communism will win.
Writing rewires the brain too.
🫵 You WILL have hope, comrade.
OUR hope.
A single spark can lit a huge fire.
