Thought Taboos and the End of Millennial Marxism
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- Опубликовано: 20 сен 2024
- Former president of the Platypus Affiliated Society discusses his recent publications in Compact and Sublation Magazine. On July 1st Compact published "The End of Millennial Marxism" and we at Sublation published "Dogmatization and Thought Taboos on the “Left.” Cutrone attempts to discuss both of these essays while Doug persists in demanding Cutrone explain Marxism in terms of commodity production, exploitation, and value.
The End of Millennial Marxism by Chris Cutrone
compactmag.com...
Dogmatization and Thought Taboos on the “Left” by Chris Cutrone
www.sublationm...
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You know it’s going to be a good show when Chris is on, so much can be learned from him.
All of my ambivalence towards Cutrone has rapidly vanished as I’ve kept listening to him while reading Marxian economic theory myself. Nothing but respect and admiration now ✌️
His article in Compact is quite good too, read it next time you're in a hot tub
@@emilianosintarias7337 ah but I have already of course. I was glad to have some context for its conception, after this discussion.
Best guest hands down
The good stuff is from 18:44 on
Class first leftism x Marxism (unions as part of the establishment);
Bourgeois society x capitalism (class as effect not cause);
Commercial society x industrial society (the contradiction of value, money as 'it's own thing');
Inflation x crisis of value (Marxism is not economics);
'Traditional Marxism' (bourgeois social relations = private property, industrial forces of production = technology) x self-contradiction of bourgeois social relations as self-contradiction of labor;
Exploitation as surplus value extraction x exploitation as crisis of surplus value; 51:50
Exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class à l'ancienne x self-exploitation of the working class;
Commodity production as 'real value producing industrial labor' x everything that reproduces the commodity labor power (biopower and all that jazz, social mediation)
Chris Cutrone - the last (interesting) marxist
With every appearance on your show Cutrone clears away decades of bullshit that passes as common sense on the left. Dude doesn't miss.
Every statement by Chairman Cutrone is the Truth; one sentence of his is worth more than 10,000 sentences of ours.
@@joeynickles7962 the true dialectic of the Left lies in the contradiction between our desperate material need for Cutrone’s ideological pedagogy, and our inability to materialize praxis (thanks to our great subjective suckiness). Thus he must continue to teach us and to write articles admonishing us until we, simply put, do better.
@@jordandubin Yeah, the task of the left is to make ourselves worthy of genuflecting before Cutrone in person.
Very existential and thought provoking from Chris. I do really agree with Doug especially on competition value because we can see clear levels of that in American education system being bought and sponsored by amazon, other large corps to create a certain type of laborer. Where do we stop that leaking from capitalism into building people as a society.
Anyways this was really good thanks a lot!
- Commodity production is the Devil!
- But is it though?
- (nervously going through notes) well I'm pretty sure that's what it says here...
(Great video. Really made me think about how I myself was lead by misreadings of Adorno and Lukacs, as well as by Debord and radical French theory more broadly, into thinking that commodity production is the Devil)
Cutrone is 100% right about the trans issue
timestamp?
I was gaming while watching this but I had to stop in the middle of the match to say that Doug's 1to1 between rent and IP creation and dissemination a la tech giants and most other hard and soft consumption industries blew my mind.
I haven't heard such an important discussion had with such shit quality audio since 2003. Stayed anyway. Thanks, guys.
The 52:00 mark is a statement very in line with the Austrian school people. They want investment drawn from savings, no central bank fractional financing
0:40
‘What actually counts as commodity production; what produces value … there is some confusion..
(Correction *) You know what count’s … Everything that *reproduces labor power. That’s what counts. That’s the thing that only matters, and not because it produces things, but because it mediates society. ‘
Only, clearly this isn't true. Cutrone gets it wrong here. If he was right then the concept of value would be identical to use value, and it is not.
For example, renting a building for factory work is necessary for the production of value, but not only does that rent not produce value it has to be overcome by labor time for surplus value to be produced.
Don't be confused by these sorts of half true conflations and keep track of what level is being described.
He said " reproduces labor power", not "produces", I think there is a difference. Cutrone doesn't mean everything necessary to generate more labor power, but everything necessary to maintain labor power. I'm still not clear what he's getting at though.
It’s all that actually matters, since its what modern civilization is centered upon. Trying to make labor into a mystical metaphysics that reveals the hidden truth of prices, ignores the blatant and obvious fact that we live to work and work to live. The struggle of the working class is supposed to make palpable in public consciousness this fundamental problem, and conjuring fabulous abstractions to neatly resolve them as thought problems, not only degrades the possibility for practice, it degrades the theory necessary for practice.
@@sublationmedia Value is both use-value and exchange-value. There is a self-contradiction of value, specifically in capital i.e surplus-value. That is not simply a contradiction of use and exchange - there is no necessary contradiction (dialectically, pointing beyond itself) between use-value and exchange-value. This is why it is not a problem of bourgeois social relations per se but of industrial forces of production vs. bourgeois social relations. Too much Kliman and not enough Postone - not enough Marx (though to be fair Marx is often difficult to discern as clearly as we want).
@@Brewmaster757 I'll give you my best try, even though I'm still working it out. I guess the first thing to point out is, not everything necessary for production is necessarily productive. Some distribution is necessary for production, but it isn't necessarily productive in itself. If I understand what Cutrone said, to him distribution (for example) is productive to the extent it enables production. The precise point he made was about medicine (beyond pharmacy) and how it's productive to the extent it reproduces labor power (enabling the production process labor is engaged in). But what do I know?
Pretty tiresome when people trot out the same lines about Nina Power (she's a conservative, she's a xyzphobic), then essentially agreeing with her opinions when they actually explore her arguments and views.
You can spot someone who's cowardly or intellectually dishonest when they preface someone's ideas (who they agree with) with 'I don't like her... but'.
“Labour” theory of value was a misleading name to give it, imho. I like Compliance Theory of Value better. Surplus Value = a Surplus of Compliance.
what is bro yappin about
Chris' "freedom of sexualiity" "gay is a personal choice" takes seem weirdly reactionary and self-loathing. Did he really hype conversion therapy? I believe he did
I don't think he "hyped conversion therapy." What did he say that led you to say that?
I think his point is that it sould not matter wether it is a choice or not, even if it is a choice one should have the right to engage in it.
Confusing
eh. isnt this just another kind of moral bashing and virtue signaling
I'm sorry, I do endorse born that way. I don't think being gay is just thinking the wrong thoughts.
"Born that way" is a political tactic, intended to combat the idea that sexuality is political, and therefore one's sexuality can be legislated and controlled. There is no reason to believe that it's empirically accurate - that's not the intent behind its creation.
People who care about clarifying empirical reality oppose this defensive political posturing. Those who support the posturing say that it's necessary to ward off opposing forces, and the debate between the two sides is rarely undertaken honestly.
To view this more clearly, consider an intruder entering your home. You, "normally a non-violent person" let's say for the sake of argument, pick up a weapon given that you may feel a need to use it. Likewise, we might prefer to "clarify empirical reality" but conditions might dictate that we choose a useful political tactic to believe rather than exploring reality. Much like the besieged, the clever political tactician arranges his understanding of reality to align with his ideology. Empirical reality is disregarded except as it politically intervenes.
@@briankoontz1 I mean there is reason to believe that because interventions on animal models can produce higher levels of homosexual activity in the animal models. So you're wrong there. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5777082/
Secondly, your discourse of fluid sexuality and freedoms reduces the homosexuality of individuals who are unable to change into a kind of completely untenable bourgeoise luxury. I welcome you and others to take a more materialist perspective, not one premised on pure idealist dialectics.
@@briankoontz1 "conceived that way" should be the new political polemic
@@kushluk777 The idea that human behavior is just an expression of abstract genetic code is actually Platonic idealism, and not materialism. An example of an actually materialist view of sexuality can be found in a thinker such as Freudian. Materialist theories take into account contingent experiences, personal history, traumatic events, etc.
For Freud, humans have a sex drive, not a sex instinct (which is what genetically determined sexuality implies). The difference is that instincts govern behaviors directly but drives are plastic, they involve movement towards a goal that appears to satisfy one's drive, but there is a huge range of choice as to which object to pursue.
So, just as one can consume many different types of food in order to satisfy the drive to eat, there are an huge number of potential objects that one could try in order to satisfy one's sex drive. In fact, believe it or not, some people without sexual partners even choose to have sex with themselves!!! Masturbation is proof of sexual fluidity.
@@kushluk777 Also, to keep things materialist in biological terms, you are overlooking that humans have extremely high neuroplasticity compared to other animals, and this neuroplasticity is directly relevant to sexuality because of the way pleasure is mediated by the nucleus accumbens in the brain and chemicals like dopamine but also adrenaline, serotonin, oxytocin, etc...
There is a level of complexity and feedback loops between this biological structure and perception, response to stimulus, interpretation of social cues, etc... Genetic determinism doesn't take ANY of this into account.
Cutrone doesn't use the world in his thoughts. He only uses ideas of the world. He's hung up on the names of things instead of the things as we experience them. There's lots of promise in his thinking, but it's wasted on coffee table-ism.
My comment above is stupid. Please accept my apologies. Chris Cutrone is awesome and so is Douglas for appreciating him!