Sara’s Reviews > In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism > Status Update

"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.