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 most annoying thing about Windows 7...

is when your application goes off screen and is unreachable. How can that even be possible? I would have thought that Windows would have something to detect and prevent this occurring. I just found a fix, however, so it isn't too difficult to deal with.

VB.NET cheat sheet

I've been doing quite a bit of programming in VB.NET recently. It's almost exactly the same as C# but a few things have caught me out. I've written up a small cheat sheet with the noticeable differences (plenty of websites will give you a huge list of irrelevant differences).

Keywords

C#	VB.NET
this	Me
base	MyBase
abstract	MustOverride/MustInherit
virtual	Overridable
sealed	NotInheritable
class Class : Interface	Implements (statement)
internal	Friend
static	Shared
typeof()	GetType()

If you want a static class in VB.NET, you'll need to use the Module keyword.

(One thing to note here is how much more intelligible some of the VB.NET keywords are.)

Logic

C#	VB.NET
&&	AndAlso
||	OrElse

There is no equivalent for And and Or in C#.

Numeric type suffixes

C#	VB.NET
12.34M (for Money)	12.34D (for Decimal)
12.34D (for Double)	12.34R (for Real)

Lambdas

C#	apples.Single(x => x.Colour = "red")
VB.NET	apples.Single(Function(x) x.Colour = "red")

Initialising lists and objects

C#	var apple = new Fruit { Colour = "green" };
VB.NET	Dim apple = New Fruit With {.Colour = "green"}

C#	var apples = new List { new Fruit { Colour = "red" }, new Fruit { Colour = "green" } };
VB.NET	Dim apples = New List(Of Fruit) From {New Fruit With {.Colour = "red"}, New Fruit With {.Colour = "green"}}

Anonymous types

C#	apples.Select(x => new { Colour = x.Colour });
VB.NET	apples.Select(Function(x) New With {.Colour = x.Colour})

Nulls and Nothing

If you're coming from C#, the Nothing keyword does not do what you'd expect. What would you expect the following code to do?

Dim value = ""
If value = Nothing OrElse value Is Nothing Then
    Throw New Exception()
End If

If you said "not throw an exception" you'd be wrong. Weirdly, the first condition is true but the second condition is false, so it throws. Compare with similar C# code:

var value = "";
if (value == null)
    throw new Exception();

In this case, the exception doesn't get thrown.

Barrett is an idiot

I spent 1.5 hours of my life last week listening to people talk about the "Seven Levels of Consciousness".

Richard Barrett, a man lacking wits but making up for it with entrepreneurial enthusiasm, has improved the old pyramid model of Maslow (the hierarchy of needs) by creating an hourglass model.

Old:

Improved:

One will instantly see the superiority of this new model. For one thing, it's symmetrical. And it has circles. If there is anything more scientific than pyramids, it's circles. And the number seven.

I have to say how impressed I am. Barrett has taken a relatively meaningless concept, the hierarchy of needs - wholly unproven and unprovable - and improved it by extension and inversion via the science of the Vedas. If it's science you're after, an ancient holy text is the best place to look. He's melded religious myth and pseudo-science and made a business out of it, selling it to morons world-wide.

Vedic science specifies seven levels of consciousness. These are waking, sleeping, dreaming, soul consciousness, cosmic consciousness, God consciousness and unity consciousness. It appeared to me that the descriptions of the last four of these levels of consciousness described the underlying features of self-actualisation. (From Maslow to Barrett)

One could wonder how this sort of garbage could become such a integral part of corporate consciousness, especially at the management level. But it's not an anomaly. Business is full of unproven ideas and myth. Modern myth may appear to be especially good targets of ridicule but old myths are no less absurd, merely more accepted because they've been around longer.

Euler problem 19

I started writing this blog entry a year ago. It's about an Euler problem I solved in F#. The code makes more sense to me now than it did a year ago and I haven't touched F# since then. I guess I'm just way smarter now.

---

Solving Euler problem no. 19 is the solution I'm most proud of. It's the first problem that I solved in F# with no assistance by the 'net.

The problem:

How many Sundays fell on the first of the month during the twentieth century (1 Jan 1901 to 31 Dec 2000)?

It isn't an overly complex problem but there a couple of tricky aspects. The approach that I used was to start on the first Sunday of 1901 (6th Jan) and add seven days over and over (i.e., only counting Sundays) until the end of 2000. I could have used the .NET DateTime type to solve this problem very easily, but I decided to see if I could solve the problem using my own date type.

I solved the problem by using a few F# features, namely:

• pattern matching
• tuple
• record
• list

The first problem was February. February is a prickly month. Pattern matching will solve it! The febDays function accepts a year as a parameter and returns the number of days that February has.

    let febDays y = match y with
                            | y when y % 400 = 0 -> 29
                            | y when y % 100 = 0 -> 28
                            | y when y % 4 = 0 -> 29
                            | _ -> 28

After February was ready, I needed to know the number of days in any month, given the month (as a number) and the year. I used pattern matching again. Therefore,

    let daysInMonth (m, y) =
            match m with
            | 2 -> febDays y
            | 4 | 6 | 9 | 11 -> 30
            | _ -> 31

The other interesting function was to be able to add a day to a date. I did:

    let addDay date =
        match date.day with
        | d when d < 1 || d > daysInMonth(date.month, date.year) -> failwith "Not a valid day of the month."
        | d when d = daysInMonth(date.month, date.year) -> match date.month with
                                      | m when m < 1 || m > 12 -> failwith "Not a valid month."
                                      | m when m = 12 -> { day = 1; month = 1; year = date.year + 1}
                                      | _ -> { day = 1; month = date.month + 1; year = date.year}
        | _ -> { day = date.day + 1; month = date.month; year = date.year}

The code above isn't the whole solution, but it's the interesting parts. As you can see, I pretty much pattern matched the whole solution. It's a shame that C# doesn't have pattern matching because it's a really powerful language concept.

Flat Earth vs Climate Change

The following is an exchange between me and someone I'll call Matt. He has some interesting ideas about climate change... After his response, I didn't think I could take the discussion anywhere else. He's clearly a downer and therefore not amenable to reason.

---

Well constructed and very much in line with what I think on the topic, particularly the part about The vested interests and the role of the big ball of burning gas above our heads in global warming.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/climate-change-science-is-a-load-of-hot-air-and-warmists-are-wrong-20120801-23fdv.html

Gee I’m glad I get to give an extra 500 per year to the government though.

Matt

---

Matt, I think this debate is distracting you from a much more significant dispute. The real controversy is between those that believe in the Ice Wall and the downers – those believing in the Waterfall. They both have photographic evidence:

Ice Wall:
     







Waterfall:

But whose testimonial can we believe? Personally, I think a British Naval Officer’s account is very convincing:

It would be impossible to conceive a more solid-looking mass of ice; not the smallest appearance of any rent or fissure could we discover throughout its whole extent, and the intensely bright sky beyond it but too plainly indicated the great distance to which it reached southward.

This debate is not simply an Antarctic concern, it has global ramifications that also impacts on the “theory” of global warming. If warmists are correct, the implications of an ice wall is extremely concerning. I think downers are drawn towards their “theory” more because of alarmist fear-mongering than they are by empirical evidence.

It’s even possible that their photo could have been faked!

Patrick

---

Hi Partick,

Agreed, global warming in all of its various extremist incarnations is distracting us all from much more significant debates and issues.

It is far more relevant deciding what to have for dinner tonight and we can all really make a difference here.

In light of my own experimentation and investigation it is just not possible for me to deny that the earth is warming. Just this morning I had to take about 2mil of ice off my car windows. This time last year, it was probably more like 3mil.

My position is more in line with that of the author of this article.

The question that seems to be supressed at every debate on the issue is:

How much is man kind contributing and how much is a natural cosmic or environmental cycle?

The very idea that man kind may not be directly responsible for global warming is considered heresy! In science! According to our politicians - the science of climate, the most chaotic system known to man, is decided, and we're all to blame.

In truth, what makes me most concerned is that people are tired of hearing about it and cannot fathom the thought that perhaps they have been misled to such a gargantuan degree the very world will never be the same.

It all just makes me so HAPppy!

This article was all about the global ramifications of warmist theories and the rampant misuse/misinterpretation of so called "empircal" data so I very much agree with you - individuals will use populist interpretations of statistics to prove whatever wacky theory pops into their heads.

84% of all people know that.