[iDC] Social Production and the Labor Theory of Value (2)

[John Hopkins]

hallo Michael, Christian, John, et al...

> If you take that into account, saying that there is 'no resistance' makes less and less sense. Perhaps some people are tired of fighting 'against capital' and rather more interested in constructing what comes emerging beyond it?

This has got to be a truism, Michael! -- I noted the following in Christian's 
rebuttal -- where he restates the core precept of M-ism (as opposed to Y-ism or 
Z-ism)

"The central aspect and scandal is that capital exploits wage labour and other 
workers and that therefore a movement against capital is needed."

It hasn't worked, and moving against <<fill in the blank>> for 100+ years has 
gotten us only HERE, where we are.  This suggests that the cumulative everything 
(INCLUDING moving against) that has occurred has landed us where humanity IS in 
the moment.  Resistance AND passivity (the creation of ANY dominant 
techno-social pathways which are followed by herds of people) have both worked 
to further this advance into the future of the collective we-a-plague-species.

And please tells me what a lived-strategy on the granular level a "movement 
against capital" means.  This appears to be so totally theoretical and academic 
that it is almost laughable were it not for the numerous fatalities that 
occurred historically under this rubric.  And its ultimate failure to do 
anything but to bring us where we ARE NOW.

The standing and largely reified models of (social) systems (X-ism, Y-ism or 
Z-ism) are not the thing itself and are always reductive.  Their accuracy is 
variable and in their reification, they cannot reflect the constant change in 
indeterminate systems.  Clinging to them and the infinite permutations (of 
discourse around them) obscures the facing of the moment we are actually IN.  (I 
have stepped out of sensual life to write this.)

IMHO, NOW is always the time to not just talk about constructing new pathways, 
but to put ourselves well on the way of thriving day-by-day upon them to our 
uncertain ends.  This means change from what has come before -- possibly change 
in social relations like the disappearance of an intellectual 'class' -- whose 
sole purpose is, from positions of more-or-less social-security, to add words on 
words -- AND the disappearance of the social structures they inhabit which are 
simply (supporting!) sub-systems of those larger techno-social entities.

And I greatly appreciate the reflective narrative that John Sobol wrote -- it is 
  exactly these kind of lived observations, awarenesses, and considerations we 
must be engaging to understand where we ARE and what potential trajectories we 
are actually upon.  The precision of Oracle rests upon a more full awareness of 
the moment.

Could it be that WE have to actually change the forms and pathways of OUR lives?

jh