Luke McCarthy > Recent Status Updates

Alright. Back to the gay stuff…

At least 300 of the 1000+ pages of this book seem to consist of King describing various kids being chased by one particular bully… please, no more…

DNF. Hated the unnecessary, ornate adverbs which seemed to clutter every second sentence. Conceptually interesting at times, but none of the stories I read seemed to come to any kind of clarifying or unexpected climax. They tended to just state what they were about in bad, gothic pastiche. Maybe his writing improves later in his career?

Will continue this at a later date; too similar to what I'm currently writing, though not in a particularly productive way. My first Ishiguro and I'm already quite taken with the deliberate, unfussy prose.

“and your thoughts about who you are comply with the breath of the girl you are.”

“What queens we were! With piercing shrieks we met each other on the sidewalk, the piercing shriek that sometimes, walking down a perfectly deserted block of lower Broadway, rose from my throat to the sky because I had just seen one of God’s angels, some languorous, soft-eyed face lounging in a doorway, or when I was on my way to dance, so happy and alive you could only scream.”

Yes, I am half-way through reading way too many books and no, I will not finish any of them.

Unsure about this. The anecdotal style is tiring, and it seems doubtful this would do much to convince anyone not already on its side. Typology is convoluted to the point it confuses more than it clarifies, for me at least.

Something blasphemous about reading Capital and Stirner at the same time... Hate to report that I think this kind of rocks so far.

Reading all these debates about the 'labour theory of value' then Marx straight up just says: "Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society." Value is a social property, it's average determined by circulation/exchange.

"The socialist revolution suppresses fetishism, and the condition of communism to which it leads may be described as the conquest of form by matter. For in negating exchange-value communism releases the content fetishized economy imprisoned in form. It subjects the social to the individual, thus exactly reversing fetishism."

"By inviting focus on the material process occurring within the capitalist economic form, it discredits capital’s pretension to being an irreplaceable means of creating material wealth. Confusion of content and form supports the reactionary illusion that physical production and material growth can be achieved only by capitalist investment."

Opening chapter contains one of the most clarifying, articulate explications of Hegel's (and by extension Marx's) philosophy of history which I've read so far. Beautiful and concise prose.

Just finished G.A. Cohen's The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3128...).

Terrific, methodical argument against an Orthodox Marxist LTV, arguing with total clarity that even if this was true, it would not be a sound basis for understanding exploitation. Would love to hear a rebuttal!

This is probably as accessible as a book this dense can manage and mostly great so far (although in desperate need of an editor!). Feel as if it ties in very well with a lot of Varoufakis' political economy. Reading econometrics makes me feel like I'm back in primary school though.

Oh god – feel myself becoming a Bookchinite. Someone stop me if I start rambling about dialectical naturalism, social ecology, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH5Jv...

“The open concepts of Marxism have closed in. They are no longer keys, interpretive schemata; they are posited for themselves as an already totalised knowledge.... The heuristic principle – “to search for the whole in its parts” – has become the terrorist practice of “liquidating the particularity.”"

Surprised by how obscure this is. Very readable, very informative. Seems bizarre that May 1968 is so under-discussed by much of the Western left!

"I believe that the use of direct means, the means to which our nerves are most sensitive, is reserved for the greatest filmmakers, whereas the recourse to allusion or ellipsis so dear to others, is only too often a mark of dryness and indigence."

"I believe that the use of direct means, the means to which our nerves are most sensitive, is reserved for the greatest filmmakers, whereas the recourse to allusion or ellipsis so dear to others, is only too often a mark of dryness and indigence."