Comrade Chicklet @ComradeChicklet@radical.town

One must not merely hold onto critical consciousness – smashing one's illusions and hopes of reconciliation with a bad society –, but one must also find one's cheerfulness or calm. Otherwise one falls into depression needlessly or makes the return to self-deception all too attractive.

[Phase 1, reading 1: Pufendorf's chapter about value in 'The First Book on the Duty of Man and Citizen,' cont.]

Thirdly, Pufendorf does not yet have a concept of class struggle as such, but he does realize that buyers and sellers in general, but specifically also buyers and sellers of labor, contest the prices of goods (and specifically labor). He also notes that legal price determinations as a rule work out in favor of buyers of labor, i.e., employers. Thus, he implicitly recognizes the state's tendency to favor the bourgeoisie (although he would not put it like this himself, of course). Sadly, he just thinks of it as a special case of a general tendency to protect the interests of buyers over the interests of sellers.

Fourthly, there is a familiar point (repeated by Marx) about how coins came to be used as money. Pufendorf notes that the metals of which coins are made are durable and have properties that make them easily usable as money.

[Phase 1, reading 1: Pufendorf's chapter about value in 'The First Book on the Duty of Man and Citizen']

This was a short but quite interesting read, mostly for historical reasons. A few things stood out to me:

Firstly, Pufendorf already makes the distinctions between use value, exchange value, and value, albeit by using a different and somewhat confusing terminology. He sometimes equivocates value and exchange value which he both calls 'value par excellence,' but in his lucid moments he does distinguish between them.

Secondly, without having any grasp of the coercive laws of markets, Pufendorf already sees clearly that markets severely limit the freedom of the buyers and sellers to set prices, since they are limited by legal and conventional price determinations. Pufendorf contrasts the unfreedom of markets with the freedom of simple bartering.

EXPLANATION: I have made a political economy reading challenge for myself, consisting of four phases:

[Phase 1] Read capita selecta of classical political economy (Pufendorf, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Ricardo)

[Phase 2] Read Marx's 'Theories of Surplus Value' while comparing his representations of classical political economy to the works read as part of phase 1, to see if his critiques are solid

[Phase 3] Read Grundrisse and Capital, vol. 1-3, to get a grasp of Marx's own theoretical contributions

[Phase 4] Read classical, neoclassical and Keynesian responses to Marxian economics and Marx's critique of classical political economy, to see whether and to what extent Marx has been intelligently critiqued

It is my intention to write updates about my readings regularly in a thread (of which this toot will be the first). This is mostly for my own sake, but maybe it will also be of interest to my followers who care about this stuff

Personal responsibility is suspect whenever it is advanced as a general social principle, or given a universally applicable form.

It is almost certainly going to be used as a means of repression, after all, since it tends to promote individual obligations to meet pre-given societal norms and standards.

And not even the Kantian solution, which is to make everyone individually responsible for formulating their own obligations, is tenable. Since it assumes (wrongly) that everyone is in fact capable of formulating their own obligations, and that those who are capable of it are not, in the very process of formulating their obligations, compromised by society already.

This leads me to believe that 'personal responsibility,' as a concept, cannot be used in social contexts at all. It is a fine thing to hold yourself accountable, and even to remind others of their commitments, but any substantive notion of personal responsibility has to be kept out of the discourse.

Being a right-winger is so weird. It is literally siding with the forces of Thanatos.

Why would someone actively seek to inflict more death, destruction, and harm on human beings?

The political discourse about terror is very misleading, because it represents terror as an exception. But it is in fact the ruling principle of bourgeois society.

At every turn, people's sense of independence is undermined, and they are made to feel little by the rulers of this world. 'Freedom' is just the mistaken sense of independence of those who are not inflicted in this situation.

Class warfare, legal sanctions, and police terror are the order of the day as an always present threat, if not a lived reality. At the same time, a generalized fear-mongering is perpetrated by the institutions of the state, capital, and governmentality.

This is not a peaceful tranquility to which terror is an exception. This is a well-regimented social world, underpinned by a pervasive, civilized, and 'reasonable' terror.

Those schooled in the art of politics understand terror in this sense, not in the sense of a wild and incidental attack or lashing out, which is child's play by comparison.

In this time of Nazi invasion in the Fediverse, let's remind ourselves of the old saying of the Jacobins:

No freedom for the enemies of freedom.

Accepting the limitations of what you can accomplish is often, paradoxically, a precondition for accomplishing something. Far from being demotivating, it gives you a sense of proportion and priority. And it also helps you to not be so hard on yourself if you don't accomplish that which was impossible to accomplish to begin with.

I am having this imagination in which anarchists are rowdy but basically good kids, and Marxists are their very, very patient parents who just want to raise them right.

I am out of beer.