Ways of Seeing is a 1972 television series of (four) 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb.

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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: December 29th, 2021
  • culprit@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is an absurdity that has been normalized by society?
    333·
    1 year ago

    The basic unit of production, where capital meets labour to produce goods and services, is the capitalist firm. And every profit-maximising firm is owned by a private capital.

    Capitalists extract profits from firms. They can spend only a fraction of their profits on luxury consumption. Because if the rich spent all their profit on luxuries their capital will rapidly diminish and expire, compared to competing capitals who invest their profit in further profitable activities. Profit income must be reinvested in order to make more profit. This is the prime directive for anyone who possesses a capital sum of money.

    Owners of capital — that is capitalists — can’t put all their eggs in one basket. That’s too risky because firms can go under, or assets that store value might depreciate. So capitalists spread their risk by owning a portfolio of investments with different risk profiles.

    A typical portfolio will consist of cash held in different sovereign currencies, government, municipal and corporate bonds, shares in different companies, from risky start-ups to blue chips, and all kinds of income-producing assets, such as land and housing. Basically anything that might yield a higher than average return.

    Each individual capital must aim to maximise the return over its portfolio. If it fails it will diminish in size relative to other capitals, and eventually cease being a capital at all.

    And it’s right here that we again find the causal structure of a feedback control system. An individual capital — when we consider it as a social practice mediated by a privately owned large sum of money — also has its own goal state, sensory inputs, decision making, and ability to act upon the world in which it is embedded.

    Let’s take each of these in turn. (i) The goal of an individual capital is to maximise the average return from every dollar (or pound) invested. (ii) The “sensory inputs” are the different profit-rates earned across the portfolio. (iii) The capitalist, or the financial experts they employ, compare the different profit-rates, and (iv) the feedback loop is closed by actions that withdraw capital from poorly performing investments, and inject capital into high performing investments.

    This control loop manifests as an insatiable and ceaseless search for high returns.

    Capital doesn’t care how its money is actually used in production. It entirely abstracts from all concrete activities. The only thing it can sense, compare and use is abstract value.

    So the commanding heights of the global economy consists of an enormous ensemble of individual capitals, each manically scrambling for profit, reacting to the signals of differential returns received from its tendrils that extend to every productive activity under its rule, continually injecting and withdrawing capital to and from different industrial sectors and geographical regions. The entirety of the world’s material resources, including the working time of billions of people, are repeatedly marshalled and re-marshalled away from low and towards high-profit activities. In the space of months, entire industrial sectors may be raised up, relocated, or thrown down.

    Capitalists are possessed, mere machine components of capital.

    What about the individual people who participate in this social practice? Surely their individual consciousness, their ideas, and their behaviour matter, and make a difference?

    To a certain extent they do of course. But individuals come and go, but capitals live much longer than any individual human. The people controlled by the capital — that is the workers that supply labour to firms, and capitalists that exploit them and extract profits — are mere replaceable components in the control loop, mechanically performing prescribed functional roles.

    For example, Marx writes in Capital, that:

    “to classical economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of this surplus-value into additional capital.”

    We often say that a capitalist possesses capital. But it is more accurate to say that capital possesses them. Capitalists are the human face of an inhuman intelligence with its own logic and its own goals.

    “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality” (Communist Manifesto).

    Bigger capitals enjoy the advantage of larger portfolios, which spreads risk. In consequence, capital tends to concentrate in a few hands. So we find a large number of small capitals, and a very small number of astronomically large capitals, which earn profits that dwarf the GDP of many nation states. The scale and power of some capitals is truly titanic.

    And these titans are so much in control, that they are out of control. Again, a quote from the Communist Manifesto:

    “Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

    Every day millions of workers, around the globe, have no choice but to sacrifice their time, and their vitality, to produce new profit for the autonomous controllers. No matter how hard, long or efficiently we work, the imperative to work remains.

    Why? Because every labour-saving technical innovation takes the form of profit, which is then captured by individual capitals, and immediately re-injected into the material world to animate new activities for further profit. This is why, despite huge advances in automation, the working day remains as long as ever.

    Take another example: the logic of capital demands maximum profit extraction from firms, and that means minimising wages. Those possessed by capital live an exalted existence. But the world’s dispossessed must feed, clothe and maintain a home with an average income of about 7 pounds a day.

    Another example: it’s better to be exploited than not exploited. We are subject to the whims of the business cycle and periodic crises of accumulation. Recessions regularly throw large numbers of people out of work, through no fault of their own. Suddenly bills can’t be paid. Families are thrown onto the street, as happened in the US during the 2008 mortgage crisis, and is happening again now.

    Why? Because individual capitals are almost blind. They see only differential returns across their portfolios. And returns may be good even if unemployment is high, or human misery spills onto the streets. Capital does not care.

    Another example: capital deals in abstract value, and things that are not owned, which aren’t bought and sold, therefore have no value to it at all. So the material wealth of nature — the land, the oceans, and the atmosphere — is relentlessly plundered without any regard for the consequences.

    Capital destroys us, and the environment. The endless production and profit-making cannot stop, because each individual capital must compete to survive. Marx summarised the prime directive of capital as:

    “Accumulate, accumulate! … reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value … into capital! Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake: by this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie”.

    So all the autonomous control loops have the single-minded goal of extracting profit from the world’s activities. If an activity fails to satisfy this goal, then the controller withdraws its capital, and the activity stops.

    So at the apex of the economy we have a competing collection of identical controllers — with an atavistic, low level of demonic intelligence — which inject and withdraw a social substance that appears to possess the magical power of animation, of bringing things alive, of creation; but also appears to possess the power of annihilation, of suffocation, of bringing things to an end, of destruction.

    We are definitely not in control. And something else definitely is in control.

    So what are we really talking about now?

    We’re saying that a new kind of supra-individual control system emerged, quite spontaneously, from our own social intercourse, and then — in a very real sense — has taken on a life of its own, turned around, and started controlling us.

    Capital in a scientific, not a metaphorical sense, is a control system. And it is capital, as a control system, that ultimately creates and maintains the abstraction we call exchange-value. Capital is the abstractor.

    more here: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

  • culprit@lemmy.mltoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What are tankies? What does sea-lioning mean?
    1310·
    1 year ago

    Of all the things Kruschev would do after Stalin’s death that Stalin should’ve shot him for - running tanks into Hungary was absolutely correct

    The Communists who sided with tanks going into Hungary was how Communists earned the moniker “Tankie”

    Yet 50 years later it’s revealed that MI6 were training the rebels

    “Tankie” should unironically be worn with pride. In the fact “tankies” were absolutely correct in characterising the uprising as a semi-fascist counter-revolution (doors of jews and Communists were marked for extermination) that needed to be put down

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/mi6-trained-rebels-to-fight-soviets-in-hungarian-revolt-1359599.html

    Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war. Additional: The Truth About Hungary is a brilliant and quite short book worth reading. Published in 1957 it basically set out the character of the protests as semi-fascist and supported by the imperialist powers. Basically everything that was dismissed as Communist propaganda but has now been confirmed by the Western press. People seem to forget that Hungary only a 11 years previously was a fascist state allied with the Nazis and Left Anticommunists have continually tried to portray the uprising as a “socialist uprising but with a more human face”

    https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf

    Section from the book “The Truth about Hungary” by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940’s, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press

    "The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, “coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways.”

    “But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing.”

    “Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as ‘Fascist elements’ …” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

    “The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary.”

    "A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

    During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

    Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."