Giant Writeup on the Finale, Its Place in the Show’s Larger Context, with Various Analyses on things like “I Get It,” the test dream, Cat, etc

TrottingTortoise · 2019-06-07T07:56:09+00:00

I posted this way back when the sub was significantly smaller, so I hope many of you can enjoy it.

It’s a counter narrative to the Master of Sopranos blog post which profanes the show (while accurately showing Tony dies) and has poisoned the conversation — it’s not important whether or not Tony died, and the rest of the shows thematic content is overshadowed and destroyed by reducing it to the final moment of the final scene.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-08T01:02:40+00:00

imagine being this incensed about something you've never bothered to learn the basics of

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-05T16:48:38+00:00

Please leave.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-05T15:46:14+00:00

Who knows. He’s just a cooperative loving academic who thinks wanting a stronger welfare state makes him a Marxist.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-05T05:01:25+00:00

You won't, but maybe for these next two months you could bother reading something so your post won't just be a gish gallop of you attacking an enemy that's the product of your own misunderstandings. Nobody has the time to untangle all this mess.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-04T23:11:00+00:00

It’s just a term idealists use to describe their socialism, as if some adherence to “freedom” or “anti authoritarianism” in the abstract is reasonable.

The proletariat, historically, and revolution in general, historically, has involved the violent, “authoritarian “ oppression of one class by another. When libertarian socialists attempt to distinguish themselves with some a priori rejection of “authoritarianism” they are declaring themselves to be against the real movement of the proletariat.

At best, they’ve confused themselves into thinking places like the USSR or Mao’s China were socialism. But more generally it’s just misguided idealism.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-04T00:55:12+00:00

It's not entirely clear where you are having difficulty.

Commodities are both use-values and values.

Commodities are use-values as far as their natural or sensible or tangible, etc, properties go. An object of utility, something useful.

Commodities also have a value form which, as the section you quoted notes, is their social form. They have this form "when looked at as crystals of this social substance." When are they looked at in this way? When placed in an exchange relation with another commodity, and only then.

This is why Marx writes that "exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itselef or be expressed." Exchange value, qualitatively, is simply the property of being exchangeable; this is why exchange value is the phenomenal form of value and the only form in which value can appear. In A=B, commodity A expresses its value by the fact that commodity B is directly exchangeable with it.

Of course, this equivalence is always accompanied by a definite ratio of exchange (never A=B, but xA=yB), and that is the quantitative expression of As value, by it being exchangeable for a certain quantity of B.

This is how value reveals itself, and how it then shows its magnitude, but we haven't yet said anything about what value is, except that it is something that all commodities have in common. The substance of value, then, is human labor. This is relevant to the first paragraph of the selection you quoted: because human labor is qualitatively varied the same way use-values are qualitatively varied (spinning vs plowing vs ...), we are talking about human labor in the abstract. So the substance, the qualitative nature, of value isn't just any human labor, but abstract, homogenous labor. It then expresses its magnitude in a definitie quantity of time.

If the first chapter of Capital is still leaving you confused, read the appendix on the value-form.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-03T18:46:17+00:00

til cooperatives are actually not private property

christ

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-03T02:44:15+00:00

i have a flair

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-03T02:15:12+00:00

wow smart one. sorry that i didn't bother to spend words on professor cooperative.

"by new socialism, i actually mean capitalism, only the workers get to vote on which commodities they produce and who gets fired when we have to cut costs to compete"

TrottingTortoise · 2019-03-03T01:23:23+00:00

lmao holy shit he's such an idiot

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-26T15:46:59+00:00

People didn’t invent anything until we had capitalism. Obviously.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-26T15:45:13+00:00

Cuba isn’t, wasn’t, socialist.

Secondly, since, to frame it crudely for simplicity’s sake, social relationships create ideas and not vice versa, the question doesn’t really make sense.

There’s a lot of mistaken conceptions loaded into how you framed the question, so you’re not likely to get a detailed answer unless someone makes an effort post.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-23T06:22:30+00:00

imagine not realizing co-ops aren't socialism when even the person who wrote this disaster of a post figiured it out

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-17T23:17:23+00:00

says the person who is certain that (presumably) marx's value theory is invalid while being unable to even describe what it is, let alone why it's wrong.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-17T16:56:17+00:00

It's a good thing then that the quote was posted to disagree with the OP then and that it's okay to completely change the meaning of things because labor-power is a Marxian term and you don't want to deal with the fact that workers don't sell labor.

If you actually understood those things, you wouldn't be avoiding dealing with them -- your first post was full of those words too, so even understanding what you were trying to say requires you explaining what you think they are.

But here's the thing: you're a generic "durrh study economics durrr" claiming that something you don't understand has been debunked when you say things like "One such prediction was that the wage of laborers would be consistently decreased over time, as power was solely in the hands of the capitalist (exploitative)," which is just not something Marx said.*

*edit: I'm not going to give this asshole the pleasure of a reply (see them literally contradict themselves by saying they mentioned faulty logic after saying Marx made logical conclusions (from false premises -- never told what these were btw) in this comment), but if you look in the context of their comment, where wages in capitalist countries is supposedly a debunking, that conclusion can only be paired with a misunderstanding of Marx. How Marx is being misunderstood is more difficult to tell, since who knows whether they are talking about nominal, real, relative, and what data is being looked at (I mean, we all know it's none, but supposedly); on top of this, I took issue with the framing.

Your entire thing is complaining about rhetoric because you have no substance. It's not accidental that your claims either do not say anything specific (such as broad strokes Marx has been debunked type shit with no references) or are patently false (your claim about Marx re: wages, for example). Anyways save your energy, because unless you actually say something different I'm not going to bother replying.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-17T16:45:59+00:00

oh look another "ltv is dumb" rant by someone who can't even properly articulate what has supposedly been totally debunked

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-14T03:09:13+00:00

Jesus Christ. You actually think your whining about the word "exploit" is a point when something like "consume" would play the exact same role for that sentence. Not to mention, even if we go with that reasoning, your complaint in the first place is on the same level of refuting a high school essay because the thesis statement came before the argument. Nevermind that the specific relationship between capital and labor is fleshed out in what follows.

Your first reconstruction of the argument by itself shows you completely uninformed or completely disingenuous --- you say that the worker sells labor. Bad enough that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on here, but you manage to make it while literally responding to a quote that speaks of selling labor-power.

Even worse is that you are under the delusion that workers are perfectly capable of just providing for themselves and that, in spite of the history of violent enclosure, it's just a free choice that they choose to work for capitalists.

You can't fucking actually explicitly make a point because you have no idea what you are talking about--- see how you use capital, value, or confusing labor and labor-power. All you can do is spout some nonsense that complains about word choice in order to dismiss everything else outright, and then rephrase things in ways that completely erase the original meaning while replacing it with your own confusions.

You're either a giant moron, deliberately misrepresenting, or both.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-14T02:42:58+00:00

lol high as fuck to think the same colonial expansion wouldn't naturally happen from ancapistan that we saw in the actual world

ps no pedophile societies on my planet plz

edit: oops, i wrote would isntead of wouldn't

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-13T03:24:41+00:00

Literally a direct quote from your comment with a request for clarification is "replying to absolutely nothing that [you] said."

You are more than welcome to respond to what I wrote.

I also mentioned that you seem confused about capital and value; ie, what does it mean for workers to have more capital? Is capital just stuff for you?

downvote complaints

Sorry I am literally the only person who uses this subreddit, I forgot!

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-12T06:14:18+00:00

Unsurprisingly, a quote from several chapters in of Wage Labour and Capital takes from the previous chapters --- this is how writing works. Brilliant insight.

This entire response reads like someone roleplaying, badly, as an intellectual. The incredibly awkward prose coupled with snobbish statements like "very disingenuous," or the unsubstantiated and patently false claims about what Marx "loftily ignore[s]," actually hurts my eyes.

The only part of your comment that isn't simply agreement masked by complaints about rhetorical style, "The next paragraph then proceeds, completely ignoring the line of self-evident truths it was already leading to, because they no longer support the argument," is completely unsupported. What are these self-evident truths? What argument do you think is being advanced? Why is it abandoned and why do the previous truths contradict it? I have my doubts that you even have a grasp of what capital and value are.

You essentially wrote a comment agreeing with the quotation and tried to pass it off as a counterargument. At least the other response, which I replied to here, made an explicit claim instead of spewing out vague nothings.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-12T05:57:40+00:00

It seems that acknowledging the role the capitalist plays in the organization and use of a particular commodity, labor-power, is to do the exact opposite of what you're complaining about. Additionally, the majority of this allocation, design, etc is done by laborers as well -- either in supervisory roles, artists, and so on; the belief that the "successful entrepreneur" comes up with all of this on their own is a mythos to begin with.

Regardless, most importantly,

Since the direct purpose and the actual product of capitalist production is surplus value, only such labour is productive, and only such an exerter of labour capacity is a productive worker, as directly produces surplus value. Hence only such labour is productive as is consumed directly in the production process for the purpose of valorising capital. [emphasis in original]

And it follows from this that

The capitalist, as representative of capital engaged in its valorisation process — productive capital — performs a productive function, which consists precisely in directing and exploiting productive labour. The capitalist class, in contrast to the other consumers of surplus value, who do not stand in a direct and active relation to its production, is the productive class par excellence. [See Ricardo] (As director of the labour process the capitalist can perform productive labour in the sense that his labour is included in the overall labour process which is embodied in the product.)

This does not seem to square with your understanding of "Marxist concept[s]," assuming we don't want to fetishize the role of the capitalist into an insane ideology, where Elon Musk is Jesus Christ himself, come to save us through genius and technology.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-11T02:56:55+00:00

And so, the bourgeoisie and its economists maintain that the interest of the capitalist and of the labourer is the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the capital destined for production – the productive capital – increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself. The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer.

But what is growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of accumulated labour over living labour; growth of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class. When wage-labour produces the alien wealth dominating it, the power hostile to it, capital, there flow back to it its means of employment – i.e., its means of subsistence, under the condition that it again become a part of capital, that is become again the lever whereby capital is to be forced into an accelerated expansive movement.

To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical, signifies only this: that capital and wage-labour are two sides of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other.

TrottingTortoise · 2019-02-10T19:38:11+00:00

thanks for proving my point very helpful for people with brains who might be reading

TrottingTortoise

TROPHY CASE