This a channel I found last year while going through Capital, www.youtube.com/@DissidentTheory/. I think it might be useful for some people.

Roast of the Week™ — Chapter One Edition

^{brought to you by Starbucks}

“Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour?” — Karl Marx, Capital vol 1, ch 1, footnote 34

:dwarf-economist:

But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use-value.

Does this get expounded on later? I realise that use-value gets abstracted as “demand” in liberal economics (the driver of everything, apparently, but obviously a shortage of food means prices go up and people are still hungry), but I feel like it can’t be discarded so early.

The labour-time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.

He’s obviously talking about mass society here, can the total labour across society for yards of linen constitute a portion of total possible yards of linen across society? Is that a worthwhile line of thinking? (e.g. We produce, idk, a million yards of linen a year. We could produce 2 million yards of linen if we dismantled all our other exports and started putting people unsuited to linen weaving in there. If all of society didn’t care about food, bathing, etc… we could produce 2.5 million yards of linen. This scaling of commodity production across society and how technology interacts with it is our “socially necessary” labour time for a single yard of linen)

I should keep reading, trying to take it all in.

hey, add me to the list, i finally got myself logged in after the latest hexbear update (had to delete 72MB in hexbear.net cookies).