Old Age Marxism

The following is a response to Paul Cockshott's review of Michael Heinrich's Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, New Age Marxism. Read Cockshott's review first.

Biology

Cockshott begins his review by criticising Marx's and Heinrich's biological metaphor:

The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known

I'd agree with Cockshott that to suggest humans are better than other apes is ridiculous. There are no higher and lower forms of life, just ones that are successful (extant) and unsuccessful (extinct). However, other than using sloppy language, I'm not sure that Heinrich and Marx are saying anything controversial. If one replaced "lower" with "less complex" and "higher" with "more complex," there wouldn't be an issue. They're not actually suggesting that humans are better than other apes and they're not even really talking about evolutionary biology.

Value Theory

It's when discussing value theory that Cockshott goes awry:

The establishment of capitalist industry went hand in hand with the development of artificial sources of power: coal then oil. We also all know that in today’s world the owners of oilfields are fabulously wealthy, so might energy not be the source of value?

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. It appears as if Cockshott is suggesting that value only came into being at the beginning of capitalism. But value relates to commodity exchange, not capitalism as such. There were commodities before capitalism and therefore there was value before capitalism. Since coal and oil use, at least in any generalised form, came after commodities, how could they be the source of value?!
2. Cockshott makes a logical jump from oil/coal to energy. Oil/coal is not the same thing as energy. There have been lots of different sources of energy throughout human history with vastly different uses. E.g., burning wood for heat and food; burning candles for light; oil/coal for industrial production. Can one really jump through wood-candles-coal-oil to energy, from there to a value theory, without any theoretical complications?

Cockshott's argument is that the labour theory of value is lacking, so we must look to what science does.

If one adopts the normal method of science, the answer is simple. You see what price structure would be predicted by the labour theory of value, what price structure would be predicted by the energy theory of value, and see which theory gives the better predictions. Such tests have been done, and they show that actual prices correspond much more closely to what the labour theory of value predicts than to what the energy theory predicts. But as we will see in the next section Heinrich’s approach prohibits this sort of scientific test.

Does science really work like this? It's true that empirical measurements are essential to science, but it's at least misleading, probably downright wrong to apply empirical results to a poor theory. For a scientific theory to be accepted, it needs to make coherent, logical arguments in a purely abstract form that then fits fairly well with reality. If the theory is faulty, the evidence is irrelevant.

As an example, I could propose f = mac (force = mass * acceleration * crap). Most of the time c is 1, but occasionally I decide that it's 1.5 or .5 for masses that I have a peculiar distaste. Now, it could be, with God's favour, that the world really does agree with my formula, f = mac. Or it could be the case that we never come across masses that I don't like (e.g., invisible pink elephants). (My formula would be essentially f = ma.) Neither of these possibilities have anything to do with the fact that this formula is logically inconsistent with other physical laws.

My point: you have to sort out your theory, regardless of the evidence! Cockshott suggests you can "go through the passage from Marx above and wherever there is a reference to labour substitute energy or power and the essence of the argument would be unchanged." If that were true, Marx's labour theory of value would be wrong. It would not be theoretically sufficient. It would need to be revised or abandoned.

I do not agree for a moment that you can substitute terms in Marx's theory. For a start, Cockshott missed a crucial section, the fetish of the commodity. This grounds Marx's value theory as part of the social consciousness of humanity. The commodity, abstract labour, value-form, etc. is a psychological trick.

Abstract Labour

Cockshott truly breaks with my reading of Marx in the notion of abstract labour:

So abstract labour is the abstract expenditure of human physiological effort and society has only a certain amount of this effort available to it which can be expended in different concrete forms.

This concept is indeed ‘naturalistic’ and ‘a-historical’. It is naturalistic in that it depends on our adaptability as a species, our ability to turn our hand to any task. It is a-historical in that any society with a division of labour has abstract labour.

Marx's theory is the opposite of this view. It is concrete labour, actually doing stuff in the world, that is the only transhistorical, ahistorical or naturalistic conception of labour in Marx's theory. Concrete labour existed before capitalism, before class society. Abstract labour is vastly more modern and arises with commodity exchange. Abstract labour did not arise with the division of labour because many societies - those based on slavery or serfdom, for example - hardly measured and compared work at all. To the extent that they were not based on the exchange of commodities, they were not societies based on value and abstract labour. The key thing lacking in Cockshott's theory in these paragraphs is a clear understanding of the history of social production.

I.I. Rubin sorted out the issue of abstract labour and physiological effort long ago:

Marx never tired of repeating that value is a social phenomenon, that the existence of value (Wertgegenstandlichkeit) has "a purely social reality" (C., I, p. 47), and does not include a single atom of matter. From this it follows that abstract labor, which creates value, must be understood as a social category in which we cannot find a single atom of matter. One of two things is possible: if abstract labor is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value also has a reified-material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labor must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labor with the historical character of the value which it creates. The physiological expenditure of energy as such is the same for all epochs and, one might say, this energy created value in all epochs. We arrive at the crudest interpretation of the theory of value, one which sharply contradicts Marx's theory. (Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, Chapter 14: Abstract Labour)

Cockshott's theory becomes incredible problematic when we bring in temporal concerns. If abstract labour is physiological effort, what can you say about that effort when the value of the commodities you've already produced halve in value because a competitor produces the same commodity for much cheaper? How does your physiological effort - that you've already expended - suddenly disappear into the ether? As abstract labour is the substance and measure of value, you've got a problem explaining where it went to.

Cockshott says:

On the other hand there is no doubt that were we to accept Heinrich’s reading we would have to abandon any claim that Marxian analysis of value was scientific. Science rests on the testability of its propositions and has to be wary of hypothesising causal entities which are in principle unmeasurable. If we say with Heinrich that the labour time that creates value can not be independently measured, can only be inferred from the price at which things sell, then you no longer have a testable theory.

Yes, it's true, we don't have a testable theory in the same way that a lot of the physical sciences do. If you tried to measure every aspect of commodity production, concrete labour-time, physiological equivalents, prices, etc. you would not arrive at Marx's critique of political economy. You would arrive at the tools of appearances that we already have: supply/demand curves, employment rates, economic statistics, etc.

Marx's critique has many complexities and subtleties that does not make it appropriate for empirical measurement as proof in the way Cockshott would prefer. One huge issue, for example, is moving from value to production prices and average profits. (See: Value and Production Price)

Finally, possibly the worst part of Cockshott's review, is a comment on a quote from Marx to Kugelmann:

“It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves.” One can scarcely have a more explicit assertion of the natural and a-historical basis of abstract labour than that.

However, Marx was not talking about abstract labour in slightest! He was simply talking about the necessity for humans to work. Humans, from the time when we developed self-awareness, have had to work to survive. We need to gather, sow, reap and kill for food. We need to bring-up the young, collect water and dispose of waste. We need to look after the old. We will have to do this until we cease to exist as a species. Nothing, not pre-class society, slavery, serfdom, mercantilism, capitalism or communism is going to prevent this necessity for work. All that changes is how we organise work in society, as the most social species on the planet. What does abstract labour have to do with it? It is nothing but the form of how we are choosing to work at the present time, under capitalist conditions.

To suggest that abstract labour is going to be the form of society, not only of capitalism, but also communism, brings nothing but horrible images of totalitarian monsters into our mind.

Down with measurement!

Critique of the Gotha Programme

The Critique of the Gotha Programme (text) was written by Karl Marx in 1875 as a response to a document by the nascent Social Democratic Party of Germany. It was one of Marx's last writings (he died in 1883). The Wikipedia page describes the SPD as "one of the first Marxist-influenced parties in the world." It's difficult to see how that could be true given Marx's deep criticisms of the Gotha Program (which was adopted by the party). It is not until the Gotha Program was eventually replaced by the Erfurt Program (text) in 1891 that the statement on Wikipedia starts to have some truth to it. Engels wrote a critique of the Erfurt Program.

As usual, I've made the text into an e-book: http://sdrv.ms/10zf70H

Wealth, Value and Labour

I remember reading this document ten years ago and being immediately confused by Marx's distinction between wealth and value. I remember Anthony patiently trying to explain it to me. I kind of half got it, but not really. It's taken fifteen years for me to understand the entire scientific critique of political economy that Marx presents. Even a year or two ago I still refused to accept it on scientific grounds. I could not fully grasp the basic distinctions and categories. Turns out that Marx was correct.

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning.

I'm not alone in my failure to understand Marx's critique. The SPD didn't understand it in 1875. They don't understand it today. Most Marxists don't understand it. To the great misfortune of millions of people, the pre-existing communists of the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. didn't understand it either. Marx is clear, but it is difficult to understand, especially if you grow up in a world almost entirely dominated by the bourgeois mode of production. To make matters worse, there are a lot of people who don't want to understand it or don't want you to understand it.

The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

The only other modern scientific theory that has come under sustained attack is the theory of evolution. That attack, almost entirely by religious forces, continues into the 21st century. Nevertheless, even at its most ferocious, the scale of the attack on evolution barely registers compared to the scale of the attack on the scientific critique of capitalist society.

Higher and lower stages of communism

The Critique of the Gotha Programme gets you thinking about a future communism. One of the notable things Marx discusses is the lower and higher orders of communism. I used to find this splitting of the idea of communism problematic, but I don't think I do anymore. Marx's justification is:

What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

Lower order communism is best described as "To each according to his contribution."

[...] the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Marx described higher order communism as:

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Of course, money needs to be abolished immediately. However, there is no longer a need for labour vouchers. We have these wonderful machines - computers and the Internet - that we could use to track peoples' contributions and ensure necessities are distributed correctly. The logistics of this isn't trivial; keeping track of billions of people wouldn't be easy. However, Facebook already tracks one billion accounts. It isn't a monumental effort to extend this infrastructure so we could record vital information on the entire population of the planet. A new form of distribution needs to be quickly realised. A disruption to distribution (or a failure to transform existing distribution) is where there is a huge risk to lives from starvation and disease.

If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.

The state

There are some interesting comments on the state in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx is very critical of the idea of the "free state." Engels, in his letter to August Bebel, sums it up really well:

All the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term. The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen ["commonalty"] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.”

Marx has some good stuff on the state and education:

"Elementary education by the state" is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people!

Ultimately, Marx seals the fate that the SPD succumbed to.

The German Workers' party — at least if it adopts the program — shows that its socialist ideas are not even skin-deep; in that, instead of treating existing society (and this holds good for any future one) as the basis of the existing state (or of the future state in the case of future society), it treats the state rather as an independent entity that possesses its own intellectual, ethical, and libertarian bases.

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.

The Burning Wheel review

I've heard some good things about The Burning Wheel role-playing game. It attempts to fully integrate character actions into the story. This is a very good idea and what should drive RPGs.

Game System

I dislike the basic game system. It uses dice pools. You roll a number of six-sided dice and count results of 4 or more. If the count fulfils the number required, you succeed in your action. If not, you fail. The reason why I dislike this system is that you always have to grab different numbers of dice, spend a couple of seconds figuring out if you succeeded (not really knowing what your chances were) and pick up, from the floor, a lost die because you had to roll 5 of them. It just screams of a design by someone who doesn't understand probability or how to get take the tedium out of RPGs.

What you are looking for when rolling a die is a way to take a decision out of the hands of the players and game master, and into the hands of chance. Generally, the result is binary (success/fail), occasionally more interesting (critical success, success, fail, fumble), but it's never anything that requires such an involved method as what Burning Wheel uses. Obviously, flipping a coin won't work. However, does that mean you want varying numbers of dice, a variable "success" requirement (4 or above, 3 or above, 2 or more) or varying counts required to succeed? E.g., in The Burning Wheel, you could need 5 "successes" with 7 dice, each "success" being a roll of 3 or more. Not only that, occasionally when you roll a six you get to roll another die! Argh! What is the point of all this complexity?

What is better: Take all those variables into account and figure out your percentage chance of success and roll a d100. What is best: Ditch the system entirely and use something sensible.

RPG advice

It's not all bad news. The book is really very good in describing what roleplaying games are all about. It's about characters and story and their interaction. Dice, the book explains, are used whenever you can't just say "yes" to a request by a player. That is, if the character wants something that someone doesn't want it to have, you roll. Keeping this in mind when playing RPGs is invaluable.

There is also the "Let it Ride" rule. This is such a simple and seemingly obvious rule that I'm surprised I've never used it. It can apply to any RPG. It is, essentially: Just roll once to perform a task, no matter the subtlety or the game time involved. Rolling multiple times can often mean you didn't get the result you really wanted. Learn to deal with the result rather than re-rolling.

Characters

Another extremely good idea are the beliefs, instincts and traits of a character. (In reality, only beliefs and instincts are innovative. Traits already exist in many games, like Savage Worlds' edges and hindrances and RuneQuest's gifts and compulsions.) A player is instructed to write down three beliefs that their character has (e.g., "the poor are little more than pebbles to be trodden on"). If the player plays their character inline with their beliefs, they are rewarded. Attributing beliefs, instincts and traits to characters distinguishes them from other characters much better than stats ("my character is strong") or roles ("my character is the thief") do.

However, having described these new ways of characterisation, The Burning Wheel then imposes a rather complex reward mechanism that the author calls "artha". It's all too much complexity and I can't see how it does anything other than detract from the storytelling, which seems at odds with the overall idea of the RPG. I'd much rather have my players write down their beliefs, instincts and traits and simply award a RuneQuest improvement point (or D&D XP) whenever they play their characters correctly. A storytelling RPG should be all about simplifying and adding ways to improve the storytelling process, not hindering it by adding complexity.

Duel of Wits

The duel of wits sub-game is an clever attempt to undertake social conflict as part of a game. It's an expanded rock-paper-scissors. Players write down a series of argumental/rhetorical volleys, each as a type of action. In a duel of wits, the player may:

• Avoid the topic
• Dismiss your interlocutor
• Feint
• Incite
• Obfuscate
• Make a point
• Rebut
  

Each action interacts with the other actions differently. Each speaker writes down a series of three actions at a time and they are played off against each other. The actions resolve simultaneously. This all needs to be role-played at the same time too. You can't just say "I make an eloquent point."

It's a clever system, but it seems too complicated. I don't see why one needs to formulate social interaction. In fact, once you have the idea of a debate in your head, you couldn't you allow the discussion to evolve more organically, rather than systematising it?

Combat System

The combat system is similar to the duel of wits. Players write down their actions in a series of volleys and all combat occurs simultaneously (like in Diplomacy). Actions are:

• Avoid
• Beat and bind (attempt to knock away a weapon)
• Block
• Charge/Tackle
• Counterstrike
• Disarm
• Feint
• Great Strike
• Lock (i.e., grapple)
  
• Push
• Strike
• Throw Opponent

I like it. It's simpler than most combat systems and yet there are a whole heap of cinematic options that could result in some fairly interestingly unpredictable battles. Still, I do kind of like the control you get in turn-based games like RuneQuest (which has all those combat manoeuvres and more).

Conclusion

The simultaneous conflict in Burning Wheel is a cool idea. I could see how that would be very fun to play. It might even speed up the often very slow combat sequences in RPGs. The way characters are created and played is also really cool. Nevertheless, I can't see why I'd ever play the Burning Wheel. The basic game mechanic (dice pools) is dire and infects every element of the game. It's too complicated and too tedious. Furthermore, there are too many rules! It's a 300 page book, almost entirely made up of rules. I'd need to completely re-work the whole thing to make far less mechanistic and complicated.

However, it's not all bad news. A lot of the ideas from the Burning Wheel went into making Diaspora. The end result for that RPG is very different. But that's for another day.

Kindle Surprise

The best thing I've noticed about the Kindle since getting it last week, is the superb dictionary integration. It works better than it does on the iPad version. This is a feature I have wanted to have for years; almost instant look-up of the meaning of a word. Not only that, but if you read in another language, you can install a new dictionary and use that instead. You can also select the definition and save it for later revision.

This is a feature that every operating system should have built-in. One should be able to instantly look-up the meaning of any work at the click of a button. Why OSX and Windows fail to do this, I do not know.

Some new words:

reave v. (past and past participle reft ) [no obj.] ARCHAIC carry out raids in order to plunder. [with obj.] rob (a person or place) of something by force: reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast. [with obj.] steal (something). reaver n.

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hummock n. a hillock or knoll. a hump or ridge in an ice field. NORTH AMERICAN a piece of forested ground rising above a marsh. hummocky adj. mid 16th century (originally in nautical use denoting a small hillock on the coast): of unknown origin.

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broil1 v. [with obj.] NORTH AMERICAN cook (meat or fish) by exposure to direct heat. [no obj.] become very hot, especially from the sun: the countryside lay broiling in the sun. late Middle English (also in the sense ‘burn, char’): from Old French bruler ‘to burn’, of unknown origin.

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expostulate v. [no obj.] express strong disapproval or disagreement: he found Fox expostulating with a young man. expostulation n. expostulator n. expostulatory adj. mid 16th century (in the sense ‘demand how or why, state a complaint’): from Latin expostulat- ‘demanded’, from the verb expostulare, from ex- ‘out’ + postulare ‘demand’.

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arabesque n. 1 [BALLET] a posture in which one leg is extended backwards at right angles, the torso bent forwards, and the arms outstretched, one forwards and one backwards. 2 an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines, originally found in ancient Islamic art: [as modifier] arabesque scrolls. 3 [MUSIC] a passage or composition with fanciful ornamentation of the melody. mid 17th century: from French, from Italian arabesco ‘in the Arabic style’, from arabo ‘Arab’.

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capon n. a castrated domestic cock fattened for eating. caponize (also caponise) v. late Old English: from Old French, based on Latin capo, capon-.

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faugh exclam. expressing disgust: ‘Faugh! This place stinks!’. natural exclamation: first recorded in English in the mid 16th cent.

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embrasure n. an opening in a wall or parapet which is bevelled or splayed out on the inside, typically one around a window or door. embrasured adj. early 18th century: from French, from obsolete embraser (earlier form of ébraser) ‘widen a door or window opening’, of unknown ultimate origin.

Kindle vs iPad vs "real" books

My Kindle arrived yesterday. It's good. Unlike most people who have commented on it, I bought it after getting an iPad. I was so impressed by how easy it was to read with an electronic device that I decided to buy something dedicated to it. It works exactly as expected.

Good things about ePaper devices (Kindle, Kobo, Nook, etc.) compared with a tablet:

• Smaller and lighter
• Battery lasts longer
• Can read outdoors
• Better quality screen

Goods things about the iPad, for reading:

• Big screen, colour and zoom (i.e., I wouldn't use an ePaper device for PDFs)
  
• Self lit (good for reading at night without a light)

One stupid thing that both types of devices don't really understand yet is that they're not paper books. e.g., the software is happy to end a page half-way through a sentence. For what purpose? To force me to keep reading? What it should do is end on the last complete sentence that fits on the page. A very minor complaint, however.

It's a new age for books. What will happen:

• Individual prices will plummet (they're already zero for books out of copyright)
• You can have any number of books and they take up the same space as one. Actually, the idea of book having/ownership is now completely absurd.
  
• Nothing will ever go out of print
• Quality will replace availability (many, many times I have wanted a book and bought something that wasn't as good because I couldn't find the one I wanted)
• People will fetishise "physical" books like they do LPs/CDs, DVDs and everything else that becomes immaterial. What they don't understand is that it's not the form that's important, it's particular instances. i.e., The Secret is a shit book no matter how it's read.

Is ePaper the coming communist revolution? Unfortunately, no. It's just nice to be able to stop collecting another type of thing.