Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden.
Heather PaxsonTags: lost nature paradise marx walden thoreau pastoral pastoralist walden-pond
Egli [Marx] ha posto il lavoro, il suo avvilimento ingiusto e la sua dignità profonda, al centro della sua riflessione. È insorto contro la riduzione del lavoro a merce e del lavoratore a cosa. Ha ricordato ai privilegiati che i loro privilegi non erano divini, né la proprietà un diritto eterno. Ha dato inquietudine alla coscienza di coloro che non avevano il diritto di serbarla tranquilla e ha denunciato, con profondità senza pari, una classe il cui delitto sta non tanto nell'aver avuto il potere, quanto nell'averne usato ai fini di una società mediocre e senza vera nobiltà.
Albert CamusBaa Baa Black Sheep’ makes Marx’s Capital look like Mary Poppins.
Terry EagletonTags: marx marry-poppins
Gli dobbiamo [a Marx] quest'idea che fa la disperazione del nostro tempo – ma qui la disperazione vale più di qualsiasi speranza – che quando il lavoro è avvilimento, non è vita, sebbene occupi tutto il tempo della vita. Chi, nonostante le pretese di questa società, può dormirvi in pace, sapendo ormai che essa trae i suoi mediocri piaceri dal lavoro di milioni d'anime morte? Esigendo per il lavoratore la vera ricchezza, che non è quella del denaro, ma quella degli svaghi o della creazione, egli ha rivendicato, nonostante le apparenze, la qualità dell'uomo. Facendo questo, lo possiamo affermare con forza, non ha voluto la degradazione supplementare che è stata, in suo nome, imposta all'uomo. Una frase, per una volta chiara e tagliente, rifiuta per sempre ai suoi discepoli trionfanti la grandezza e l'umanità che gli erano proprie. “Un fine che ha bisogno di mezzi ingiusti, non è un fine giusto”.
Albert CamusOne of the curious things about our educational system, I would note, is that the better trained you are in a discipline, the less used to dialectical method you're likely to be. In fact, young children are very dialectical; they see everything in motion, in contradictions and transformations. We have to put an immense effort into training kids out of being good dialecticians. Marx wants to recover the intuitive power of the dialectical method and put it to work in understanding how everything is in process, everything is in motion. He doesn't simply talk about labor; he talks about the labor process. Capital is not a thing, but rather a process that exists only in motion. When circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.
David HarveyTags: capitalism marx value labor contradiction labour process motion capital dialectics harvey
This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it.
David HarveyTags: capitalism possibility revolution marx value labor communism socialism labour capital fetishism harvey commodity-fetishism labour-theory-of-value ltv value-form value-structure value-system
Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error.
David HarveyTags: liberalism capitalism economics individualism revolution marx value human-rights anarchism rights un harvey neoliberalism proudhon
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