How about you quit beating it around my bush and tell me what you really mean

Karl Marx is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself

It is getting genuinely scary, I am pretty sure that if a politician was attacked or killed

Oh no, not the politicians!

[A]t the same time, constant changes take place in the sex […] of the industrial conscripts. [Fowkes p. 583]

Damn, industrialized forced femming confirmed?

In keeping with the benevolent scientist theme, we could have an academic institution tasked with translating constituent opinions into selections of philosopher kings. Maybe it could be called something like “Election College”

What? So you’re telling me that if I’m not focusing MY ENTIRE MENTAL ENERGY into thinking about the fact that I am currently eating or drinking something, I’m gonna choke and probably die or something?

It’s just like this: Me drinking water: “Yes this is a nice cup of water and I am relaxed hmmmm I think I will let my mind wander a bit while I relax drinking this water. Maybe I can think abou-” CHOKES AND FUCKING DIES

Like come the fuck on why is the human body like this. You should be able to fucking tell if something’s going down my throat. You do so many other things automatically WHY DO YOU NEED ME TO DEDICATE MY THOUGHTS TO DRINKING/EATING TO MAKE THINGS GO DOWN THROAT WITHOUT KILLING ME GOD DAMMIT

Yeah, it’s real tough for us out there these days. The nice thing about being white though is it provides great camouflage during the winter. You just gotta strip nekkid for 3 months a year and the PC Police will never find you. You’re on your own the other 9 mos., but that’s a 1/4 of your life figured out right there.

holy shit spongebob grew to the size of his whole house

Something I’ve been kicking around in my head a bit is the bourgeois notion of economic “efficiency,” which I feel like must mean efficiency at producing to meet the aggregate demands of society, which in turn are warped by the social inequities inherent in that society. We might then expect that as wealth inequality rises, an efficient free-market society will increasingly focus on producing luxury goods. (Which maybe can result in absolute immiseration if productivity increases in industries that meet basic needs do not offset their declining share of the economy? Idk I’d have to think more about this.) Anyway thought I’d throw this thought out there since Marx kinda touches on forces shaping the social division of labor in 14.4.

i have my shoebox ready, can you give me ur home address so i can ship it to you

I think mapping exchange-value (of a good or service expressed in terms of money) to equilibrium price is probably fair. Translating surplus-value to profit can lead you astray in that, because we’re talking in particular about labour-capital relations when we discuss surplus value, the rate of surplus value is not the same as the rate of profit, because the former is calculated against the living labour costs of the capitalist while the latter is calculated against all input costs including the means of production. But the mass of surplus value is effectively the same as the mass of profit, if I’m not mistaken.

The math in chapter 12 gets a little hard to follow. Here’s my go at working through it.

All quotes henceforth from Fowkes/Penguin ed., p. 435-6.

Recall that Marx’s baseline scenario, before innovation, is as follows:

A worker works 12 hours a day, producing 6s. of value (of which 5s. remunerates 10 hr of necessary labor time, and 1s. is surplus-value representing 2 hr. of surplus labor). This labor-value produces 12 products, so each product gets (6/12)s., or 6d, each of newly produced value, plus a further 6d preserved from expense of the means of production, for a total value of 1s.

Now, when the capitalist introduces an innovation, the 6s. of value added by the worker produces instead 24 articles, so each gets (6/24)s. or 3d. of new value, for a total value of 9d. But the social value is still at 1s. or 12d., so the innovating capitalist undercuts the market at 10d. and still gets an extra 1d. surplus. And this is where Marx starts doing some algebra behind the scenes and expecting you to follow along.

[T]he capitalist now produces 24 articles, which he sells at 10d. each, making 20s. in all.

This is simply the total price the capitalist fetches on the market. 24 articles * (10d. / article) * (1s./12d.) = 20 s.

Since the value of the means of production is 12s., 14⅖ of these articles merely replace the constant capital advanced.

The means of production are 12s. because they still represent 6d. or ½s. per article. If each article sells at 10d. or ⅚s., the number of articles that represent the means of production is 12s. / (⅚s. / article) = 72/5 or 14⅖ articles.

The labour of the 12-hour working day is represented by the remaining 9⅗ articles. Since the price of the labour power is 5s., […]

(The capitalist has no immediate obligation to raise the workers’ compensation, so the price he’s paying for labour-power across the 24 articles is the same he laid out previously for the production of 12 articles.)

[…] 6 articles represent the necessary labour time, […]

5s. / (⅚s. / article) = 6 articles

and 3⅗ articles the surplus labour. The ratio of necessary labour to surplus labour which under average social conditions was 5:1, is now only 5:3.

6 / (3⅗) = (30/5) / (18/5) = 30/18 = 5/3. Now skipping down a bit:

Hence, instead of 10 hours, the worker now only needs to work for 7⅕ hours in order to reproduce this value.

As has been shown, the necessary : surplus ratio is 5:3, so ⅝ of labour time is necessary labour time. 12 hr * ⅝ = 60/8 = 15/2 or 7½. I’m pretty sure “7⅕” is a mistake, probably Marx or an editor had bad handwriting and misread “½” or “.5” as “⅕”. The error is then replicated on the next page with

surplus labour is therefore increased by 2⅘ hours, […]

which should instead be 10-7.5 = 2.5 hours. However, the following remains correct:

[…] and the surplus value he produces grows from one into 3s.

Of the 20s. realized for the capitalist by the 24 articles, 12s. is the cost of consumed means of production; the remaining 8s. is split 5/3 necessary/surplus, as shown, so 5s. to the worker and 3s. to the capitalist.

except naked

anybody who doesn’t agree to renaming their state this should get the

Leaves open the Egyptian presidency for

Another way of thinking about it, if you found quarrk’s way hard to follow:

If the ratio of s to v is 80:52, that means that if you divide a period of labour-time into 80+52=132 equal portions, 80 will go to s and 52 will go to v. So in a period of 1 hour, for example, you have

• 80/132 of an hour devoted to surplus, and
• 52/132 of an hour devoted to necessary.

Now it’s not immediately obvious since 132 is such a big number, but if you simplify these fractions (by dividing each side of each fraction by 4) you get

• 80/132 = 20/33 and
• 52/132 = 13/33 respectively.

To then get the fractions for 10 hours, you simply multiply each by 10, giving

• (20/33) * 10 = 200/33 = 6 2/33 hours surplus, and
• (13/33) * 10 = 130/33 = 3 31/33 hours necessary.

I have a better win percentage with black because I just sit back in the Pirc and deal with whatever gets thrown at me. Can’t handle the burden of initiative with white lol

murray reduction: