Month: January 2018

FRESH_ED: Do you think Marx would’ve been a good academic?

DAVID HARVEY: No! He’d been terrible. He wouldn’t have gotten tenure anywhere. First off, nobody would have known what discipline to put him in. I have a bit of that problem. I mean I come from Geography, but a lot of people think that I’m a sociologist or something else. But…so he doesn’t fit in easily into any discipline. Secondly, he didn’t complete much of his work. And I always used to have this little thing on my desk. He had a letter from his publisher that said, “Dear Herr Professor Marx: It’s come to our attention that we have not yet received your manuscript of Das Kapital. Would you please furnish it to us within six months or we’ll have to commission somebody else to write this work.”

FRESH_ED: Do you know if he met the deadline?

DAVID HARVEY: No, of course not.

The Post

Spielberg moves left of liberal in his excellent The Post. The film implicates both Parties and their major players in the extension and expansion of the Vietnam War and the thousands who died because of it. A celebration of free press as labor, love, and civic duty—our responsibility to resist in the Mario Savio sense. Not blanket anti-government, but an allegorical FU to Trump.

“The Real Winston Churchill”

So this history [link below] is missing from Darkest Hour’s hagiography, which, I admit, I loved (fell for?). The film reduces the internal conflict to Churchill vs. Halifax-Chamberlain-George VI, with the former advocating war at whatever cost and the latter an ostensibly well-stipulated treaty (both sides acting in the nation’s best interests, of course). Jacobin is no doubt correct in its account of Churchill, his personal ambitions, English nationalism, imperialism, racism, and antisemitism. But if it was Churchill and not Halifax et al. who stood up to Hitler’s Germany, is the film then excused for its “portrait of leadership,” its Ciceronian Great Man, even if Churchill in the end fell far short? I think it’s an important question for film. Darkest Hour would be the historical supplement to the beautiful, terrifying, and ultimately vapid Dunkirk, a Cloverfield for war buffs, unless Darkest Hour, too, merely serves the Brexit nation-state and the fiery, white palatines who launch those dreamy Spitfires.

“The Real Winston Churchill”

“For the recognizable background to this situation is the fact that ‘the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself.’ And if this insight were to become conscious it would indeed entail the self-negation of the capitalist class.”

Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness.

“[B]y equating their different products to each other as values, they equate their different kinds of labor as human labor. They do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. [ … . ] When, therefore, Galiani says: ‘value is a relation between persons, … he ought to have added: a relation concealed beneath a material shell.’ The determination of the magnitude of value by labor-time is … a secret hidden under the apparent movements of the relative values of the commodities. Its discovery destroys the semblance of the merely accidental determination of the magnitude of the value of the products of labor, but by no means abolishes that determination’s material form.”

Marx qtd. in Sohn-Rethel