W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’

Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings? Read more↴

A footnote in Capital:

In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find “worth” in the sense of value in use, and “value” in the sense of exchange value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflexion.

Marx misses a trick here by failing to point out why English has this strange dichotomy. Read more↴

On of the criticisms of object-oriented ontology which has some currency is the suggestion that it is a form of, or a philosophized alibi for, commodity fetishism. And this has a superficial plausibility; doesn’t the focus on objects enact the kind of reification that Marx criticizes. I don’t think this plausibility is more than superficial, though, because it misunderstands object-oriented ontology and, more importantly, misunderstands commodity fetishism. In fact, object-oriented philosophy might provide a useful way of analyzing commodity fetishism which we could use to provide a Marxist corrective to the banality of much leftist critique of reification (such as that of Axel Honneth). Read more↴

It’s unfortunate Marx was so bad at maths. Well, bad isn’t quite the right word, as he often expends a great deal of effort and creativity establishing the various mathematical conclusions he needs to establish, even when the conclusions are obvious. It’s rather wearing slogging through a whole chapter to finally get to the conclusion and realize what Marx has been trying to point out is the difference between the mean and the median. I do wonder what mathematical education was like in 19th century Prussia; Marx was an educated man, but seems to know less maths than you’ld expect from an 11 year old today.

Except, this mathematical inability turns out to reveal something important about Marx’s method. Read more↴

As the audience for a high-school comedy that presents detailed debates within Marxism is probably limited to, well, me, I guess The Trotsky is the closest we’re likely to get. And it’s a pretty good film, although of course I am disappointed by the limited engagement with the details of Bolshevik theory within the film. The biggest limitation is that no-one in the film seems to have any conception of anything left of liberalism, union representation and some kind of fuzzy humanitarian conception of “social justice.” Nonetheless, the adding of even the trappings of socialist politics to a high-school film is entertaining, and there are various minor moments in the film that are interesting. Read more↴

There’s a fine line, when you encounter work close to your own, between the excitement that someone else considers your little area worth working on, and the worry that they might already have written the work that you are struggling to put together. This happened for me most recently when reading Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins. As I’ve been trying to write about ways in which class reductionism misrepresents Marxism, Anderson’s detailed investigation of Marx’s writings on race, nationalism, and non-Western societies looked like it might render my gestures in that direction irrelevant. Luckily for me, Anderson’s book is actually the best sort of work to encounter, as it contains a huge amount of material on which one could build, while leaving enough theoretical space for others to do that building. Indeed, it is this combination of Anderson’s great aggregation of material with his comparatively sparse theorization of it that leads me to some thoughts about methodology for those of us attempting to construct theory through close dialog with particular texts and authors. Read more↴