Yep, Morozov seems to be absolutely right:

"Benanav dubs his project “a real political economy of technology,” but leaf through the inventory and you’ll find the merchandise has been smuggled in, price tags still attached, from the very warehouse Marx spent his life trying to burn down: efficiency, innovation, trade-offs, even such neoclassical curios as the “vintage problem” and the “production frontier.”

So when he asks why I decline to do that kind of political economy, the answer writes itself: My reading of Marx—partial, perhaps; flawed, possibly—is that the task was to dynamite the categories of political economy, not to embalm them in scholastic amber and slap “realism” on the display case. That a prominent Marxist economist can wield these terms as if they were neutral instruments of reason rather than historical artifacts marinated in capitalist brine tells you something melancholy about the state of the tradition. The tools of the master’s house, lovingly polished and passed off as revolutionary furniture.

Sadly, Benanav knows exactly what he’s doing. In a footnote to his first NLR essay, he explicitly dismisses the work of German value-form theorists—who argue that the categories of political economy (value, money, labor, the firm) are not neutral analytical tools but historically specific forms of capitalist social domination, to be abolished rather than repurposed. He doesn’t mention Moishe Postone—who chided socialists for fetishizing the category of “labor” instead of finding ways to transcend it—nor Simon Clarke—who argued that the categories of political economy, so skillfully dissected by Marx, are not neutral analytical tools passed off as timeless truths but, rather, reified expressions of social relations. We can infer that Benanav would find their work impractical too.
(...)
Consider the value Benanav treats as most self-evidently balanceable: efficiency."

https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-socialist-charcuterie-board/
#Marx #Technology #PoliticalEconomy #Wertkritik #Capitalism

"[V]alue is the product of wage labour in a capitalist system, and all the things that this entails. Value is not an ontologically distinct, ‘abstract’ substance, existing in some other plane of reality, birthed into that plane by the demonic machinations of capital. Value – like gravity – is a conceptual representation of a complex process that is difficult for all of us to comprehend.

To repeat: value is not an object, but a process. Many have said this, but the implication I emphasise here is this: if value is not an object, but a process (or set of processes) it cannot be a ‘real abstraction’, insofar as this term is commonly understood to refer to something immaterial. Everything that creates value happens here, in this world, and is explainable within it, without need for reference to a wicked Narnia where a white queen of value coordinates our realm through her interdimensional spyglass."

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/on-the-bourgeois-concept-of-real-abstraction

#Marxism #CriticalTheory #RealAbstraction #Ontology #WertKritik

#Marx #Freud #WertKritik #CommodityFetishism #Capitalism #Psychoanalysis #Narcissism: "Jappe recognizes that the crux of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism is abstraction. Commodity fetishism is often understood to indicate something like consumerism: an overvaluation of a commodity, a consumer product, on the basis of desire that surpasses need or utility. Here the psychosexual connotations of the fetish sneak in the back door and pose as necessary considerations for a Marxist critique.

Marx’s use of the term in Capital Vol. I is meant somewhat ironically, mocking the limitations of the bourgeois intellect to comprehend its own constitutive categories. Marx was familiar with sociological and anthropological uses of the term, in which the fetish is a sensuous thing that takes on the qualities of the deity or deities and thus holds otherworldly power in its concrete form. Exemplary of pre-enlightenment religious animism, and hence an affront to the power of bourgeois instrumental reason over and against nature. Marx’s point is that what has become naturalized, what appears natural, in capitalism, is unreason, specifically manifested in persistent unfreedom in (social, political and economic) crisis, the unresolved and persistent self-contradiction of bourgeois society.

In Capital Vol. 1, Marx says, that ‘[t]he fetishism of commodities arises from the particular social character of the labor that produces them.’ By particular social character, Marx means the historically specific form of social relations in capitalist society, social relations mediated by labor. This appears totally natural and not as historically specific or created. The fetish-character of capital masks the essence of capitalist society as something distinct from its appearance, and hence, as something that can change."

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21688_the-self-devouring-society-capitalism-narcissism-and-self-destruction-by-anselm-jappe-reviewed-by-jamie-keesling/

Tomas Konicz on German politics, #fascism as a crisis ideology (not a conspiracy among capitalists), and the connection between the rise of AfD and the demise of German export industry: https://www.konicz.info/2024/05/11/germany-fascism-is-booming/

"The faction of capital that is most resolutely opposed to the AfD’s participation in government is therefore the German large-scale and export-oriented industry. /.../
And it is precisely the German export industry that is currently experiencing a downturn, which actually marks only the beginning of the end of the export-driven German economic model." #wertkritik

Ein okkulter Lese-Sonntag mit Heinrich 😄

#NeueMarxTheorie #Heinrich #Postone #Kapitalismus #Antifa #Wertkritik #Marxismus #Antikapitalismus

Philosophisch betrachtet ist #Geld ein sogenanntes #Subjektobjekt. Es erhält seine objektive Bedeutung ausschließlich durch die subjektive Wertschätzung derer, die es verwenden.

Der #SubjektObjektspalt hat sich aus Sicht der radikalen #Wertkritik, durch die Einführung der auf #Privateigentum basierenden #Privatwirtschaft etabliert.

Subjektobjekte können ausschließlich dialektisch durch ihre dialektische Genese verstanden werden.

Die positivistischen liberalen Wissenschaften sind an der Erklärung des Geldes bisher gescheitert. Das geben selbst berühmte klassische Ökonomen zu.

#Philosophie #Kapitalismus #Dialektik