quarrk

Just opened the trailer which has a woman saying “come to me” 3 times in a shaky whisper. Definitely not sus at family’s house

I saved this post a few days ago so I could review before responding.

It might be helpful if you clarify the origin of your question. Why did you pose it in that particular way? I ask because I don’t recall any passages from Marx stating that concrete and abstract labor are in contradiction. I’m also not sure how you get from this first question to the second question, which assumes that there is an inherent contradiction in (the concept of) concrete labor.

While the connection from Marx to Hegel is undeniable, one has to question how useful it is to attempt reading Marx as a strict application of Hegel’s “method”. Marx made enough modifications such that it’s just easier to understand Marx in his own words rather than the words of Hegel, because in the first place, we have to grant Marx his own interpretation of Hegel.

Hegel starts with concepts that are immediately linked, such as Being and Nothing. These two concepts relate to each other in their own definitions, precisely in their oppositeness. And on further examination, in an attempt to find their difference in a way that is absolute and not referential to the other, one lands in a referential circle, a paradox or contradiction. This contradiction cannot be escaped from within the narrow scope of these two concepts. Only by bringing a wider view, a speculation by the thinker, can the totality of the contradiction be understood or synthesized as a new thought object of Becoming. This Becoming is the concrete in the abstract-negative-concrete paradigm, whereas we had started from the abstract concepts of Being and Nothing in an attempt to find their individual substances, ultimately finding that they share one substance or are different aspects of it.

Searching for traces of this method in Marx are not fruitless, but it can be confusing. Marx does use the terms abstract and concrete. But he doesn’t start with abstract concepts. Instead, he starts from empirical observation, or one can say the fully developed, concrete concepts as they are expressed in material reality. Marx analyzes (splits up) the concrete concept of the commodity and finds that it contains two aspects, use-value and exchange-value. These are already understood to form a dialectical unity because we started from the completed form of the commodity; we are working in the reverse direction of Hegel. Through analysis we move from concrete to abstract. And if you’ll allow me a bit of an ellipsis here, the result of this approach finds the abstract concept of value which was hidden behind the appearances of use-value and exchange-value.

Now, this discovery of value was more-or-less already done by the classical economists when Marx arrived on the scene. But as I. I. Rubin writes, the analysis of the commodity is insufficient for understanding capital. In the first line of Das Kapital Marx says that analysis is only the starting point. There is another part that the classical economists missed: after we have analysis the commodity, having moved from concrete to abstract, we must reverse direction and build up the concrete from the abstract.

Marx: “Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely,[32] value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour time by the magnitude of that value.”

Through analysis of the commodity, we find that a concept of value necessarily emerges, and its content is labor. The more value a commodity has, the more labor is in it. But what kind of labor is it? We can’t say at this point, and that is what Marx considers the “chief failing” of the classical economists. In order to discover what kind of labor makes up value, we need to understand labor; not labor in general, but labor as it appears specifically in the capitalist epoch. Das Kapital is essentially this, Marx building up the abstract concepts of labor (and value) to see how and why they necessarily produce the concrete forms (commodities, exchange value, money, price fluctuations, etc) visible in material reality.

I’ll cut it off here since it’s Christmas and this is long enough already. Happy to answer more or elaborate as needed. I’ll leave with two good resources:

• I. I. Rubin’s essay on content and form of value. Invaluable explanation of some of the Hegelian influence in Das Kapital.
• Andy Higginbottom’s lectures on the Hegelian features in Capital

Microsoft is reopening Three Mile Island for its AI

Like most things, it’s a balance between security, convenience, and reliability. A local password manager is a great option and I’m glad it exists, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. If your password manager is locally stored and you have a hardware failure (say, you live in Asheville and your hard drive is underwater with your house) then you’re completely screwed. A cloud option is a bit more disaster proof because those services typically have mitigation plans to prevent that kind of disaster. Plus you have the convenience of device agnostic passwords.

Security theater is an overstatement. If your password manager has a data breach (which happened a couple years ago with LastPass) then 2FA offers an extra layer of protection. E.g. if hackers get your email password, and it’s short enough to be decrypted, then 2FA would save you. Of course a longer password makes 2FA less necessary, but redundancy doesn’t really hurt anything

VoIP is not supported for 2FA by some institutions like banks because it may be less secure than a conventional phone line, since it is connected to the internet. In practice, I think SMS is insecure regardless whether it is over the internet or phone line, but in any case that is why VoIP is not fully supported.

Strength training is also way overlooked for health and longevity. It has large benefits even for 90+ year olds. At that age, your hip mobility and strength is one of the most important health indicators. If you can’t get up from sitting, your quality and length of life rapidly diminish.

The DNC is faced with two fronts: a looming class war and a battle for state control within their own class. They decided the class war is more existentially threatening.

Taking a hard stance against leftist ideology and following up with this kind of blaming propaganda is necessary for them to discipline the population in much the same way that employers utilize layoffs to ward off strikes and collective action in the workplace. It works well because when bad things happen like layoffs, people are upset and look for someone to blame. It’s difficult to counter this kind of propaganda.

Good post but Lincoln doesn’t quite belong in that list. Any progressive things he did were essentially concessions he had to make to preserve the Union, which he wanted to do for non progressive ends.

Lincoln didn’t free the slaves. They freed themselves and in 1860 were the most revolutionary class in America.

Nordic countries have good transit too, but admittedly nowhere near the same throughput as a metro in China

Sen. Whitney Westerfield, a Republican from Fruit Hill who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, was one of the bill’s more vocal opponents. When he learned of the citation against a woman in labor, he called it “deplorable.”

“Where's the humanity in that response? Where is the compassion for human life? Where is the pro-life compassion for the unborn child in that response?” Westerfield said.

That cop is such a piece of shit that he’s making other Republicans ask if they’re the baddies

WHY does NYPD need all that tacticool gear to escort a handcuffed, unarmed suspect?