/lit/ - Literature

>>16935218
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Leopold and Loeb? I thought not. It's not a story the Jedi would tell you. The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.

>>16935218
Isn't value form just money/the commodity exchanged?

rich bad proletariat good

>>16935218
no.

>>16935218
Commodity fetishism:
>John and Peter
>John's mother knits him a blanket
>Peter sees blanket
>Peter buys a blanket
>Peter thinks that his blanket and John's blanket are the same because he only sees that they're blankets.
>Peter doesn't understand that John's blanket has special value because it was made by his mother
>Peter thinks the blanket is the object of value and not the making and giving of the blanket.
>Peter thinks that the emotional value of the gift is in the giving of it for free and the having of it, not the production of it for free and the utility of the blanket.

>>16935518
Congrats you looked it up on Wikipedia

>>16935535
Actually it's worse. I made that up completely. I didn't check wikipedia and the only Marx I've read is like 1/2 of The Communist Manifesto.

>>16935535
Congratulations you read a post

>>16935218
tl;dr economic structures govern human life and sociopolitical forms change progressively depending on what class governs society
>WHAT THE FUCK IS THE VALUE-FORM?
I-I don't know anon! P-please don't hurt me...
>WHAT THE FUCK IS COMMODITY FETISHISM?
It's when you see a product on the shelf and think of it as a single thing contained in itself, rather than as a product of various processes and a combination of technology, labour power and raw materials.

Marx was concerned with analysing the up-and-coming industrial production and bourgeois society of the Europe of his time. In this setting, a range of concerns with the alienation of man, from fellow man, from nature, from labour, from himself, led him to a thorough inquiry into the structure and functioning of wage-labour, actual and ideal social relations in the manner of production, circulation and expansion of value. Under conditions of waged labour, labourers meet patrons on the market to sell them their labour, their labour as an abstracted entity (alienating a part of themselves). This contracting is made to have the appearance of a free exchange, each participant acting according to his or her own self-interest, obscuring relations of domination and exploitation. This can be quickly compared to non-capitalist domination: a king may select a boy from a crowd to be his sex-slave, maintain a fire near him, clean his feet etc. This is open and acknowledged domination, contrasted to the contractual equality of bourgeois society. Under this type of social organisation, this abstracted entity can be exchanged for, using a generalised medium of exchange: money. As a general medium, money can be exchanged for anything. The linen cloth manufactured in a factory (formerly through a rural domestic putting-out system), has a form with certain characteristics - raw material from a particular quality, density, size, colour, smell. In exchange, however, this form does not cover the whole linen: to exchange it in return for money, means it needs to have a certain value. The linen, therefore, takes on the form of value, expressed and realised in money. This value, says Marx - building on the earlier work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Mill and some others - is the value of labour-power, more precisely: socially necessary labour-power (that is, labour-power expended taking into account the 'basket of goods' required for the labourer's bare subsistence, the level of technology in society more broadly which may strongly heighten output).

>>16936131
Now, when an 19th century coomer went around from a coffee bar pretending to have read Dickens to stare at so-called 'art hoes', he entered a little market to buy a new linen rag (the previous one was substantially saturated with months of cooming-output). Cloth has a value expressed in money. What is obscured in this relation between things are the crucial relations between men (in production, namely labourer and patron): cloth and copper coin only become each other's equivalent under a specific constellation, namely capitalist mode of production. The linen rag appears to develop a relationship to the coin as if the coin's characteristic of being an equivalent is inherent to it, part of its use value. While, in fact, the value of the money comes from the labour power expended, and this labour is realised in a social relations of production, which are not 'free agents' acting in their 'own rational self-interest', but is a class relation. This is where the transposing of power onto an object lies: while you and I confront each other as equals, it is as if the commodities hold power over us. We treat those commodities as having an intrinsic value, while in fact its value comes solely from our own doing. So, while the arrangement of market exchange, wage-labour, contracted between nominal equals, pursuing their rational-utilitarian ways, is the freedom so lauded by bourgeois philosophers and economists, an appearance we believe in by engaging in wage-labour and buying commodities with money, one needs to look at the actual social relations of production - marked by alienation, class struggle, exploitation - to begin to question this presentation of affairs.

>>16935218
Here you go

>>16935218

>>16935218
>>16936208

>>16935218
gib me dat fo free

>>16935218
hes just a silly guy with a cigar and pianos fall on him n shit.

>>16935218
Rich people have too much stuff. Shoot them and take it and give it to the poor people.