Communist utopia in Spain?

While browsing the Interwebs, I came across a book about a small town called Marinaleda in Andalucía, Spain. The town was described as a communist utopia. Intrigued, I found a copy of the book to see what it was like.

“If you work it with your hands and water it with your sweat, the earth is yours, worker”

The book, Utopia and the Valley of Tears, written by Dan Hancox, an English author and journalist for the Guardian, is an account of the Hancox's trip to Seville, Marinaleda and nearby towns. It contains a sizable interview with Sánchez Gordillo, where the content of the communist experiment is revealed.

The town is no utopia, but I was a little deflated to discover that it's old-school communist too - not the communism I'm looking for. It could best be described as a "workers' paradise."

I got the impression that things in Marinaleda started out okay. First, they had to secure land:

We saw that the Duke of Infantal had the most lands – 17,000 hectares between Andalucía and Extremadura. So we fought the Duke for twelve years! We occupied his land, we cut off roads, and at the same time we pressured the government.

[...] the Marinaleños kept going and going – occupying, protesting, disrupting; direct action gets the goods, as the saying goes. After 12 years of struggle, with 1992’s Sevilla World Expo just round the corner and the authorities’ resolve finally weakening, incredibly, they won, securing 1,200 hectares of the Duke’s land.

Every communist movement has to secure land. Their method of expropriation seems entirely appropriate. It's what happened next that concerns me:

With the land they had won through occupation, they began planting, deliberately choosing crops that would need industrial processing, to create more work back in the town, in the factory. “Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs, so we created a complementary industry to transform our agrarian products: peppers, artichokes, favas, broccoli, olive oil and olives”. The idea, he says, is that “la tierra es de quien la trabaja” – the land is for those who work it. The town co-operative does not distribute profits: any surplus is re-invested to create more jobs. Everyone in the co-op earns the same salary, 47 Euros a day for six and a half hours of work (which they try and keep equivalent with public service wages) [...]

[Quoting Sánchez Gordillo:] our goal is to make jobs. Instead of pocketing the profits we reinvest them back into the project. That’s why we believe the land should belong to the community that puts it to work, and not in the dead hands of the nobility.

There are quite a few things wrong here.

1) Why would you want to deliberately increase the amount of work that Marinaleños had to do? The whole point of communism is to take the massive surplus generating power of machines to reduce work to the absolute minimum. What the Marinaleños are doing is the exact opposite. Though perfectly in line with (pre-)existing communism, it isn't a good approach. A better approach would have forged a path where machines are used and the work-day reduced.

2) What about the so-called non-workers? I assume they don't receive the salary. Some may say that "if you don't work, you don't earn" but have they really investigated what work is? Does the category of non-work extend to house-work? Do women house-workers only earn via their husbands? None of this is discussed, neither in the book nor other articles I've read.

3) "Land for those that work it" has been the catch-cry for colonists for the past five-hundred years, displacing indigenous populations and killing millions of people. Do you really want to be associated with that history and present day reality? Instead, what about "land for those who need to live from it"? In that way you include primitive, peasant, and industrial workers and can exclude those who don't need it (i.e., the nobility).

4) The fact that the co-operative re-invests profits to create more jobs is the very definition of capitalism, not communism. It is hardly a distinguishing feature of their form of organisation. If capitalists didn't re-invest their profit they wouldn't be capitalists. By doing the same, the Marinaleños are in no way distancing themselves from capital social relations.

As for the rhetorical "dead hands of the nobility" phrase, what is that supposed to mean? That because the nobility don't work, their hands are figuratively dead? Isn't that the same argument that the bourgeoisie use to seize power from the aristocracy?

Content of the work

A friend raised a good criticism of the type of work. It's not only tedious, but gruelling labour.

We walk over to the farm’s olive oil processing plant, where four or five men in blue overalls are working the machinery. The olives are stripped from the branches by the first machine, then cleaned by the next, then smashed into pulp, filtered, and filtered again. They produce 300,000 litres of olive oil a year.

Not only have the Marinaleños chosen labour intensive work, but generally fairly unappealing work.

Undoubtedly, whether capitalist, feudal or communist, dull and tedious work needs to be done. Thankfully, a lot of people like doing a lot of different things, we shouldn't all have to do horrible work all the time. What separates communism from other highly organised societies is the idea that we can reduce this labour to a minimum. We have seen that quantitatively and qualitatively, the town of Marinaleda are not attempting to do this.

“This is how we’ve built 350 homes.”

I don't like how Marinaleda works, but there is a definite attraction to the way they create housing for the community. Land is assigned and houses are collectively built. There are no mortgages.

The new houses have been built on land on the fringes of the town which was municipalised, made public property for just this purpose. “Once we had this land, we prepared it, negotiated with the Andalucían government to obtain materials, and then we called the people who needed housing. We give them land, materials, and architects for free, and they put in their labour from the beginning of construction to the end.” Each plot consists of 90 square meters for construction, and 100 square meters for a patio or garden – normally three bedrooms, a bathroom, living room, kitchen and courtyard.

Bourgeois houses, to be sure, but it's nevertheless an impressive feat, and appears to be a genuinely communist moment.

The rub: to prevent people from profiting, residents cannot sell their houses. (A Job and No Mortgage for All in a Spanish Town)

You can't sell your house? Good.

“You know you have to work on Sundays?”

One Sunday a month in Marinaleda is designated a Domingo Rojo (Red Sunday), where the townspeople work for free for the mutual benefit of the town [...]

[...] the dream that housing should belong to everyone, because you are a person, and not a piece of merchandise to be speculated with. The dream that natural resources, for instance energy, shouldn’t be in the service of multinationals but in the service of the people.

Why Sundays? Why not have every fourth Friday for collective projects? That you have to work on Sundays goes to the core of their form of communism. It is a workers' paradise, not an attack on work and the role of being a worker. And they go against two hundred years of working class activity on this. God may have given us Sundays (or Saturdays/Fridays depending on the god), but it was the working class that gave us the weekend and the eight-hour day. Why haven't the Marinaleños given themselves a three-day weekend yet? I guess, with a 6.5 hour work day (as opposed to the 7.5 hour Spanish standard) they have effectively done this. But the psychological effect of an extra day without work is much greater than one less hour a day.

Bourgeois criticism

I've read a few bourgeois criticisms of the Marinelda, none of which actually attempt to engage with the content of the project, but nit-pick with holier-than-thou hypocrisy claims, such as:

Analysts and political opponents dismiss Mr. Sánchez’ populist bluster, noting that while he portrays Marinaleda as a Communist oasis, it depends heavily on money from the regional and central governments it decries. The materials for each house, for example, cost the regional government about $25,000. (A Job and No Mortgage for All in a Spanish Town)

Where do these "analysts" (un-named, un-analysable) think a project like this is going to come from? Who cares where they get their money? Money has that wonderful property of leaving no smell. Maybe money comes from the forced labour of billions, yet it leaves no trace. Oh, guess what? The people living there are also labour-power created and nurtured under modern Spanish capitalist conditions. What hypocrites - they can't even attempt communism without having first come from a communist society!

The end

The book covers more than Marinaleda and Sánchez Gordillo. It touches on the economic crisis in Spain and the 15-M Movement and the Indignados. The author clearly has a sympathy with some sort of an idea of communism. It was enjoyable reading about his youth and engagement with communist ideas - reading Homage to Catalonia, distancing himself from Stalinism and all existing communism, etc. It was an enjoyable read about an aspect of Andalucian life that I was completely unaware of.

As for Marinaleda, I don't want to be overly critical. I think in some ways they've entirely missed the point. In other ways, they're attempting an inspiring communist experiment. The self-reduction they've done in supermarkets is certainly a critique of capital in practice. However, they must drop the 20th century ideology of workerism if they want to genuinely contribute to the movement of communism.

What the town of Marinaleda does is allow us to imagine how to create a new way of living. It'll need to be different from what the Marinaleños are doing, but it's an interesting point of departure.

Reading Capital Politically, Part 3

This blog entry contains the final set of quotes from Reading Capital Politically. These quotes are generally concerned with the money-form of value. Overall, a very quotable book, it would seem.

We can see now that just as the relative value form finds its meaning only in the equivalent form so it is that the working class recognizes itself as working class only through its relation to capital. Indeed, it is working class only within that relation. The relative form thus expresses the perspective of the working class. Destroy capital and there is no more working class as such. And, conversely, the refusal to function as working class (i.e., to work) acts to destroy capital. Put in the language above, the mass of workers have their joint condition as working class reflected to them through capital acting as a mirror which mediates this recognition.

Children work for capital to the extent that they produce their labor-power for future roles as workers (waged and unwaged), but they are not directly waged. They, like housewives, are supported by the resources (money) obtained by their waged father or mother. The relation with capital is mediated directly for the father by the money wage, but for the children and housewives there is also the father/husband. In these circumstances the fact that children and women in the family work for capital is hidden by their condition of wagelessness. They appear to stand only in some private relation to the male wage earner but not to capital.

This was one of the main aims of colonialism - the creation of a world-wide reserve army. And poverty continues to be the tool by which vast millions are kept alive but (it is hoped) easily available when it suits capital's purpose. These reserves are then drawn upon either for immigration into areas where their cheap labor can be used to hold down the wage demands of more powerful workers (e.g., Mexican and Caribbean labor drawn into the U.S.; workers from Mediterranean countries brought into northern Europe) or for employment in their own areas when runaway shops seek out their cheap labor locally. Of course, time and again things have not worked out so well and the struggles of the unwaged have made them unfit for capital's factories.

Another way the class struggle refuses the mediation of money is the refusal of price. This is the essence of direct appropriation and includes not only the price of labor-power but also the prices of other commodities. It involves self-reduction of utilities or housing prices, changing labels in a supermarket, using 15-cent slugs instead of 50-cent tokens in the subway, or total elimination of price through shoplifting, employee theft, or Black Christmases where commodities are seized. This refusal of price is a refusal of capital's rules of the game. The refusal to accept the role of money is the refusal to accept everything we have seen going into the determination of money - the whole set of value relations. This is the working-class perspective with a vengence.

Inflation means rising prices due, not to increases in labor input, but to monetary deflation. Prices are the money equivalents of the value of commodities which are expressed in the price form. To raise prices means to increase the amount of money (gold or paper) being exchanged for goods. If the amount of money the working class holds is fixed, then the amount it can buy decreases accordingly. In this way, the amount of value the working class receives for its labor-power is reduced, and the amount of surplus value that capital gets is increased.

[...] it is easy to raise prices simply by circulating more paper so that a given quantity of commodities, being represented by an increased quantity of paper, has higher prices (assuming velocity of money constant, etc.). This was just the idea of Keynes, then Lewis and others. The state could print more money, or expand money via the credit system, and thus raise prices, which would decrease the value of each unit of money and thus undercut working-class wages. This undercutting could be done whether working-class wages were constant or increasing.

Reading Capital Politically, Part 2

My last posthad a selection of quotes from Reading Capital Politically. There were so many that I retained some quotes until this blog entry.

[...] the overwhelming majority of the people are put in a situation where they are forced to work to avoid starvation. The capitalist class creates and maintains this situation of compulsion by achieving total control over all the means of producing social wealth. The generalized imposition of the commodity-form has meant that forced work has become the fundamental means of organizing society - of social control. It means the creation of a working class - a class of people who can survive only by selling their capacity to work to the class that controls the means of production.

Most fundamentally, the view of the commodity as use-value is the perspective of the working class. It sees commodities (e.g., food or energy) primarily as objects of appropriation and consumption, things to be used to satisfy its needs. Capital sees these same commodities primarily as exchange-values - mere means toward the end of increasing itself and its social control via the realization of surplus value and profit.

The preoccupation of the working class with exchange-value and the preoccupation of capital with use-value, however, are both the outgrowth of capital's success in imposing its social system.

Because of our need for this use-value of food, capital understood early on that its control over food as a commodity gave it control over workers. This was why the most basic means of production stripped from workers in the period primitive accumulation was land - the traditionally necessary precondition for producing food. Thus the fundamental use-value of food for capital is the power to force the working class to work to get it.

One way in which the old dichotomy between politics and economics has often been posed has been to label as "economism" struggles by workers which are deemed solely quantitative, for example, more wages, shorter workday, and so on. These struggles are said to be within capital, which is itself essentially quantitative. "Political" struggles are only those that challenge the "quality" of capital itself, that is, that threaten the "revolutionary" overthrow of capital via the seizure of state power. From what we have seen already, it should be apparent that struggles over the length and intensity of the workday (how much the commodity-form is imposed) are at once quantitative and qualitative: quantitative because they concern the amount of work that will be done for capital, qualitative because they put into question the realization of enough surplus value to maintain capital's control

[Quoting Marx:] ". . . the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists is altogether wrong. It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labor -- and these are its own product -- take on a personality toward it, or what is the same, that they are posited as the property of a personality alien to the worker. The concept of capital contains the capitalist."

Men do benefit from women's work; whites do benefit from blacks' lower status; local workers do benefit from immigrant workers' taking the worst jobs. Therefore, the struggle to destroy the divisions generally finds its initiative in the dominated group, since the other side cannot be expected to always work to destroy its privileges. The efforts to overcome racism, sexism, imperialism, or the exploitation of students in the 1960s were led by the struggles of blacks not whites, women not men, peasants not Americans, students not professors or administrators.

[...] to conceive of the value of a commodity as being the direct result of the work of producing that individual commodity is to lose the social character of value and to see it instead as some metaphysical substance that is magically injected into the product by the worker's touch.

[Quoting Marx:] ". . . the real level of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. . . . If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e., if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour."
These very important concepts should lead us once and for all away from any tendency to try to grasp value in terms of individual cases.

When Marx wrote, for example, in Chapter 15, Section 3, on the employment of women and children, he saw these persons being drawn ever deeper into the industrial machine to be chewed up daily and left to recuperate at night in the same fashion as male workers. There was no need for any special theory about the family, housework, or schoolwork, because these constituted negligible parts of the day. But later, with the expulsion of women and children from the mines and the mills and the factories, with the creation of the modern nuclear family and public school system by capital, such a theory is vital. Today, we must study how capital structures "free time" so as to expand value. We must see how housework has been structured by capital with home economics and television to ensure that women's time contributes only to the reproduction of their own, their husbands', and their children's labor-power. We must see the desire for the reproduction of life as labor-power behind capital's propaganda that it is in the interest of the individual or the family to have a "nice" home or a "good" education.

Both housework and schoolwork are intended to contribute to keeping the value of labor-power low. The more work done by women in the home, the less value workers must receive from capital to reproduce themselves at a given level. The more work students do in the school, the less value must be invested in their training and disciplining for the factory (or home).

[...] the labor an "average person" can perform, say, in the United States of 1775 and in the United States of 1975, or in the United States of 1975 and in upland Papua of 1975, is quite different. When put concretely this way, the vagueness of the notion vanishes. Workers of all these periods and places could be trained to perform "average labor" today in a New York City factory or office. But the amount of training our 1775 farmer or our 1975 tribesman would require would be substantially more and of a different order, involving not just linguistic, mathematical, or mechanical skills, but regularity and discipline.

The Civil War in France

I recently read Karl Marx's The Civil War in France. It's about the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-71. This was the book that really began Marx's rise to infamy - accused of plotting the whole uprising from London. It was written during the war and subsequent revolution in Paris.

If, like me, you're not overly familiar with the history of 19th Century France (and Prussia), here is a short description of the main characters you'll encounter reading this book:

• M. Thiers - French historian, prime minister, suppressor of the Paris Commune, president of the Third Republic
• Louis Bonaparte - Emperor of the Second Empire, started the war with Prussia
• Otto von Bismarck -  Minister President of Prussia, credited with unifying modern Germany
• Blanqui - French socialist, absent leader of the Paris Commune
• Louis-Philippe I - King of France until the 1848 revolution

Large chunks of this book aren't very interesting for a modern reader. These sections are largely concerned with military strategy and the criticism of various personalities (mostly Bonaparte and Thiers). At the time, revealing these people for what they were was an important thing to do, but they're now long dead.

There are six chapters. I've summarised them below:

Chapter 1 is amazing in that it contains communiques from French and Prussian workers opposing the war.

The English working class stretch the hand of fellowship to the French and German working people. They feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future.

Chapter 2 is mostly concerned with military tactics, towns of Germany and France and a history of the two nation's conflicts. The chapter ends with an extremely ominous (and prophetic) warning:

Let the sections of the International Working Men’s Association in every country stir the working classes to action. If they forsake their duty, if they remain passive, the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital.

In Chapter 3, Marx gets stuck into Thiers, describing him as a "monstrous gnome" and elucidating the build-up to the massacre. I thought chapters 3 and 4 were the least relevant to anyone reading nowadays.

In chapters 5 and 6 Marx writes about the events of the Paris Commune; its successes and its destruction.

In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!

To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome. The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood; the same disregard, in massacre, of age and sex, the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud.

If the acts of the Paris working men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new society arising and an old one breaking down.

All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.

Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.

Engels, in his 1891 Introduction, makes some very interesting comments about the state and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, especially relevant in light of the horrors done in his and Marx's name in the 20th Century.

From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

I read the edition at marxists.org. I've re-formatted it as an e-book (including the bulk of the appendix) and made it available at: The Civil War in France.

Reading Capital Politically

I have recently re-read Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver. It's a book that injects contemporary discussion (until 1979) and class analysis into a reading of the first chapter of Karl Marx's Capital, Vol 1. I re-read an e-book edition (below) that I put together from Harry Cleaver's university webpage (which currently - Dec 2012 - no longer contains the files).

My edition is generally not as good as the PDF edition. The main disadvantage is that the footnotes aren't hyper-linked. However, it has the advantage of containing all the prefaces to the various editions that Cleaver has written over the years. It is current as of the preface to the German translation of November 2011. (I excluded the 2011 Polish preface as it is very similar to the German preface.) In that respect, it's the most complete version. I've also done some minor editing.

The formats that you can download are:

• HTML
• MOBI
• EPUB
• PDF

Below are some quotes that I found illuminating:

[...] the continuing spread of Taylorist and Fordist deskilling produced such an alienation of young workers from work that, by the 1960s, the desire to take over work and make it less alienating was being more and more replaced by its simple refusal. They didn’t want control; they wanted out.

For Marx, value was only understandable within the context of surplus value. It was not just a form, separable from its content. Value does have a form, exchange value, but it also has a content: imposed labor and the link between value and surplus value is that in the normal course of capital accumulation, the capitalists only impose labor when they can impose surplus labor.

The capitalists are capitalists, not when they consume the surplus, but when they invest it, i.e., when they impose more work. And this is exactly what the socialist critique of capitalist development fails to deal with. By focusing uniquely on the question of who owns or controls the surplus and demanding workers' control, it fails to come to grips with the substance of value and surplus value: endlessly imposed work.

Why did Marx hate money so much? Because it is the quintessential distillation of homogenized labor, of the reduction of all of human life to labor.

Rather than the usual Marxist image of the capitalist with a whip, better the image of would-be managers riding the tiger's back trying to coerce or cajole their mount along different lines of development, frequently coming within a hair's breath of falling off when the tiger rears or comes to a sudden halt, always in danger of the tiger turning around and ripping these upstarts from its back.

To the degree any group of people ruptures capitalist command and carves out their own space, capital responds by doing its best to isolate that space, to sever its connections with the rest of the system, to prevent it from drawing on the productivity of global social production and forcing it to rely on its own limited resources.

[...] the wage is not the only form through which the reduction of humans to abstract labor under capital is accomplished. Not in the Third World, not in the First. In all worlds where it holds sway the central problem for capital is the imposition of work, how it manages to do that is purely secondary.

But what, some may ask, of the peasants who produce a surplus they sell on the market? Are these not petty bourgeois producers and outside the working class? The answer is that they are still very much part of the working class if the result of their work is only self-reproduction. It does not even matter if they hire waged labor, if they are only earning subsistence. These peasants are essentially piece workers for capital and the per-unit price they obtain for their agricultural products is their piece rate.

It quickly becomes apparent to anyone who has read Engels and Stalin that Althusser and friends have added almost nothing to the original discussions of historical materialism except a more obscure vocabulary and a deeper scientific gloss. We are still left with a lifeless sociological taxonomy of modes of production, the unresolvable problems of the interactions between the base/superstructure dualism, the mystery of the articulation of modes, the absence of class struggle, and a fetishism of production that justifies contemporary socialism.

[...] despite the originality and usefulness of their research into the mechanisms of capitalist domination in both the economic and cultural spheres, and indeed precisely in the formulation of those mechanisms as one-sidedly hegemonic, Critical Theorists have remained blind to the ability of working-class struggles to transform and threaten the very existence of capital. Their concept of domination is so complete that the "dominated" virtually disappears as an active historical subject. In consequence, these philosophers have failed to escape the framework of mere ideological critique of capitalist society.

As Tronti pointed out, under the conditions of the unskilled mass worker, work itself could only be seen as a means of social control to be abolished, not upgraded. This understanding led directly to the realization that the basic characteristic of working-class struggle in this period is not only an escape from capital but also an escape from existence as working class. The aim of the mass worker is to cease to be a worker, not to make a religion of work.

[Quoting Marx:] "Bourgeois economy thus provides the key to the economy of antiquity, etc. But it is quite impossible [to gain this insight] in the manner of those economists who obliterate all historical differences and who see in all social phenomena only bourgeois phenomena. If one knows rent, it is possible to understand tribute, tithe, etc., but they do not have to be treated as identical."

Aufheben, Fortunati and Federici

I read Aufheben's review of the Arcane of Reproduction (by Fortunati) years ago. Even though I thought it was a generally correct analysis of a terrible book (or a terrible translation), I thought Aufheben's conclusions were false. I recently read Federici's latest book, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. I think I can now effectively say why Aufheben are incorrect.

Aufheben's conclusion about value and housework is:

So then, does housework create value, or not? We have seen in the previous sections that the answer is: no. Housework does not produce commodities, and the labour involved in it cannot be abstracted and measured as abstract labour, as a contribution to value. But we have also seen the value supposedly created by housework cannot be pinned down anywhere.
[Aufheben, The arcane of reproductive production]

I agree that without commodities at some point in the production process, it's impossible to have value. Nevertheless, housework definitely produces and reproduces labour-power. Labour-power can be sold as a commodity. The fact that Aufheben disputes this is ridiculous. Every new generation of worker for the factory, office or farm is created and maintained by house-work. What the hell do they think pregnancy, childbirth, feeding, clothing, caring for, teaching is if it isn't the production of labour-power? What is cooking, ironing, cleaning, washing, sex, etc., if it isn't the reproduction of existing labour-power? This work remains largely un-waged, mostly done by women. Is it relevant that it isn't immediately realised as a wage for it to contain value? It isn't relevant if you accept Tronti's idea of the social factory, as expanded by Federici:

Work appears as just one compartment of our lives, taking place only in certain times and spaces. The time we consume in the “social factory,” preparing ourselves for work or going to work, restoring our “muscles, nerves, bones and brains” with quick snacks, quick sex, movies, all this appears as leisure, free time, individual choice.
[Federici, Silvia (2012-09-01). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions) (pp. 35-36). Independent Publishers Group. Kindle Edition.]

One way to think of house-work is to understand that the value of house-work is bound-up in the waged-worker and realised when they receive their pay. It's not some sort of secret/hidden extra thing like Fortunati would have you believe, but it's a realisation that people aren't atomic individuals that can be separated out like little units (like bourgeoisie ideology would have us believe).

On the topic of commodity production and who produces them, Marx is clear that it doesn't matter who does it or how it is done once the world-market has been established.

No matter whether commodities are the output of production based on slavery, of peasants (Chinese, Indian ryots), of communes (Dutch East Indies), of state enterprise (such as existed in former epochs of Russian history on the basis of serfdom) or of half-savage hunting tribes, etc. — as commodities and money they come face to face with the money and commodities in which the industrial capital presents itself and enter as much into its circuit as into that of the surplus-value borne in the commodity-capital, provided the surplus-value is spent as revenue; hence they enter in both branches of circulation of commodity-capital. The character of the process of production from which they originate is immaterial. They function as commodities in the market, and as commodities they enter into the circuit of industrial capital as well as into the circulation of the surplus-value incorporated in it. It is therefore the universal character of the origin of the commodities, the existence of the market as world-market, which distinguishes the process of circulation of industrial capital.
[Marx, Capital Volume 2, Chapter 4, "The Three Formulas of the Circuit"]

[...] a commodity produced by a capitalist does not differ in any way from that produced by an independent labourer or by communities of working-people or by slaves.
[Marx, Capital Volume 2, Chapter 19, "Former Presentations of the Subject"]

Once the world-market exists, pretty much everything becomes subject to its rules. A tribe of savages could collectively work together to produce a commodity. Why is a marriage not treated in the same way? The nuclear family expends the labour-power that is realised as exchange-value in the form of the waged-worker's pay cheque. It's a simple as that.

The value of housework can be most clearly revealed through contemporary history. This is because housework is moving from being entirely hidden through the naturalised forms of love and marriage to the waged form.

As the participation of women in waged work has immensely increased, especially in the North, large quotas of housework have been taken out of the home and reorganized on a market basis through the virtual boom of the service industry, which now constitutes the dominant economic sector from the viewpoint of wage employment. This means that more meals are now eaten out of the home, more clothes are washed in laundromats or by dry-cleaners, and more food is bought already prepared for consumption.
[Federici, Silvia (2012-09-01). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions) (pp. 107). Independent Publishers Group. Kindle Edition.]

Aufheben are incorrect. There is an immense secret being kept - even with generations of feminism from the 1960s until the 2010s and certainly within Marxism - that a huge proportion of the Earth's wealth is generated by unwaged (generally women's) work. Does this work create value? In Fortunati's sense, no. In Marx' sense, definitely.

The Society of the Spectacle

I recently re-read The Society of the Spectacle. I read the Knabb translation.

There is a pdf of the book online and physical copies are available. I needed it for my Kindle, however, so I downloaded the HTML, cleaned up the document and converted it to a mobi format.

UPDATE: Notes from the Sinister Quarter has created a superior version of this book. Go and get it from their website.

Below are some interesting quotes I found during this reading:

Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorenson continued to write speeches for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead man’s public persona.

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults — people who are masters of their own lives — are in fact nowhere to be found.

Like the old religious fetishism, with its convulsionary raptures and miraculous cures, the fetishism of commodities generates its own moments of fervent exaltation. All this is useful for only one purpose: producing habitual submission.

The plain facts of history, however, are that the “Asiatic mode of production” (as Marx himself acknowledged elsewhere) maintained its immobility despite all its class conflicts; that no serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal lords; and that none of the slave revolts in the ancient world ended the rule of the freemen. The linear schema loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that has ever won;

Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle as a whole serves as his looking glass. What he sees there are dramatizations of illusory escapes from a universal autism.

Occupy Melbourne

I went to my first Occupy Melbourne general assembly this evening (the 16th they've had). It wasn't deliberate, I was walking on Swanston St, eating my chips & tomato sauce, and there they were. I stayed for a couple of hours. My impressions follow.

I'm not very good with numbers, maybe there were 100 people. They used the (predominate) megaphone and the human microphone. Decisions were run on a consensus basis.

It was very much a left ghetto event. However, it was as though the factions had set their differences aside for participation in Occupy Melbourne.

The first hour was reports from various workgroups (legal, direct action, media, etc.) on what they’d been doing since the last GA. The legal team were going to court over whether Occupy Melbourne could have structures and political posters at Treasury Gardens. They wanted people to await the outcome of legal proceedings before Occupy Melbourne decided to do anything more.

I was disinterested by the first hour. If I were a part of Occupy Melbourne, maybe I’d have been more interested (but probably not).

After the reports there were some more substantial suggestions. The first motion was that Occupy Melbourne has a minute silence for the dead of WWI. I was shocked. I had thought that nothing so conservative would ever dare to be tabled. A show of hands for, then against. There was massive dissent. It was quickly reformulated as "all that have died in all wars". There was massive dissent. Others spoke against war per se. They didn’t want to honour victims, they wanted to attack the perpetrators of war, the 1%. I was encouraged by this, but by then, 10-20min of my life had already disappeared before the motion was thrown out. (I definitely would have walked away forever if it had been accepted in any of its forms.)

After, there was a proposal that we build structures on Saturday, regardless of the legal outcome. There was general (60-70%) support for this. One dissenter made an absurd analogy to guerrilla tactics saying "now is not the time to attack but harry the enemy." This received quite a bit of support. One commenter riposte with "This isn't the Vietnam war." Another dissenter talked of not wanting to jeopardise legal proceedings (the interim outcome, everyone already knew, would be known before Saturday). This rhetorical nonsense (clearly suffering for causal misdirection), received even more support than the guerrilla fighter. However, speakers for or against were unable to sway the numbers significantly. (I voted for occupation with structures, too horrified by the nonsense of the dissenters to abstain any longer.) It was decided to revisit the issue on Saturday. After that, I left.

I was generally quite impressed. For all my critical thoughts, it seemed like a movement with promise. Are the "Occupys" around the world the beginnings of a 21st century soviet? I don't know. I don't think anyone could know that. They probably aren't though. They'll probably fizzle and burn out. To avoid that fait, they need to inspire people to take control of their lives. I have no idea how they're going to do that. Hundreds of years of failure gnaws at the edges of the general assembly.

Decision making

The last role-playing session ended on a crucial dilemma; does the group continue tracking horse thieves into the night, or do they stop and rest at nightfall, continuing the hunt on the morrow? One player was in favour of pursuing into the night (or at least until the torches ran out - 4 to 5 hours). Three were opposed to the notion. As the game master, I must admit I thought it would be more fun if they continued the chase, so perhaps, one and a half in favour.

We resolved the decision in probably the worst way, flipism. Afterwards, I thought through the ways groups can make decisions. They are

• Consensus
• Majority rule
• Flipism
• Minority rule
• Splitting the group
• Rational argument
  

Clearly consensus is a terrible idea. It's little more than formalised coercion. Majority rule is better than consensus, at least the dissenters can announce their reservations even though they accept the decision. Still, it's a bad idea (what if the minority are correct in their beliefs?)

Flipism is the worst of the lot, but maybe in things like RPGs it can be fun. I thought it was fun to see the group slowly be influenced into continuing the pursuit, only to see the process break-down on the last person.

Splitting the group is also completely valid, if somewhat dramatic. Nevertheless, there should be nothing stopping one or more people leaving the others behind.

Rational argument, that is, arriving at a decision based on looking at all known options and collectively deciding which is the best, is the finest way to solve a problem. It's too bad that few use it. (I'm not sure how well it fits the fantasy world of Glorantha, however.)

The crazy thing was that - during the session - I'd forgotten all about minority rule. Often in RPGs a leader forms simply because the others aren't very communicative or are disinterested. This wasn't the case with this group/session. I had a bunch of free thinking anarchists roaming Glorantha. This will not do. A leader shall emerge. At the very least, it'll create more interesting dynamics; those that don't lead, rebel. Also, having one more option to fall back on is always a good thing.

On Haiti

Vanessa and I just finished a skype chat. She's living/working in a remote area of Haiti. It had an earthquake earlier this year, is currently experiencing an outbreak of cholera, and there is a cyclone on the way. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

----------------

l: what u having for lunch? do they have many corporate food places? mcdonalds? subway?

V: i had lunch hours ago

l: oh yeah. it's the evening.

V: squashed fried bananas
V: rice
V: crushed pea sauce
V: and lots of leaves, i think cooked in meat unfortunately
V: wasnt so bad, apart from the meat
V: i havent seen a mcds
V: chains dont seem to exist here
V: not even supermarket chains
V: most of the supermarkets are lebanese owned
V: and there's a few bakeries that also do burgers and McDs type stuff

l: oh right. well, hopefully the aid people will do something about that. might be a good emerging market soon. heh heh.
l: sounds a bit crap there at the moment though. i'm pretty interested to go and see.

V: ha well yeah they've already had an effect on the supermarkets, massive new one opened recently, can get everything there
V: even tofu

l: is the government ok at the moment?

V: elections coming 28 nov
V: seems like its going to be 'stable' though

l: is it two-party?

V: i don't think so
V: there's millions of presidential candidates

l: not a real democracy then

V: ha, but i think the guy who will probably get in is friends with current pres
V: and he's directeur of some massive company i believe

l: so overall it's a good place to be?

V: i like being in the mountains
V: it's pretty quiet and i think i'm going to keep interested in my work so that's good

l: what happened to the guy with cholera?

V: the first guy was fine i think, but there were many more cases up there since
V: been about 300 deaths i think now
V: but i'm told official stats seem a lot lower than reality
V: want to talk to my friend who works in camps in city tonight, see what's happening there, must be crazy

l: yeah, couldn't be good with lots of people living in poverty, all in one place.
l: it isn't overly infectious is it? just health related.

V: what do you mean? pretty infectious i think
V: you don't want to shake hands with someone who has got it
V: but pretty easy to treat
V: it's just that a lot of people don't realise how serious it is and so don't react
V: and it would be pretty hard to walk for several hours to get to nearest clinic if you got it in the mountains

l: oh right. i guess i must have half-known that, but it seemed weird because it is so related to water.

V: well admittedly i don't know how long the bacteria survives outside of water

l: so what do they do up there?

V: just a whole lot of farming
V: corn, beans...
V: rice, bananas, avocados, some root vegies

l: animals too?

V: yeah lots of animals, but they don't seem to eat them very often
V: although supposedly they eat cats and dogs

l: well, nothing wrong with that. in many ways it's a good idea. you don't have to farm them for meat.

V: lots of chickens but the chickens lay their eggs anywhere so not a whole lot of egg collection
V: nothings very organised
V: but lots of mules and horses etc to transport things to markets

l: and just dirt roads?

V: in the mountains its really just walking tracks
V: but they are improving the road leading to Chambo, which is the last town i can drive to
V: it may even be all bitumen to Chambo by the time i leave
V: but suspect they doing it all pre-election and then there may not be much after

l: and then you walk over hills to the village and then on to your hut?

V: its actually pretty flat to get to my house
V: the mountains start a bit further north from my village
V: i walk through the river a couple of times
V: its a pretty nice walk actually
V: and weather is cooling down a lot at the moment so even better

l: many trees near there?

V: not many. i really miss the trees
V: around my village there are some, but surrounding hills are bare
V: have to get into the mountains where i was before to see trees

l: u going to start planting some? or is it not really anything to do with your job?

V: not really... maybe could do it about the water sources
V: but they really need trees
V: but if a program did just start planting them, just like that, they would just be cut down to make charcoal...
V: need to do a few other things at the same time as planting i think

WorkChoices and Fair Work Australia

Being a little ignorant of IR policy differences between the ALP and the Liberals, I thought I'd dot-point the similarities and differences they had/have.

Similarities:

• Can only strike during a bargaining period;
• Industry-wide (pattern) bargaining is banned;
• Secret ballot required before industrial action;
• A single, national industrial relations system;

Differences:

• Focus on enterprise bargaining rather than individual contracts (this wouldn't matter except the Libs removed the "No Disadvantage Test");
• Unfair dismissal legislation is sort-of back with the ALP (so long as you've worked for 6 months in the business; 12 months if less than 15 people in the business);
• With the Liberals, laws prevented union right of entry into the workplace;

There are more differences - even less significant - however, all the differences are minor compared with the similarities.

The non-voters

I am part of the millions of Australians who don't vote. About 8% of people living in Australia aren't on the electoral roll. There are also about a million overseas who don't vote. Add to that the informal votes, up from 4% to 6% for the 2010 election and you have about 20% of the population eligible to vote who don't.

For a country that rushed in compulsory voting after the massive drop-out 1922 election (60% turnout), I am proud to announce that we're back!

Not that not voting changes anything. How can it? Voting doesn't change anything. Nevertheless, one should not encourage them. It's poor form.

Watts Riots started today, 1965

The Situationists had a little to say about the riots.

Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion.

[...]

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists [...]

[...]

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity [...]

[...]

The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers.