been thinking about online disagreement lately and i've arrived at the unfortunate conclusion that it's contextual and conditions for positively evaluating a particular method of engagement are not antecedently specifiable
The object of Marx's theory of value was not exploitation or prices, but labor itself. Marx wasn’t searching for a price determinant and finding the answer in labor. Rather, he was trying to figure out why labor takes on the form that it does in capitalism and what consequences follow from this.
Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say,
the theoretically sensitized lover constantly works with the reflexive instruments of ambiguity and irony, relativization and distance, the endless play of “as if"
For we are not chasing after some dream of justice; we are doing what must be done, what cannot be left undone. The old world dug its own grave, and is now falling in. Let’s give it a little shove.
- Victor Serge, Conquered City, pg 37
The bloody farce enacted by this Revolution, its 'immorality', does not concern me: what I hate is its Rousseauesque morality; the so-called 'truths' of the Revolution through which it persuades everything shallow and mediocre over to its side. The doctrine of equality! There exists no worse poison.