“What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production” (Marx, 129). 

Reading Capital Volume 1 again got me thinking about what constitutes socially necessary labor, what used to be socially necessary and what is no longer. As most are aware, Marx starts with an analysis of the commodity, and his analysis relies on the assumed existence of socially necessary labor. His definition of the commodity also seems to rely on its existence as a physical object (e.g. linen, gold, wheat, clothes, Bible).  

So if we take something like performing music, can we think of it as socially necessary labor? Does it produce a physical commodity? It does now in the form of CDs and Records, though now much of music exists intangibly in “The Cloud.” Famous musicians, or celebrities, are arguably people who have been transformed into commodities, but on a local level, maybe this is just fantasy or nostalgia, I think at some point performing music was deemed as socially necessary, but is no longer, in the sense that a town had a bar where people would go to drink, and they required entertainment, some live event that would be 1) witnessed and 2) danced to, even if eventually 3) talked over. The lack of technology required the musician to fulfill all three functions, and so they were deemed an essential fixture of the public gathering space. But did the musician produce a commodity? If the performance itself doesn’t count, then nothing comes to mind, so perhaps Marx would say that music did not constitute socially necessary labor because it produced no physical commodity, even though it would have been deemed socially necessary by a room full of drunk people.

“Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value. The expression of price is in this case imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may also conceal a real value-relation or one derived from it, as for instance the price of uncultivated land, which is without value because no human labour is objectified in it” (197).

The phrasing in the above passage suggests that the commodity’s “form” (its husk, its appearance?) does not require socially necessary labor.

Perhaps today we have a contradiction when it comes to music. When the performance of music was socially necessary, no commodity was produced, but now that live music is no longer socially necessary, many commodities are produced. At the same time, any distinction between corporeal vs. ethereal commodities has been rendered totally useless. Burning a bunch of MP3s onto a CD does not make the songs any more or less commodified. There is no longer any difference between commodities and their ghosts.

In any case, music is now totally ubiquitous. We are probably worse off for the amount of music we are subjected to. Go to the mall and hear soft jazz or elevator music or Top 100. Go to a “Mexican” restaurant in the southeastern U.S. and hear “alternative” hits from the 90s. Simulate a trip to your local Starbucks® by pouring yourself a cup of coffee and loading up the Spotify playlist “Relaxing Indie Acoustic.” Hear an uncanny valley version of your favorite “classic” reappropriated to sell shampoo. The best part is you are not expected to actually listen to any of it! The dominant expectation that live music fulfill the same function and remain harmlessly in the background of whatever else is going on, coincidentally, renders it socially irrelevant. Vaporwave and PC Music are arguably just responses to the grating, omniscient presence that characterizes the current condition of music in the modern surveillance state. They are both subgenres that amp up music’s ever-present-ness and its function as advertising.

There’s something inadequate in a music criticism that takes rigid structural analysis as its bedrock. For one, most writers and readers (incl. yours truly) simply don’t have the vocabulary for it. But there’s also something grating about the bald cultural production found in many Pitchfork reviews, a kind of name-dropping, scene-carving new historicism.

I agree with Jessica Hopper who said that good music criticism takes everything into context: album art, cultural moment, intended audience, public persona, etc. But it also seems to me that one effective way to write about music is to make your prose a doppelganger for the sound you’re describing, so the style of your essay adapts to the idiosyncrasies of an artist or album or individual track. I know, easier said than done. Enter Ian Penman, writing on Sinatra:

“I’ve always found Sinatra most seductive, and most disquieting, the softer and more liquidly rapt he gets. The breakthrough work for me, the first Sinatra LP I truly madly fell for, was Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobim (1967; fallen for circa 1983): one of the quietest albums ever made and – appropriately enough, given its shoreline feel – one of my own Desert Island discs. Ten songs, 28’05”, voice never raised above a murmur: utter perfection. A music barely there, like pollen on a summer breeze, the drowsy strings not slathered all over everything, but coming and going like midnight optimism. Sinatra sings lines like ‘tall and tan and young and lovely’ – all these clicky, tricky consonants like soldiers on guard duty – and yet when you recall his voice it’s a soft, uncurling wave.”

Barely there. Coming and going like midnight optimism. Penman doesn’t truly get rolling until the second half of the paragraph, but then he really brings it home. Note how he humanizes the instrumentation, and gives it a dark, brooding character. How he cuts Sinatra’s voice in half, divides it into opposing metaphors. How the almost excessive parentheticals and parallel compound adjectives invoke a sense of studied languor. The coy, glib rhyme of “clicky, tricky” is almost shocking because Penman is so frequently cerebral in this piece (e.g. he uses the word “valetudinarian”). It’s the climax of a song that’s mostly quiet crooning.

I didn’t even care about Sinatra, but I do now. Penman is not the kind of writer who allows us to remain indifferent about his subject, which he treats with the reverence of a careful lover. As thecatamites put it, “he is very attentive to those underground movements of drive and affect & refreshingly unevangelical about describing them.” Penman is not a Bible salesman. When he writes about music, he isn’t preaching or trying to sell you something. He is in love, and weirdly matter-of-fact about making whatever he’s describing seem celestial. His phrases are surgical; his paragraphs radiate with an unsentimental devotion.

For an example of Penman’s range, compare his Sinatra piece, which is like a marathon-length rapturous sigh, to this paragraph from a different essay on Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. 

“The hook to each song is usually deep in a choppy rhythmic current – a shuffling samba. Very insistent, very dreamy. Less speed and more taste than that more popping popular amyl (night rate) disco beat. Lined and fleeced with a multiplicity of signs from a predominantly 40s Swing Era code book: seedy jazz, seething calypso, reedy rhumba, rude rhythm’n’blues. The horn section and vocal harmony arrangements are many sided and exquisitely twisted, counter-counter-pointed. What poise! What a slinky noise.”

The appeal of something like Game of Thrones lies in its disorientation, a barrage of cliffhangers fired off as chapter-by-chapter shifts in perspective; new gaps in the reader’s knowledge are hollowed out just as quickly as they’re filled in. One common analogy is that of setting up a chessboard one piece at a time only to eventually knock them all over. The Kingkiller Chronicle is more like a cake than a chessboard. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s more frivolous or less substantial, but that the base narrative is repeatedly layered over in such a way that you’re gradually swept back into suspension of disbelief as you slowly forget that you already knew what was going to happen. It’s less gamelike, more rhetorical & theatrical.

I just finished the first book in the series, Day 1: The Name of the Wind. There’s plenty of boilerplate fantasy (magic, wizards, blue fire, crystals & shit), but there’s also a lot of self-aware hedging around the established tropes. The style is at times overwrought—Hemingway wouldn’t like all the adverbs (“...I said hesitantly”; “...I accepted graciously”)—but it’s also dexterous.

Also, lol check out this cover art from the Wiki page:

He’s supposed to be carrying a lute, but it looks like he’s about to shred some power chords. Also, his hair seems to have very few layers and seems to flow at a perfectly horizontal right angle; is that an outline of his bald dome underneath?

I should say that I found the book largely engrossing. As implied earlier, there’s a lot of metanarrative, and it’s elegantly done. The book starts with some guys drinking at an inn in a small town in the middle of nowhere. They’re telling stories, then something ominous happens involving a giant spider-thing made of metal or stone (or something), and this creature never reappears for the rest of the book. I think this scene made me misapprehend what the rest of the book would be like.

After a few chapters of the town’s inhabitants worrying over what all this might mean, a scholar (the Chronicler) shows up to record the innkeeper Kvothe’s biography because it has been made very clear that he’s an Important Person, already the stuff of myth & legend even though he’s probably still in his twenties or thirties. Once Kvothe starts telling his story to the Chronicler, who transcribes it, you learn that the rural townsfolk have been charmingly pronouncing his name as “coat.” The real story begins here, the bulk of which takes place while Kvothe is a teenager attending the University, an elaborate institution steeped in tradition where the rich AND/OR brilliant learn Magic & Shit. There are a few interjections throughout the book that will bring the reader back to the inn as Kvothe needs to take a break or as other IRL interruptions occur. In addition, there are a few instances where a character in the story Kvothe is telling will dive into yet another layer of narrative, usually for the purposes of filling in the history-mythos of the fictional world. I confess that my attention didn’t hold as well in these moments. One layer of meta is probably enough for me.

One nice thing about this structure is it effectively trivializes the idea of spoilers, which is a concept I’ve always found tiresome. You, the reader, know that Kvothe is going to get expelled from the University because he tells the Chronicler right at the beginning. So the intrigue is not about *what happened* but about learning why. What matters isn’t the sparknotes but the context. Kvothe has been elevated to myth, and in effect dehumanized, while he’s still alive. We’re trying to learn the truth about him. So the revelation isn’t that he gets expelled, but when the expulsion happens and how the expulsion ultimately shapes your judgment of his character. But will it even occur in the first book, or later in the series?

Now I’ll be honest about what happens whenever I read a book like this. As I’m flipping through the intrigue, figuring out who’s responsible for murdering the main character’s entire family, or who’s behind the dark magic, or who stole the crystals, I’m mostly thinking “hmmm, yes, I wonder what’s going on with Potential Love Interest.“ Though I appreciate it when the intrigue manages to draw me away from this line of thinking, the love story (the ‘ship) always remains my top priority. Probably my biggest disappointment while reading the Harry Potter books was becoming disinterested in the main character’s love interest after I figured out it wasn’t going to be Hermione.

Kvothe’s love interest is named Denna; she’s a clever, talented musician (like Kvothe); she disappears & reappears sporadically throughout the story, and she is courted by many suitors, but it’s complicated because she’s also hoping to find a patron, so she can have a stable income. The scenes between Kvothe and Denna never last long, and it’s never clear when Kvothe will encounter Denna again because she never stays in the same place for long, she’s always skipping town, and their meetings are frequently interrupted by fraught and cruel circumstance.

On the one hand, I find this a very effective plotting technique. I felt jettisoned through the story because I was constantly anticipating Kvothe’s next interaction with Denna, and this helped me care more about other stuff that was going on in Kvothe’s life. I felt, as Kvothe did, warmth and relief whenever Denna appeared suddenly, and I savored their time together.

On the other hand, I find in retrospect that structuring the story around Denna in this way—spotlighting without actually featuring her—reduces her to a sensation. Denna becomes a stand-in for a general sense of anticipation and furtiveness, for the ephemeral flutter of teenage conviction, as opposed to a fully developed character in her own right. Does she only exist to make Kvothe seem more human? If I try to think of ways to describe Denna’s character, I can say that she’s clever, witty, ruthlessly competent (like Kvothe), but I think most of my strongest associations boil down to “hard to find” or “just out of reach,” like an elusive prize. So even as Kvothe repeatedly insists to his friends—who predictably tell him that he should make a move—that Denna finds those who pursue her tedious, that he can’t be forthright with her because he’s seen how tiresome she finds those that cling to her and would stake some claim of ownership over her, even as Kvothe expresses this acute awareness, their relationship as it is structured in the book is reduced to exactly that, a kind of medieval hunt. The story cloaks Denna in mystery and clings to it. There’s very little discernible reason for Denna to be in the same city as Kvothe, besides the fact that the story needs an excuse for them to banter every few chapters.

Kvothe, as a character, is interesting despite himself. He’s a prodigy, exceptionally talented at everything, quicker to learn new skills than anyone else. It’s an easy fantasy. But as an innkeeper, Kvothe is a sad old man before he’s even old. As a student at the University he’s rash and arrogant, often kept afloat by his few close friends. His recklessness is often forced on him by his poverty, and by the abuse of rich peers and jealous professors. Apparently everyone at the University except Kvothe is wealthy. Hopefully in the next book Kvothe will destroy the institution of neoliberalism.  

There are three quotes in the machine chapter that surprised me in different ways, even though they’re all sort of about the same thing. All three quotes on some level describe the tension inherent in capitalism between revolutionary impulses and capital’s tendency to predict, subsume, even require those same impulses in order to sustain itself.

The first quote is about how Marx uses the terms “conservative” and “revolutionary.”

Modern industry never views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combination of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions. But on the other hand, in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labour with its ossified particularities. (617)

This is generally how Marx operates, taking the paradox of whatever thread of capitalism he’s focusing on at the time and unraveling until it comes apart. This passage is tricky though because of Marx’s usage of the word “conservative.” It seems kind of dubious to call earlier modes of production “essentially conservative” just because they were less efficient at exploiting the worker and because ‘innovation’ was less frenetic. When he says the “technical basis” of modern industry is “revolutionary,” he implies that the factory machinery carries a revolutionary or subversive potential, EVEN THOUGH this very machinery was designed under capitalist interests and enables capitalists to exploit more and more labor power as the workers become more and more objectified as just extensions of machines.

So let’s try to unpack the implications of this. The chapter on Machinery and Large-Scale Industry is 161 pages long. Marx spends most of those pages exposing the horrible factory conditions, how pretty much every new technological innovation proves disastrous for the workers, how the new machines make it possible for the capitalists to extend the working day indefinitely, how machines enable the capitalists to employ more child workers and neglect their education, how machines make the intensification of labor possible in a way that the worker has no real control over, how machines make the worker’s skill or trade pretty much irrelevant, how machines exaggerate the division of labor and further obscure the production process so that the workers are pretty much useless if and when they are cast back out into the labor market whenever the latest factory innovation renders them redundant.

The point is that Marx is exhaustive in his articulation of the negative effects of machines. But now he’s saying that the “technical basis” of “modern industry” (in other words THE MACHINE) has revolutionary potential because whatever  mode of production that’s currently in practice is already on its way out. So even as this industry prevents workers from learning much beyond how to perform rote and repetive mundane actions, and thereby reduces the value of their labor (which they’ll need once they get fired), at the same time it forces the workers to be flexible, fluid, and adaptable; they need to be capable of everything, and nothing. Sound familiar?

I think he’s saying that the machines have the potential to free us from the necessity of repetitive and thoughtless labor. Technology should allow us to subsist more efficiently and spend less of our time actually working. Of course, Marx is keenly aware that the opposite is what actually happens because the technology is being designed with capitalist interests in mind.

His usage of “revolutionary” and “conservative” in this passage struck me because well, let’s be honest, I’m reading Marx, so naturally my association is revolutionary = good and conservative = bad. The machines are potentially revolutionary, but not good. But Marx isn’t really saying we shouldn’t have the technology; he’s not a Luddite. He’s maybe even saying the opposite.

What makes me uncomfortable about this idea is it makes me think of some modern uses of the term “progressive.” Progressive as a kind of affect or state of mind that can be employed as a way to “shake things up” in the business world. The word “disruptive” has similar connotations among silicon valley types. Cynical marketing terminology.

If these machines that were designed to render humans as mere appendages can be called revolutionary, then what does that really mean? Marx has already characterized resistance, or tension between the working class and the capitalist class, as essential to the capitalist system. If resistance is necessary to the way the system functions, then how is it real resistance?

It’s almost like he’s looking for silver linings. In the second quote, he highlights another contradiction with respect to gender relations. He talks about how the exploitation of women and children in the factories has led to changes in gender roles and family dynamics.

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organized processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of relations between the sexes. It is of course just as absurd to regard the Christian-Germanic form of the family as absolute and final as it would have been in the case of the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek or the Oriental forms, which, moreover, form a series in historical development. It is also obvious that the fact that the collective working group is composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages must under the appropriate conditions turn into a source of humane development, although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalist form, the system works in the opposite direction, and becomes a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery, since here the worker exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the worker. (620-621)

So not only changes in gender relations, but a new “foundation for a higher form of relation between the sexes.” Marx is saying that the capitalist excesses of modern industry have contributed to changes in the patriarchal structure of the family, and he’s saying that having men and women and children all share responsibilities in the labor process can encourage a greater “human development.” Where earlier he conflated women & children and characterized them both as docile, here he’s making a pretty good point. Radical change in how we conceptualize family is necessary. But at the same time, the change he’s describing came about as a result of the capitalist drive for expansion and profit. If capitalism is so adept at leveraging “progress” to shore itself up, then does that make this kind of progress useless? 

The last quote, I think, suggests that the answer to this question is “no.” Here Marx points out that factory regulations designed to protect the worker and limit the working day actually accelerate the concentration of capital.

If the general extension of factory legislation to all trades for the purpose of protecting the working class both in mind and body has become inevitable, on the other hand, as we have already pointed out, that extension hastens on the general conversion of numerous isolated small industries into a few combined industries carried on upon a large scale; it therefore accelerates the concentration of capital and the exclusive predominance of the factory system. It destroys both the ancient and the transitional forms behind which the dominion of capital is still partially hidden, and replaces them with a dominion which is direct and unconcealed. But by doing this it also generalizes the direct struggle against its rule. While in each individual workshop it enforces uniformity, regularity, order and economy, the result of the immense impetus given to the technical improvement by the limitation and regulation of the working day is to increase the anarchy and the proneness to catastrophe of capitalist production as a whole, the intensity of labour, and the competition of machinery with the worker. By the destruction of small-scale and domestic industries it destroys the last resorts of the ‘redundant population’, thereby removing what was previously a safety-valve for the whole social mechanism. By maturing the material conditions and the social combination of the process of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of that process, and thereby ripens both the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one. (635)

In other words, factory legislation designed to protect the working class by limiting the length of the working day also makes the rich richer in a sense; it shuts down smaller workshops or forces them to be absorbed by larger ones. Large-scale factories spread. Labor becomes more intense. The worker must compete with more machines. The worker gets less options on the labor market, which becomes more tumultuous. But Marx seems to imply that even though capitalists will be content to take advantage of these developments, and even though in some ways they compromise the options workers have for selling their labor, it’s still worth mobilizing and fighting for regulation because (besides the fact that this is the only life we get) articulating a coherent struggle against power is necessary for the eventual overthrow of the current system and the imagining of a new and better one. The regulation of modern industry is an unveiling; this is just what capitalism looks like underneath.

8. After some further crooked questions from these bourgeois, the secret of their ‘sympathy’ for widows, poor families and so on emerges into the daylight.

nice

7. Although Ure’s work appeared in 1835, at a time when the factory system was still comparatively little developed, it remains the classical expression of the spirit of the factory, not only because of its undisguised cynicism, but also because of the naiveté with which it blurts out the thoughtless contradictions of the capitalist brain.

BOOM

6. It is evident that the British Parliament, which no one will reproach with being excessively endowed with genius, has been led by experience to the conclusion that a simple compulsory law is sufficient to enact away all the so-called impediments opposed by the nature of the process to the restriction and regulation of the working day.

SLAM!

5. (stony-hearted fellow!)

DAMN!

4. (this is the ‘abstinence’ of the capitalist!)

O_O

3. This passage demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of the kind of criticism which knows how to judge and condemn the present, but not how to comprehend it.

2. (!)

......

1. Apart from Liebig’s incorrect interpretation of the word ‘labour’, a word he used in quite a different sense from that adopted by political economy, it is, in any case, ‘very remarkable’ that he should make John Stuart Mill the first proponent of a theory which James Anderson was the first to publish, in the days of Adam Smith, and which was repeated in various works down to the beginning of the nineteenth century; a theory which Malthus, that master in plagiarism (his whole population theory is a shameless plagiarism), appropriated in 1815; which West developed at the same time and independently of Anderson; which in the year 1817 was linked by Ricardo with the general theory of value, then made the round of the world as Ricardo’s theory, and in 1820 was vulgarized by James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill; and which was finally reproduced by John Stuart Mill and others as a dogma already quite commonplace, and known to every schoolboy. It is undeniable that the second Mill owes his certainly ‘remarkable’ authority almost entirely to such mistaken attributions.

Still getting through the big machine chapter and noticing Marx’s occasional use of exclamation points whenever he really starts to get riled up:

“In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means for employing workers of slight muscular strength, or whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labour of women and children was therefore the first result of the capitalist application of machinery!” (517)

and

“But from this we see how capital, for the purposes of self-valorization, has usurped the family labour necessary for consumption. This crisis was also utilized to teach sewing to the daughters of the workers in sewing schools. An American revolution and a universal crisis were needed in order that working girls, who spin for the whole world, might learn to sew!” (footnote 38, 518)

and

“Just imagine that! Making ‘useless’, if only for a single moment, a piece of capital that has cost £100,000! It is in truth monstrous that a single one of our people should ever leave the factory!” (529)

The last two are cases of ironic detachment, a kind of bitter laughter, and the first one is more like a sincere outburst, an “aha!” moment. The first two quotes show how Marx tends to get exercised (& rightly so) when he talks about the deplorable working conditions of women & children in the factories. Part of Marx’s point is about how machines became the subjects of the labor process instead of the laborers themselves; the machines reduced differentiation & specialization of labor, which led to factories recruiting entire families to work where before they would have only employed the patriarchal head of each household, so that family income could increase or stay the same while individual wages were driven down as the labor became devalued.

The first book I finished this year was Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism by Shannon Sullivan, which helped me consider some things about my own white middle class upbringing & socialization that I think I was aware of on some level but hadn’t been able to articulate with explicit thoughts before. This book probably led to more internal reflection than any other book I’ve read in a while bc certain sensibilities of my own specific background (in terms of social class) were implicated in a more specific way than I’d seen before. Whiteness mostly operates by pretending it doesn’t exist, while “Middle Class” is an identity often idealized overtly in American discourse: stability, but without all the elitism of being rich! 

Sullivan talks about how middle class whiteness is an identity that’s constantly slithering around, hiding its own tail, hoping to obscure itself as a race-class identity so that it can remain DEFAULT. The title of Sullivan’s book is meant ironically of course. Sullivan points out how moral “goodness” is a white middle class performance very important to white identity and one that has nothing to do with actual racial justice because it impedes progress. Basically, this type of “goodness” is about reassuring oneself that poor uneducated whites are the “real racists.” White middle class people tell themselves that white working class culture makes them uncomfortable because it’s ‘more racist’ or w/e, but it actually makes them uncomfortable because it undermines white middle class sensibilities. For middle class white people, working class whites undermine the illusion of white ‘purity’ because they’re not appropriately deferential, because they don’t perform the appropriate amount of shame™ for being white, because they’re too loud, etc. etc. She also discusses regional variations in white racial etiquette, like in this passage on the nuances of physical proximity & social hierarchy:

Sullivan’s chapter (called “Dumping on White Trash”) that talks about how white classism shores up and preserves white racism was the most useful & revealing part of the book for me. Some of the most interesting passages are her close readings of terminology. Here’s her discussion of the phrase “white trash” and other similar slurs:

The key point here is the threat of “pollution and contamination from within.” Performing contempt for white trash ‘ignorance’ is about staving off that threat, preserving social hierarchies.

She also talks about other ways middle class white people evade their own whiteness & impede racial justice movements: by demonizing and distancing themselves from ancestors, thus ignoring their own privilege & racism by conveniently displacing it onto villains; by indulging in color-blind token multiculturalism & discouraging racial self-awareness in their children; by indulging too much in unproductive affects like guilt and shame.

Started reading Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? yesterday for MLK day and the most interesting part so far is Dr. King’s recounting of internal debates in the civil rights movement. Specifically he talks about the debate over usage of the phrase “black power” in speeches and marches and its birth as a slogan in 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi:

“So Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement. The phrase had been used long before by Richard Wright and others, but never until that night had it been used as a slogan in the civil rights movement. For people who had been crushed so long by white power and who had been taught that black was degrading, it had a ready appeal.”

The disagreement within the movement over the usefulness of the phrase “black power“ mirrors larger disagreements about the usefulness of nonviolence as a revolutionary tactic. King’s resistance to the phrase is fascinating:

“I conceded the fact that we must have slogans. But why have one that would confuse our allies, isolate the Negro community and give many prejudiced whites, who might otherwise be ashamed of their anti-Negro feeling, a ready excuse for self-justification.

‘Why not use the slogan “black consciousness” or “black equality”?’ I suggested. ‘These phrases would be less vulnerable and would more accurately describe what we are about. The words “black” and “power” together give the impression that we are talking about black domination rather than black equality.’”

The question King is wrestling with is How can one insulate something as loaded & changeable as language from the violence of racism? If there’s anything that’s proven consistent about whiteness over the past few decades, it’s that it doesn’t need an excuse to perpetuate its own arrogance, willful ignorance, privilege, and prejudice. Hegemony is relentless in adopting language in a way that serves its own interest. Racism appropriates “black lives matter” into “all lives matter.”

In response to Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick argue that neither of King’s phrases would have the persuasive appeal of “black power,” and they’re right of course. King’s main reservations with the phrase have to do with the connotations of violence that had already been attached to it by the press and that would continue to be emphasized in coverage of the movement. He sees the phrase as more “vulnerable,” and he thinks the slogan would only bring about internal division. Their debate is one about the utility of language, but it serves as container for disagreements over other tactics as well.

Trying again to get through Marx’s extra bigass chapter on machines in Capital, Volume 1. One thing I like (sometimes) about Marx is the shapeshifting quality of his prose. He’ll go on for pages rattling off measurements & equations that as far as I can tell exist only to reinforce his dialectic and make him sound like an accountant, and as such could be replaced with any other numbers & the passage would remain the same. Then he’ll start acting like he’s doing a reading of the Odyssey, recounting the evolution of machines from “dwarf-like” to “Cyclopean.” Or he’ll hit you with his Gothic style:

Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs.

I think these transitions out of the pretense of objectivity help me appreciate the ambition of Marx’s project. It’s like he hopes to reach people that aren’t all the same type of reader, yet weirdly expects readers to slog through the more cumbersome styles to get through to their preferred one.

The other most immediately striking quality of his writing are the sick burns in the footnotes, which I admit endear him to me. He finds an “astounding” and “gross“ ignorance in chemists and scientists whose thinking lacks a historical dimension. He excoriates the “vulgar economists.” He talks about how capitalists “drivel on” about “interest” produced and “service” rendered by machines, when really machines can’t create new value and were never designed to relieve the worker’s toil in the the first place.

David Harvey spends a lot of time lecturing on footnote 4 of the machine chapter, where Marx articulates a relationship to Darwin, which Harvey argues is one of those places in the text that shows us Marx’s thinking is not deterministic or causal. For Harvey, Marx doesn’t believe that Technology OR Nature OR the Means of Production OR Social Relations OR Mental Concepts OR Daily Life OR Labor Process causes change; changing any one of these things doesn’t change the world because they are all in a dialectical relationship with one another, which Harvey says helps explain the failures of IRL communism [Harvey also says something about Naomi Klein implying in Disaster Capitalism that ‘ideas’ are what change the world]. I buy Harvey’s analysis re: Marx, but sometimes I feel like I can’t tell if what Marx is saying really IS causal or deterministic. Like this:

Hence the co-operative character of the labour process is in this case a technical necessity dictated by the very nature of the instrument of labour.