is one of the reasons crypto doesn't work is because like. it doesn't really have a use-value?
Yeah very much so. The point about machines doing all the work (we will not ignore electricity here; instead as Marx does in later chapters with coal it counts essentially as part of the machine) is spot on
Painfully true tbh
This is true elsewhere, but in interest of pedanticness I gotta point out that the Apocalypse quote is Marx using it's theoretical arguments to support his own, and in doing so (and a few other places in the book), he draws attention to Rome's similarity to English capitalism. Rather than dunking on Christians, here Marx is making an attempt to weaponise christians/ity against capitalism
Marx's use of the Bible is honestly really interesting. Expect to see more of it through Capital (and even more the earlier in his writings you go). It is inarguably the single largest literary, theoretical and philosophical inspiration Marx has throughout his life. Marx's library contained at least one copy of the Bible when he died, so it's also likely that it (like Hegel) was something he came back to time and time again.
Some more Marx-Bible facts:
In his early articles for the Rheinische Zeitung he refers, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, to both himself and other journalists as prophets and false prophets.
He closes his "Critique of the Gotha Programme" with a quote from the Bible identifying himself with Ezekiel.
He taught his daughters about Jesus as "the carpenter who the rich men killed", reciting his own version of the story himself.
According to the memoirs of German socialist Max Beer (who met Eleanor Marx), Marx rarely had much to say about religion in her memory except, when her mother and sister started going to Mr. Bradlaugh's secular Sunday services. This led Karl Marx to dissuade his wife and daughter from going there. Beer quotes Eleanor as saying: "[Karl Marx] told mother that edification or satisfaction of her metaphysical needs she would find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in Mr. Bradlaugh's shallow reasonings".
Some Jewish socialists have actually claimed him for the Jewish prophetic tradition, for example Abraham Shiplacoff's speech in the 1910s said (originally in Yiddish):
Marx was a prophet, no less so than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. With honest conviction and courage he proclaimed the economic liberation of humanity. He appealed to the workers of the world and inspired them with his conviction that they are destined to fulfill the great task of abolishing poverty, thus putting an end to wars between nations and classes, and, in doing so, realize the great thousands-year-old dream of human brotherhood.
Marx's constant references made me curious so I looked into it, and the Bible has a shocking number of condemnations of poverty/oppression and outright critiques of markets, class, urban/rural divide, and so forth. The commodity-fetishism section from last chapter is especially neat because Marx secularises prophetic condemnations of idol worship, even using the same phrases (e.g. "work of their hands").
Yeah this point about different angles is very much how I understand Marx's thought and presentation. Bertell Olmen's book Dance of the Dialectic has some a good description:
The third mode in which Marx's abstractions occur is that of vantage point. ... There are many similar, apparently contradictory positions taken in Marx's writings. They are the result of different abstractions, but not of extension or level of generality. They are due to different abstractions of vantage point. The same relation is being viewed from different sides, or the same process from its different moments.
In the same mental act that Marx's units of thought obtain an extension and a level of generality, they acquire a vantage point or place from which to view the elements of any particular Relation and, given its then extension, from which to reconstruct the larger system to which this Relation belongs. A vantage point sets up a perspective that colors everything which falls into it, establishing order, hierarchy, and priorities, distributing values, meanings, and degrees of relevance, and asserting a distinctive coherence between the parts. Within a given perspective, some processes and connections will appear large, some obvious, some important; others will appear small, insignificant, and irrelevant; and some will even be invisible.
While Marx hasn't gotten into any of that yet, I read this as foreshadowing that this labor theory of value will transcend all modes of production. That it isn't fundamentally changed whether a society is Feudal, Capitalist, or Communist.
No, the labour theory of value is only a thing in a society wherein the capitalist mode of production prevails. A communist society would be dealing with pure use-values while in a feudal society (not in the market-interstices) the focus was also use-values, not on value or its reflection exchange-value.
The quote you are commenting on specifically notes that the universal form of labour, independent of social development, is labour as creator of use-values. This labour is a constant for human society, whereas labour as a producer of value is specific to a world where the commodity-form is generalized.
The labour theory of value also doesn't acknowledge all work as labour, e.g. the persistent denial even to this day by many that housework, childcare, etc, is labour.
Marx seems to be of two minds on the LToV in Capital; sometimes he seems to actually genuinely believe that there is something fundamentally unique about human labour or that reproduction of labour-powers can be excluded from his analysis because family is a natural sphere, and sometimes he seems to be simply accepting the bourgeois definition of 'real' labour as a given for purposes of criticising it on its own terms and sees the concept of commodity-value as a purely social thing with "not an atom of matter".
The repetition in Capital is very much intentional. As best I can tell (this is my fourth time reading it) the repetition is very much Marx hammering a point in, or describing it in several different ways to try and make sure at least one method of describing it gets accross. I think its intentional because 1. this is how good teaching is done, 2. bc some of Marx's main literary inspirations (Shakespeare, Ancient Greeks, the Bible) do similarly.
this roast of the week idea is awesome
just because government actors and economists have declared that commodity money has been abolished in favor of fiat money, does not necessarily make it so
Yeah from my (very limited admittedly) understanding of high level modern economies we're on a de-facto oil-standard (as opposed to a gold-standard)
I've been struggling to do one big post so i'm gonna try doing smaller posts instead (any more posts will be in replies to this one)
One of the neat things I've noticed about the earlier chapters is how well some of these basic, abstract commodity relations manifest in the larger historical scale. Quotes from Fowkes' translation.
This describes the process of the "innocent trade" stage of colonialism perfectly. At first, the goods traded are surplus goods, things not missed. In the fur trade, some of the earliest traded furs were actually old coats because the worn fur was softer, for example. As these furs are brought into relation with e.g. guns, textiles, etc one begins to see e.g. a buffalo and in it see not a collection of use-values, but instead only it's possibility of being exchanged for traded goods.
And henceforth the need for traded goods becomes a normal social need. This can be immediately practical, e.g. bullets once the gun is relied on, or it can relate to more social practices, e.g. the Ainu's use of Japanese goods in ritual.
I.e. one begins commodity production; the traded goods are no longer just surplus goods but goods produced specifically for trading.