book: historical materialism 31.4
Historical Materialism on Brill <– a book from the Historical Materialism series. Not my usual fare … I got it for free though.
This is a very recent issue. The front cover is of Gaza on Oct 10, 2023. the works within don’t talk about Palestine much. not a great feeling from that juxtaposition but I don’t know who made this choice & why, doubtfully the authors featured within.
As a collection of essays/research, I’ll cover them briefly & separately:
Editorial Perspective
When Monopsony Power Wanes , Ashok Kumar
dissecting the ways in which supplier-firms and buyer-firms interact. How in capitalism, buyer-firms will consolidate towards monopsony (like a monopoly but for “buyers” instead of “sellers”) as one company gets more and more powerful, and that monopsony will mean they can choose the suppliers of their goods & eventually drive the suppliers towards monopoly (by only buying from their favored suppliers). When suppliers have monopoly, they can begin to strong-arm the monopsony firm. Neither of these necessarily lead to good conditions for workers, since the monopoly-supplier refers to the companies here … the sweatshop-owners who make the things sold in the USA, for example.
“Capitalistic competition therefore produces oligopolies at either end of the value chain, leading to crises of profitability and attempts at new ‘fixes’” (fixes like finding suppliers in a country with poorer workers’ rights, or inventing a New Thing like AI, or manipulating the government and remaking political structures)
Articles
Latin American Development in Historical Perspective , Nicolás Grinberg
an in-depth following of Latin America’s development, and how it has been a site of continuous exploitation … Grinberg posits that many countries are not self-contained capitalist systems, but held perpetually in debt to the world system, US-authoritarian governments driving policy towards extracting rent from the businesses in their country to pay off these debts. I think. I think I understood it then forgot.
On the Distribution of Wealth and Capital Ownership , Geert Reuten
“capital ownership” refers to what a family owns that gives it capacity to shape the behaviors of companies … so not things like houses you own, etc. When capital ownership is used (as opposed to wealth in general), the world only becomes vastly more unequal. 94% of capital ownership is in the hands of the top 10%. for example. I am so mad
The Planning Daemon , Max Grünberg
Asks if a communist AI would be a good idea, or at least, better than other ideas for running a communist system. Even if you don’t care about AI it does talk about some issues in non-automated/algorithmic approaches to “finding out who needs what materials, where, when, why” which are worth picking through even if you think AI would be a shitty fix. …Grünberg brings up the fact AI is a “black box” is a pretty big problem, but doesn’t address it further, which is. ? I guess that’s a job for a programmer?
Sohn-Rethel’s Unity of the Critique of Society and the Critique of Epistemology, and his Theoretical Blind Spot: Measure , Frank Engster
Engster draws on Marx & (lesser known?) Sohn-Rethel to figure out what the hell “value” is. Really interesting and long and Idk if I can do it justice here. A simplified idea of “value” is that it is a unit of measurement (like a mile, a gram, so on) that arises from subconscious understanding of society (not One Person) that, by virtue of being a Quantitative Measurement with No Clear Creator, it can masquerade as an objective thing, severing itself from the historical and social contexts that created & validated it.
Marx’s Dissertation in Light of the Value-Form , Gabriele Schimmenti
to put it bluntly, “individuality is bullshit” , goes about it in a pretty interesting way if you know Greek philosophy (Epicurus specifically), which I don’t.
Translations
Abstract Labour and Socialism , Kamal Khosravi trans. Sam Salour
an introduction to Khosravi, an Iranian Marxist that Salour wants to show the West. Khosravi heavily critiques the idea of quantitative value, capitalist or otherwise. A system must have room for qualitative nuance.
And that the right to [x] is bourgeois, an outgrowth of capitalism towards socialism (as things would be), due to its Equality rather than accepting of qualitative difference/nuance … e.g.,
“two producers with individual differences, for example the difference between one who is married or has children and a bachelor without children, receive equal shares for equal labour; therefore to overcome this injustice and 'to avoid all these defects, right would have to be unequal rather than equal.’”
Khosravi asks: how might we approach just distribution of resources, of living interdependently, of collective ownership and access? We might shift as we can, exchanging worker-to-worker, buying from the artisan or trading one-to-one, decoupling money from necessities, maybe?
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