Status Updates From In Letters of Blood and Fir...

"For Red Rosa, Marx erred because he did not see that capitalism could not both be accumulating and reproducing on an extended scale and be a closed system of capitalists and workers." - Rosa is always right.

"Marx quoted Babbage’s On the Economy of Machines and Manufacturing (1832) at least five times in Part IV, “The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus Value,” "

"The crucial ability giving human work its value is not its nonmechanizability, but rather its self-negating capacity" - I argue, its life, which is hyper-complex, the result of two decades at least of nurturing. Labour power is never simply 'reproduced', is hyper-produced, per a sort of second law applying to human energy (the factor input is may times greater than labour's output)- the mountain gives birth to a rat

"Labor is outside of political economy in a way opposite to the exoteric character of use-values, for the discovery of the externality of labor to the field of value makes it possible for there to be a “critique of political economy” at all" - labour is the measurable, 19th century-scientific reduction of a "something" that is priceless and a bridge between nature and society. Let's call it life.

"But Marx insists that labor has no value and is not a commodity, though it is the creative source of value, that is, capitalism is a system of commodities produced by a noncommodity."

"These linear algebraic systems do not convincingly interpret Marx’s theory because they seem to take Sraffa’s method as basic: that capitalism is a positive, self-reflexive system of commodities produced by commodities per se"

"If labor is to create value while (simple, heat or Turing) machines do not, then labor’s value-creating capacities must lie in its negative capability, that is, its capacity to refuse to be labor." - a logical jump here. Labour's creative capacity lies in something machines do not or cannot do. What is it? There are options...

"It is here that the creation of surplus value is to be found: the difference between the value of labor-power and the value created by labor. On the labor-power side of this nexus is the weight of physiology and history, while on the labor side is an activity that is totally simulatable by machine, but it is in its gap that value creativity is to be found. For if machines cannot create value, then why can labor?".

"Turing’s machine theory reveals the mathematics of work."

"The strategic motivation for Marx’s restriction of value creativity to human labor was given “scientific” support through an obvious analogy with the restrictions that thermodynamics places on perpetual motion machines of the first and second kind". - "scientific" in inverted commas. Poetic, quixotic, noble, romantic in the sense of Mary Shelley.

"This was the political card that Marx played in the political game against the ideological suffocation of the machine = capital metaphor. It was an ironic card, but it has proved to be a useful one" - this dialogic interpretation of Marx opens Capital to contemporary uses. Capital is exemplary in its dialectic with contemporary (mid-nineteenth century) history and politics, not for its historical responses.

"In the face of the ideological attack arising from the depths of the system, Marx needed a direct reply. It was, of course, to point out that surplus value was the thin reed that the whole capitalist system was based upon. For all the thunder of its steam hammers capital could not dispense with labor. Labor is not the only source of wealth, but it is the only source of value" - wealth vs. value: spiritual economics

"The problem this evolutionary tendency posed was: What would be the proper human stance, resistance or cooperation? The working out of the resistance-option could be seen later in Erewhon (1872), which describes a society that destroyed all its machines in a horrendous civil war after the publication of a prophetic text, 'The Book of Machines'."

"The Crystal Palace meant to the petty bureaucrat speaking in the Notes from the Underground a final loss of his humanity, the crushing of “human” resistance to capital by scientific means."

"Ure epigrammatically eulogizes, “when capital enlists science in her service, the refractory hand of labour will always be taught docility.”"

"Marx’s choice of theoretical weapons against the value-creativity of machines was rooted in the complex political situation he and his faction of the working-class movement of Western Europe faced during the U.S. Civil War and the formation of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA)."

"Thus in the “transformation process” we have a truly organicist vision of capitalist production and reproduction, with the vegetative roots of the system sucking up the labor nutrients and transferring them vertically to the herbivores, which in turn are devoured by the carnivores, who finally transfer the original labor to the nervous pinnacles." - good image. What is sucked is life, in biological and social sense.

“Circulation, or exchange of commodities, creates no value” in the first volume of Capital.Then there are the laws of the conservation of total value and total surplus value that he postulates in the discussion of the transformation of values into prices in the third volume of Capital." - LIFE - biological and social - creates value, and life is all about exchange, and value is a social construction.