🔴 RED NEWS | IRAN ATTACK | UKRAINE | AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY UPDATES

Smodly

Smartly with the hundred.

Wow.

Wow.

Brother, thank you so much for the hundred.

I appreciate it, man.

Thank you so much.

Strail Stanny Krass, how you guys doing?

Smartly, what's up, brother?

I appreciate you a lot.

Thank you, man.

I mean it.

Um so guys, I uh have a important stream lined up for you today.

We have a lot of important things to talk about.

Uh theory stuff to talk about, if you could believe it.

That's something I'm doing still.

Anyway guys, I haven't slept in three days.

So

Bear with me.

You're gonna have to bear with me.

Red saffron, what's up, brother?

Appreciate you.

Yeah, I haven't slept in like three days.

So be considerate.

Be considerate of that fact.

But um

First of all, I want to talk about ACP right now.

Speak of the devil actually.

Um, okay.

So a lot of people are confused about what's going on with the American Communist Party.

They're seeing on our social media everyone's picking up trash across North America minus Mexico.

And it's like the news, all every chapter is doing it.

And people are confused about what this means or what the purpose of this is or if this is what our party is in general now.

And this is all it's going to be.

So I know I've gone over this a few times, but I want to offer more clarity.

I want to talk about this initiative a little more.

And I want to talk about how it's fulfilling something that we baked into the technology of it from the beginning.

Red Ambiance, what's going on, brother, with the 10.

Wow.

Um, I am super congested.

I haven't slept.

I'm just asking for you guys' patience.

That's it.

We're gonna get through this.

Uh, we're gonna get through the stream.

You just gotta give me, um,.

Give me some patience.

Anyway, guys, um

So what we're seeing right now

Is the equivalent in real life at the party-wide level of a meme going of taking off?

It's a meme.

People think memes, I went on into this lecture one stream ago or two streams ago, people think memes are just jokes and they're not.

And then, you know, Richard Dawkins, I hate that guy, but his idea of a meme is really stupid.

And but once you just take the broad concept of this kind of like carrier of information that can just go viral and be communicated in ways that are much more proximate and direct than concepts.

Then, you know, it's kind of a useful word to describe what we're talking about here.

And it's almost like it's like these are.

What are those neurons?

They're like mirror, mirror neurons or whatever it's called.

I don't know what, I don't know what the hell that is.

Anyway, I've just.

Broadly referring to something that vaguely comes to mind when describing like certain types of.

neurological models

But I must sound really crazy right now.

It's literally because I haven't slept in three days.

Anyway.

That's what the party is.

It's basically a kind of uh

What are those things called?

The mirror.

What are they called?

The mirror?

They're something, it's something in the brain.

I don't know what it's called.

Hmm.

I'm literally about to pass out.

Holy shit.

Mirror neurons.

That's what they're actually called.

Alright, mirror neurons.

Yeah, that's what they're called.

Okay, mirror neurons.

It's kind of like something like this is going on.

And we designed it to be this way, and this is just a kind of test run of how this is gonna work.

So why everyone is picking up garbage is not because we are a party primarily focused on cleaning up garbage from the ground.

It's a gesture of goodwill that we wanted chapters to do.

We didn't even instruct them specifically.

That's the beautiful thing.

We didn't actually instruct them to pick up garbage.

We just said do something good of community service.

We said do something.

Uh give me one second.

Just give me one damn second.

Alright.

Give me one second.

Sorry, guys, it's a little difficult for me to speak because my sinuses are clogged.

And yeah.

It's a byproduct of not sleeping.

So that's not fun.

Anyway, guys, I want to continue talking what I was talking about.

In case you're curious, we aren't actually telling chapters to pick up garbage from the ground.

What's happened is that we broadly told them that in the beginning stages, as you're learning how to organize and you're learning how to coordinate and act in a collective capacity, come to collective agreements and implement those agreements in some kind of practical way.

Sorry, the criterion by which to measure.

is not, you know, established by um

The agreement itself, but by the actual, like, sorry, I don't know what this is so fucking hard to say.

Again, I haven't slept in three days, it's really bad.

Do something in real life where the results aren't just going to be determined by like an ideology.

So yes, it could be something as simple as like cleaning up garbage from uh your local community.

Whether that happens or not is something you actually have to do and prove through work.

So that's what we were looking for, right?

Prove your competency as an organization, prove your competency as a chapter.

And the beautiful thing about ACP and how it's already working is that one person or one chapter just shows us an example that this can be done.

It raises the threshold of possibility.

And it inspires other people to do the same, like a mirror neuron network.

It inspires them to do the same thing.

So this is how we design the organization.

And that was the intention from the very beginning.

Oh one second.

Alright, that was the intention from the very beginning.

It's what we wanted to do.

And it's working as intended.

So, this is what's so beautiful about ACB.

It seems like we're just ordering all these chapters to do everything because they're just carrying it out with such repetition and such efficiency.

And it's like it's like a huge thing, but it's like it's really actually decentralized.

We broadly told them to do community service, and then they started seeing the success.

of the actions of one chapter or two chapters, and it inspired them and it gave them the idea to do something.

So this is like not even the beta stage of where we're at as far as you know how this party is going to work in the long term.

But it's showcasing broadly that the idea worked behind the party.

The the the technology, it is a type of social technology and it's working.

Um

Now with that being said, there's another element which is part of how this works, which

Regular and active communication from leadership.

Leadership, which ensures that we don't don't create idols and fetishes of specific forms of activity.

Um don't exclusively just do something because others have done it and it works.

We want to heavily reward initiative.

We want to reward initiative.

We want to reward people actually doing things that no one has done, but which you know break the glass seal it's not the right word break or further the threshold of possibilities.

And I want to encourage chapters, and I'm saying this now, I want to encourage you to experiment in the types of community service you do as you introduce yourselves.

Uh you don't just have to clean garbage, you can do other things as well.

Get creative.

And I want to strongly uh stress that, you know, and emphasize that.

Because when it comes to organ see, I want you guys to think about it like this, all right?

Ninety nine percent of

These, I don't know what you call them, leftist organizations.

Create a fetish out of one particular form of activity that proved it could work one time, and so they create an entire organizational model off of that.

So the PSL, for example,

is a protesting organization.

All it really does is go to demonstrations and it's mastered the art of protesting, and that's its specialty.

That's its like that's its role in the division of labor of activism.

That's what it focuses on, right?

And why why?

Because praxis is something that is more impactful than ideas are.

Once you can see that something you have done before works, it's really hard to not get attached to it and just keep repeating it over and over again because risking doing something new just is a little too unpredictable.

But the way we design this organization is so that we don't become like PSL.

We don't become like these other organizations that get stuck and fetishize one.

I mean, it could it doesn't even just have to be protesting.

There's other organizations where their primary form of activity

It's just like heckling, you know, heckling, uh disrupting.

Blocking traffic.

It doesn't matter, you know.

These are all forms of idolatry, you know, activistic idolatry, where they're just fetishizing one type of activity.

And they're creating an organization based on one type of activity only.

And we designed ACP to be different from that.

So, we don't want you to get too comfortable picking up garbage.

That's what we're trying to say.

This is one of our meme campaigns in real life.

It's not a meme in the sense that it's a joke, but it's in the sense of like the more sophisticated, I guess, biological metaphor.

Like, this is a way to actually spread ideas.

But not ideas in the Plato sense of concepts, but ideas in the kind of sense of something that can just immediately inspire you.

So this is something I'd like to emphasize.

You know?

Um

All it takes is one chapter to lead by example, and then everyone else is going to try it too.

And it's good to repeat and build on what others have done before.

That's a great thing.

But we want you to also be experimental.

We want you to also be creative.

We encourage that.

We also encourage you to be smart.

We encourage you not to uh offend people, offend their sensibilities and try to shock them.

Um

Your chapter is selling Trotskyist newspapers.

Um Kyle look into that.

If that's if there's even a grain of truth.

There's even a grain of truth.

Even a grain of truth.

You are getting all of you getting disaligned and expelled.

Investigation began.

Uh, yeah, just kidding.

I don't know.

I probably not true.

Anyway, um

No, we want I just want to give you this update.

It's only been a few weeks and I already you know what I love though?

It's like I love seeing people already make memes off of these volunteer initiatives to clean up waste and garbage.

It's so cool.

I mean this is this is why we created ACP.

You know, we have these meme campaigns.

Like, for example, let's just give some brief attention to these guys.

The Gripers and the Griper War.

I mean, those people are only going to ever be confined to internet memes, and that's it.

We didn't want to be like that.

Our memes are literally going to be based off of the reality we participate in creating.

We're not just commentators.

We're not just here like commentating on s on Trump's campaign and being upset about no, no, no, we're here to actually be involved in the reality we're reacting to.

If you wanna, you know, uh it's like I don't have a single smart enemy because if I did.

Instead of gibbering and talking about how we're all fascists and we're all Nazis and yada yada yada, they should probably say something like Haas ran out of content for his streams, so he decided to start an organization to create the very content that he's able to react to.

If you're a cynical person who thinks I'm just some kind of scumbag and that all this is bad faith, that would be much more on the mark.

Because there is a sense in which when I thought of ACP, I started thinking about how bored I was of streaming, how I didn't really feel like I wanted to be a live streamer because I just kind of felt like I mean, like, I don't want to just sit here and react to reality all the time and bitch and whine about it.

If I'm calling myself a communist,

You can't be a communist live streamer, all right?

You can't just be like Hassan Pliker.

You can't just sit on a chair and have the content of your communism be the way in which you react to things.

You actually have to be involved in the things you're reacting to, you know?

And it's like you wanna know what's sad is like I did this.

As a guy with five hundred viewers.

You know, Jackson did this as well on Twitter or whatever.

But even Jackson usually gets a few thousand, you know?

None of us are close to Hassan Piker's live stream viewership.

Just imagine if Hassan Piker had the courage to do or air courage, the creativity, the imagination to do what we did.

Imagine if Hassan was actually a communist who like actually cared about any of this and wasn't just trying to make money.

If if we look look

If we could do this without any help and it's just us.

Imagine what Hassan could have done if he wasn't just such a coward, you know?

Just think about that.

Um Midwestern Marks, myself.

I'm talking about just influencers, not the amount of work we put in.

Obviously, Kyle's put in the most work.

But I'm talking about in terms of like how much we've used our platforms, you know, for a real life cause.

I mean, Hassan will literally sit on his chair and be like, oh, I'm so blackbilled.

It's like, but you can literally affect the reality you're reacting to.

You could literally affect it.

I mean, if I could affect it,

He obviously could.

He has uh, you know, for forty times the viewership that I do usually.

So, you know, this is what I'm trying to say though, is that

There's a cybernetic loop that I already see beginning where the community is starting to make memes off of what ACP is doing.

And it I find it really cool.

I find it super cool.

And that's exactly what we intended, you know?

And I'm not talking about memes that mock us.

I'm talking about like cool

I mean, it's it's already started this is what's so beautiful about it.

Like, it's already started making me think about.

You know, different ways of what it means to be a communist.

Like, you know, I've started thinking about environmentalism more, and it wasn't intended.

You know, I was thinking about, you know what?

This is the tragedy of the commons, you know, this is a place where communists could really shine and show that they recognize this reality that everyone has neglected.

No, not green socialism, because by environmentalism I'm not even talking about I'm not talking about um conservationism.

Environmentalism just means being responsible for the environment you live in and its conditions.

Simple as that.

You know?

And I l I I think it's so cool how

As much as we're called reactionaries and all this stuff,

Praxis itself has revealed just how

And I'm pretty proud of this.

Close in proximity, you know, our understanding of what communism is, is related to ecology, you know, and ecologism.

And again, ecology doesn't mean green conservationism.

Ecology is about the feedback loops between your.

It's a type of cybernetics, you know.

Ecology is like.

I have to confess, let me lay my cards on the table.

You know, it's really Fred Jameson's Universal Army, where he's talking about the future model of socialism will be like a volunteer army that does like disaster relief and like organizes whole societies in the face of ecological disasters, providing disaster relief, you know, leading the way.

It's like you think about Death Stranding.

You know, you think about that game, Video Game Death Stranding.

You know, you think about Jameson's American Utopia.

Um

You think about Boris Groyes' book?

Um.

Communist postscript, which you could charitably interpret as, you know, basically like a book about online communism, you know.

Not just communism as language, but language is mediated through social media.

And it's like a lot of things are coming together.

You know, a lot of things are coming together in ways we didn't even directly plan for.

That was the whole point, you know?

And it's super cool.

It's super cool.

And, you know, a lot of people are saying: it's just charity.

It's not just charity.

It's not just charity.

It's it's it's a it's a new type of organization, you know, and we're not going anywhere and it's only going to expand from here.

It's a new type of organization that is based on taking the initiative

to recognize these neglected common realities where no one else will.

It's about being soldiers fighting a war, you know, but the war we're fighting is not necessarily against other human beings.

You know, the war that we're fighting is for our commons, for our common future, you know, for our common

environments for our common, you know, um

Our common um

Dwelling places, you know, things like that.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's really about.

You know, I want to envision a future where

You know, we will be the soldiers that provide relief, that provide leadership, that provide organization.

You know, in the midst of environmental disasters, in the midst of s the breakdown of society,

Key word, breakdown of society, key phrase I mean, breakdown of society.

You know, I'm I'll fully tell you, I do think a civil war is coming and

If it doesn't come, that'd be beautiful.

But I think one is coming.

And I think, you know, our role is going to be.

Yeah.

Restoring sanity amidst like nihilism and chaos and bloodbaths and shit.

We would have to be the ones that.

Yeah.

create the structure of a new society, you know?

Basically

Um

But you know, I I I also love it because

A big problem of modern societies is ironically, as much as people are overworked, there's also a problem of free time.

and what people are doing in their spare time.

And, you know, people are grinding playing video games.

You know, they're just sitting and doing nothing.

They're doing drugs.

They're binge watching Netflix.

And sometimes I wonder, I'm like, should I feel bad?

About everyone having to spend so much time doing things like this across the country.

I mean, they don't have to, but like, should I feel bad that?

Instead of having fun, that this is what they're doing.

And then I thought to myself, I'm like, no, because you know what?

I'm pretty sure you guys are kind of having fun.

I'm pretty sure you guys are, you know.

In some sense.

Finding this to be a healthy way of spending your time.

You know, it's a type of camaraderie, it's a type of.

It's doing good for your community in your free time with like-minded people.

Juzan, what's going on?

And I think it's a good experience.

You know, there is something about.

That militant military camaraderie that is uh

that is missing in today's world or today's America, you know?

And

You know, I I think it's good.

Obviously, no one's quitting their jobs and throwing their whole future away to risk everything at once.

We definitely are not asking you to do that.

But to spend your free time doing things like this is a good thing, you know?

It's a good thing.

It's a healthy thing.

Yeah.

So I'm very proud of I don't wanna we don't wanna congratulate ourselves too early in the game, but I'm proud of uh and more is coming.

You know, we have a few more announcements of chapters we're gonna introduce.

and then from there chapters are going to start posting themselves.

Some already have.

And then they'll take it from there.

You know.

So that's a very nice thing.

Arkansas with the twenty.

Thank you so much, brother.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

You guys have to forgive me.

I'm really

Tired and my back hurts 'cause I'm an idiot who goes to the gym even when I haven't slept.

Take an energy drink and it'll keep me sustained.

And then I break my back, my neck.

It's uh

Yeah, I probably should be lying down right now.

But that's alright.

Um that's alright.

Ah, yeah, if you guys don't know, don't fly out to this.

Don't go through a lot of trouble because you're going to need to be in Chicago.

The last weekend of September, or the weekend before then, we haven't decided exactly, we'll tell you within five days.

for the party conference.

But if you happen to live in Chicago already,

You happen to live within a few hours of Chicago, let's say.

I'm gonna be in Chicago the thirty first of this month at the Revolution Reports event with Slava and um

Don Corder, if I'm saying his last name right.

And I'm going to be speaking at that uh event as well.

Also the plan right now

We're waiting for a confirmation, but the 23rd or 24th of this month, so next week, I'm gonna be debating uh Andrew.

on uh in Miami.

I believe on Fresh and Fit.

So that's coming next week.

So

And he's a uh it's kind of like a traditionalist.

Christian?

I think that's how we would identify.

We're going to be debating the root cause of society's um problems.

Obviously I'm the Marxist and he I think will come at it from a more idealistic

Perspective.

So that's where I'm gonna be next week.

Huh?

Anyway guys, um

We have other things to talk about.

Gonna be totally honest though.

I am really, really, like.

It's really tough for me to.

I'm gonna try to see if I could, like.

User Tom, thank you so much.

Alright guys, if I talked like this, would this be like super weird?

'Cause like this is the only way I could talk without like it actually being exhausting and hurting a lot.

But it's also kinda cringe, isn't it?

Yeah.

No, I mean I could I could continue streaming if I like talk like this, you know.

I just can't talk like how I normally do.

I'm not gonna lie.

It's just like right now it sounds like RFK Junior and I understand it.

But I don't mean to mock him.

I literally don't.

I literally need to talk like this right now.

Um.

Like, I straight up cannot talk normally without it really, you know, being exhausting and hurting.

I haven't slept in like three days, you know.

Are y'all are y'all cool with me talking like this?

Can I say something?

Let's just like compromise.

Maybe, like, uh, do it halfway, you know.

Anyway, guys, um

Look, you know what I don't like seeing on Twitter?

I make streams talking about shit, like, really in depth, and then does no one have the courage to actually, like, draw from my arguments and use them and when you get into Twitter spats?

Why are you guys, like,

I see you in Twitter spats and you're not even using the arguments I'm giving you.

I don't understand that.

I don't understand that.

Um, it makes me feel like all these lectures I give are in vain somehow, you know, like they're pointless.

You need to have the fucking courage to draw conclusions from what I say.

You need to have the courage to actually stand on it.

I'm not saying it for no reason.

And if you don't understand it, just tell me and I'll help you clarify it.

I'm not here to tell you guys things for no reason that you're not going to be able to understand.

All right.

Um, you know, for example, and this is kind of a comfortable position.

Um, I could probably speak like this.

Yo, John Jackman, what's going on, brother?

I can't, I can't salute.

I can salute you with this anyway.

Um.

Super disappointing, you know?

Like.

Yeah.

Uh you know, no, I wanted to say something.

Uh you know, uh today I wanted to talk about the normal thing, the topic of like JD Vance being weird and how to be normal and why we need the Hegelian Egros to be normal.

Something like that.

But uh I I I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about other stuff and then if I have the energy we'll get into that big time.

So, uh

I want to get a pulse on my own community on this front.

I'm writing a book on political philosophy right now.

Besides the manifesto, that's my main focus, uh Carlos is launching a journal for the party.

So I want to get a pulse on what you guys think.

Every three weeks I see the barista shit coming up from uh from our ops.

Every three weeks, I see them make a post.

I can't believe how much they hate baristas.

We did nothing to provoke it.

We literally said nothing.

And they'll just like make a post on this, making themselves upset about it and getting enraged by themselves.

And we've short-circuited them.

We've left it behind.

We've short-circuited them, and they're still angry about it.

They're still punching themselves in the face about it.

And we literally aren't even saying anything.

It's not like we're saying anything to like bring this topic back.

Like, why are they so addicted to this discourse?

We are, I'm over it.

I'm confident in our position being correct.

They're clearly not because they keep bringing this fucking discourse back.

Get over it.

If you want to actually engage with what I've said, then engage with what I've said.

Engage with my argument that they're not producing capital.

Engage with my argument that their outstanding liabilities are far more even than the revenue that these companies are raking in.

You know, like engage with the fucking argument that even if you're producing profit, you're not producing necessarily capital that allows you to expand when you factor in considerations like debt and speculation, right?

Just engage with what I've said.

Engage with where I'm coming from.

Why are they?

I keep seeing these stupid, they keep repeating the stupid arguments about use value and how, oh, it's not about use value.

It's about the commodity form.

You're arguing with a straw man.

And then I see retarded guerrillas somehow get sucked into this stupid paradigm they're the ones imposing, not understanding themselves, even themselves not understanding the point.

It's like.

No, okay, to be clear, I don't know, I keep repeating myself a million times about this.

We don't consider it.

Productive labor in the Marxist sense of the word.

for a million different reasons actually not one even not even one superficial reason million different reasons about the nature of how capitalism has changed in general where wage labor

And especially in the service industry, it is just the epitome of this, honestly, where that type of work or those types of jobs and those types of wages and types of employment no longer could meaningfully correspond relationally to a proletarian position.

Okay.

And I could get into depth explaining that, and I probably will spend like five minutes on it in this stream.

But to be clear, our position is not that we regard them as unproductive laborers.

Uh because we don't like Starbucks uh coffee and we don't like and we don't prefer it, you know, or or or we or because they have blue hair.

Or something stupid like that.

That's not why.

Okay?

It's so, so all this talk about, oh, it's because of use value.

That's not the point.

Aside from the obvious fact that, yes, the expansion of capital in even if the commodity form is blind to this fact, which it is, in actual reality, and Marx was very, very clear on this, the expansion of capital corresponds to an actual material expansion of the material, the total physical material wealth of society, because that's what labor does.

It transforms labor, transforms nature to increase total material wealth.

So even if the commodity form is blind to this physical reality, let's say, that doesn't mean it's not embedded within it.

I've said that a million times.

The second thing is that.

Um

You cannot derive the conclusion that surplus value is being produced just because profits are being made and employees are involved.

That's not just a peculiarity of today's capitalist mode of production.

It's literally in Capital Volume 2 where Marx talks about commercial workers and he specifies that they do not produce any surplus value, but they are just a cost of production and that's all they could be counted for.

And they don't valorize a capital.

They don't produce any surplus value or affect the surplus value.

And he literally names them commercial workers.

Do you know what a commercial worker is?

Look up what a commercial worker is because he talks about it in Volume 2, alright?

For fuck's sake.

Um and then in volume three he makes it clear that surplus value and profit locally produced could not possibly be one for one the same thing.

You know, you could produce profit without producing surplus value.

It's Marxism 101.

It's also Marxism 101 that you could produce profit without producing capital.

Because the question is not where does the profit come from?

That was never the main question as far as Marx's theory of value is concerned.

I'll give you a hint of what the main question was, I'll give you a hint.

Guys, what do you think?

What do you think?

It's related to the title.

It's related to the title.

It's about where does the capital come from?

Where does the not only the profit, but the profit which enables the expansion of capital come from?

The profit which can act as capital.

It's not just profit.

It's profit incorporated within capital.

Profit that participates in capital.

Profit that is capital.

It's about the profit that is capital.

It's not about the profit.

Anyone can make profit.

You can make profit and spend it on toilet paper.

That doesn't say anything about whether the profit you're making is capital.

So because Starbucks makes profit doesn't say anything about surplus value.

It doesn't tell us anything about surplus value.

One, it also doesn't tell us anything about where the capital is coming from.

Because in case you didn't know this, the capital at the disposal of Starbucks, the capital necessary for Starbucks to expand, doesn't come from their profits at the level of sales or at the level of revenue.

That is mainly, again, a signal for speculators to invest more.

In other words, to promise that eventually it's going to produce capital.

But it it doesn't actually do this.

And that is a fundamental feature for today's economy.

Not just in Starbucks, in all almost all companies, okay?

So we're looking in the wrong pi places.

I'm not saying it's self evident who is a productive and unproductive worker.

I'm not even necessarily saying this is a meaningful

A me a politically meaningful distinction, necessarily.

But I am saying people are thinking about what who the prole and what the proletariat is in the wrong way.

They're b they're being too direct in the sense that they're trying to literally like unionize

These fundamentally different types of employment and work

And which is fine.

I'm not even against that.

You can go and do that.

I'm not going to stand in your way.

But please don't tell me this is the equivalent to a trade union consciousness when we're talking about baristas or when we're talking about bullshit jobs.

Don't tell me that this is trade union consciousness because it's not.

Not because those people aren't working class people.

I would say most of the people in the service industry are working class.

But their working class status.

Isn't primarily defined at the level of the shop floor.

It's defined by the communities they live in.

It's defined by the quality of public services they have access to.

It's defined by the quality of the environments they live in.

It's defined by the quality of the infrastructure they require.

It's defined by the extent to which they can afford groceries, transportation, and rent and things like that.

And the fact that they have to go work these bullshit jobs day in and day out just to make ends meet.

To me, that's what working class is.

Isolating that at the shop floor level and saying that is primarily the site of proletarian subjectivity, I disagree.

Now, if you could incorporate that within something bigger, totally.

I have nothing against it.

Can I go on record saying this?

I probably, I'm just kind of like going off of a.

A hunch with no data at my disposal.

I have no problem saying that most baristas are probably working class.

People are just misunderstanding what I'm saying.

I'm not saying they're not working class.

I'm just saying that.

Telling me and telling the ACP, for example, that

We need to go like the primary way in which that working class consciousness or that working class status is going to be interpolated is by unionizing their workplaces.

Well, if that works, all power to you.

But I'm extremely skeptical of whether that's going to work, and therefore I don't think it's a good use of my time or my community's time.

If it works for you, though, by all means, go and do it.

I don't care.

Like, literally, just go do it then.

Why are you yelling and getting angry at us?

Because your shit is not working.

That's why.

Like I see for example

We want to focus on debt relief.

We want to focus on building a political movement that's community oriented.

We want a relationship to unions, obviously.

We want to be part of the labor movement and the union movement, but

And we think that's important.

But

Here's the tricky thing.

There's always been a problem in the history of the labor movement called craft unionism, where there's a particular type of union activity that excludes, that is by definitionally excluded from general labor, from the movement of labor in general.

So, for example, we support the Amazon labor union and what Chris Malls did.

Why is that?

Because the Amazon labor union.

Had a universal significance for all workers in all of society.

It had that universal significance because it epitomized a universal circumstance, right?

Because Amazon is just one of those jobs that anyone is going to go get, you know, when they just have nothing to sell but their labor, for example, right?

But

The more small potatoes stuff, I'm not even necessarily saying I'm against it.

I'm just saying I don't think that's the site of universal

Labor struggles.

Like Amazon, you know?

Um

And you know what?

Use value, of course, factors into this because it's literally a relevant factor within society itself.

Whether you like it or not.

We don't live in a society based purely on profit anymore, not even at the level of like this state and the ruling institutions of society.

Basic considerations of use value, of course, have to factor in.

And you know how I know that every single person who disagrees with me is going to concede this point to me?

Because go fucking unionize Raytheon employees if you disagree.

Go unionize them then.

If you think use value has no significance at all, like none at all,

For the labor movement, then go unionize the people that make drones and bombs and that make weapons that are killing children in Gaza.

After all, it doesn't matter because every they're all productive laborers anyway, because they're producing a profit, right?

Now, am I saying Starbucks baristas are on the same level as that, like morally speaking?

No, I'm not saying that.

I'm just saying it's a clear and obvious example to you of why that would be relevant.

Now, as far as society is concerned,

We can all agree that warehouse work, like the type that Amazon workers are doing, is necessary for society.

Like it is.

It's necessary labor to reproduce society.

But

you know, bullshit jobs are bullshit jobs.

And I I think that institutionalizing those jobs is the wrong direction.

Is if you're adopting the long term view of a communist.

Now let's say you know you're a barista

And you just want to make a better living for yourself.

And so you're gonna unionize.

Literally, more power to you.

Like, I'm not gonna get in your way.

Good luck too.

I don't wish you any ill will or nothing.

Like, literally, good luck.

But communists have to take a long-term view of things, you know, however ruthless or cruel that that is, or how that it seems.

And it's not just the use value aspect that we're focusing on here, okay?

It's you know, like the the broader societal implications or whatever.

That's not only it, it's also the strategy of it, right?

What parts of

Let's presume that everyone is a worker, like everyone.

Let's just not even argue about it right now, right?

Clearly, there are some sectors.

of the working class that are more strategically important as far as utilizing the leverage that labor has, that are capable of shutting down society, not shutting down one company just so like, I don't know, like like Tim Hortons can come and take over, or Big B Coffee can come take over and instead.

You know?

It's also the strategic aspect of it, all right?

It's the leverage.

Like, you know, like Amazon laborers unionize is a huge deal.

Why?

Because it's not like someone else can come and just like replace Amazon.

It's not just a brand.

It's like a fundamental use value of society that we've all agreed is.

You want to know how I know we've all agreed on it?

Because the government fucking subsidizes them.

Now, if the government is subsidizing an industry, a lot of the times that's because they're at least keeping up the veneer and the pretense that at a political level, we've all agreed as a society, this is a necessary use value, right?

Um yeah, like for example, so so it does have some relevance, but the strategy is also important.

Because people who think use value is irrelevant to the the capitalism we live in today.

I mean, look, in the nineteenth century,

There was no social state to any capacity.

You know, there was no New Deal.

There was no welfare state.

There was no, you know, there was no there wasn't even imperialism yet, right?

As Lenin described it.

The laissez-faire, whatever, capitalism Lenin was writing before Napoleon III or whatever.

So

So it made sense that, you know, wherever workers were unionizing, that epitomized like the general condition of a sphere or a segment of society which was not being recognized in any way, you know, which was just being treated as a commodity, the laborers, their labor was just being treated as a commodity with no other considerations.

And that's it.

And there was no and society had no consensus about, you know.

You know what it

What it should be economically, right?

It was just a kind of whatever, every man for himself, laissez-faire capitalism, supposedly, right?

That's the assumption.

So we it's 150 years later we're living in a very different society, all right?

I haven't gone to sleep in three days.

Um

So, you know f forgive me for my crudeness.

But

I I just think it's

It's not people people really misunderstand us because we're not even saying, we're not really even just coming from like blue-collar workers are the real workers that Marx was talking about, and like baristas, it's just like some bullshit, like you know, like leech job that leeches off of actual productive labor.

I mean, in a sense, yeah, yeah, like in a sense, that's kind of true.

Basically, it is true, you know, it is true.

Not to say baristas are parasites.

And I can actually justify why I don't think they're parasites.

That's the thing.

I'll get to that in a second.

This is where I want people to actually just start.

thinking instead of uh getting angry about this topic or getting offended by it.

But there's truth to that.

There is truth to that this bullshit job only exists because of the arbitrary allocation of capital.

For speculative purposes, however successful it is in terms of meeting the demands of the population, the consumer demands of the population,

Um

Starbucks has the capital that it does.

Because banks gave it to them, and the reason banks were able to give them that capital is because of the productive labor that's actually produced by the blue collar.

Industry and labor, laborers, right?

So there's truth to that, you know, but that's not even just where we're coming from.

It's also more that people

Don't appreciate how much

We are, you know what?

Fuck it.

We are living in a different mode of production than the one Marx described,

In capital, the mode of production we live in now clearly came from that one, it clearly evolved from that one.

It's not the same one, though.

It's definitely not the same one.

And I will die on that hill.

Anyone wants to debate me on it, I'll wipe the floor with them if they think what I'm saying has no basis or no credibility.

But it's just the truth.

It's not the same one.

Even Lenin's imperialism wasn't necessarily the same one.

But especially today, it's definitely not the same.

Okay?

And I'm sick of people attempting to LARP

nineteenth century class struggle in every possible context.

People are trying to LARP the nineteenth century class struggle in every possible context in which there are employees

And a workplace.

And that's what I'm sick and tired of.

I'm not angry at baristas for having pink hair hair.

I'm angry at Western Marxists.

For having no self-awareness as far as how much things have changed, how much we live in a different world than the one described by Marx in Capital.

Again, that world i i has lineage in the one Marx was talking about, but it has changed fundamentally.

Okay?

It has changed fundamentally.

Like that is where we were coming from.

And I think that's where Logo is coming from too.

Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna elaborate.

Don't worry, I'm just gonna say this.

Like, for example.

Here's the tough thing, you know.

It's capital.

Where does capital come from?

Where does the capital come from that basically that bankrolls the types of economic activity in our society across the board, whether they're in the service industry or any other industry?

Where does that capital actually come from?

And for some reason, that question has been lost on people.

It's like they just assume circuit.

They just assume that it's, of course, given in the fact of profit.

It comes from the profit.

The profit then is reinvested in its premises.

And this is what produces the MCM Prime circuit of capital.

But that's not true for today.

Fascinatingly, that's not true today.

It's not true today when.

The majority of the capital doesn't come from profits, and somehow Marxists don't find that to be significant.

Somehow, they don't find that to be significant.

They don't consider the factor, even though Marx literally writes about it in volume three in which chapter?

The chapter where he's talking about the conversion of the rate of profit into the or the relation of the rate of profit to the rate of surplus value, where he says, even when I'm relating these two distinct things, we have to assume that the money supply stays the same.

And it's like you won't find a single six-month interval where the money supply is the same today.

So first of all, that's something we can't assume.

Definitely can't assume it.

Uh

But yes, strangely enough, the capital doesn't seem to come from capital.

The capital doesn't come from capital.

Put that in your head.

The capital today doesn't actually come from capital.

It doesn't come from profits.

It comes from socialized planning.

What else can I call it?

It comes from socialized credit, not planning.

Capital today doesn't come from capital, it comes from socialized credit.

By socialized, I don't mean in a necessarily good sense.

I mean it in the sense of.

banks seem to have the power to marshal the productive forces

Um

However they want to, to their heart's content.

obviously within the limits of physical laws.

But within the limits of economic laws, it doesn't

It seems like they have to meet a few what are the economic laws that socialized credit has to meet?

Well supply and demand, there has to be demand, uh consumers have to want it.

And of course, there has to be supply.

It has to be physically possible.

There has to be enough resources.

But even then it even then it seems like this new mode of production we're living in defies even this.

You want to know a good example of this?

Look at Saudi Arabia.

I want anyone to come to me and look me in the eyes and tell me that NEOM in Saudi Arabia is being funded from capital.

What circuit of capital is funding Neom?

In Saudi Arabia and in Dubai and in the Gulf, we see these tendencies nakedly on display.

Like, literally, to your heart's content.

Utilizing like uh credit, which doesn't seem to have to be backed by anything except some kind of socialized initiative.

By socialized I mean like a government initiative or at the scale of the whole of the productive forces of society h wielding that power.

Like, you know, people tend to in the Soviet Union and in Mao's China, where there is direct state planning and they could pretty much just embark on whatever projects they saw fit, is s assuming they were like uh correctly appraising the economic laws and the whatever societal considerations.

That doesn't seem like that disappeared.

It seems like that itself has somehow been incorporated within the global mode of production we live in.

They say backed by oil, and that's where things get interesting.

Because when you say oil, it makes me think about the Rockefellers.

And

The origins of the US banking system and the US form of capitalism or imperialism, super imperialism.

And things like morganization, this this um or standardization, it was literally called standard oil by Rockefeller, where they basically standardized all of these um

industries that were producing surplus value

And it's almost like what Marx describes in Volume 3 with the conversion of what was it?

The conversion of profit into rent.

And that's exactly what Standard Oil and Morgan and the Vanderbilts that's what they did.

They they turned all these profits into predictable

Streams of revenue and rent.

And then, on the basis of that predictable rent, that all of society agreed was a necessary use value of society.

So, we need railroads.

It doesn't matter what commodities we're transporting.

We need railroads as a society.

We need oil.

We need energy as a society.

We need electricity as a society.

So it's like it doesn't matter.

It was an agreed upon social use value for the whole of society.

That meant it was an economic monopoly.

Okay, translation.

It was an economic monopoly.

Once you have a monopoly,

You have an ability to have almost an unconditional collateral asset.

You could use that.

From the surplus that's produced from the rent, because rent does endanger, um.

more than what it takes to that's the nature of rent right

You could use that to build the world, to design whatever fucking world you wanted.

And it seems like that's what the Rockefellers kind of did, or at least had a part in doing.

The the Bilderbergs and all these

Billionaires, they got together and they fucking designed and and were architects of like this new world order after World War Two.

I mean, it's literally true.

All that shit conspiracy theorists talk about.

It's like there's a grain of truth in it, you know?

Through they call it philanthropy or whatever else.

I mean, that's what happened pretty much, you know, the RAND Corps, whatever.

Ah

Alright, anyway.

So like tradition so so already there we're kind of um we have uh to have a new understanding of the proletariat.

You know, the the proletariat aren't just people who are employed, they're the people employed in the industries which are producing the collateral that creditors are able to use to fund everything else.

So to begin for Starbucks, we would have to begin analyzing is that a sufficient form of collateral?

To what extent is that is that producing the collateral?

And then you could s just from from an analysis of supply chains alone, you could see it's definitely not.

It's qualitatively not in the same league as oil, you know, or or heavy industry, you know, or or even infrastructure and transportation.

So, you know, uh why am I getting crucified for pointing these things out?

I'm just the guy raising questions.

I just want people to think about the world we live in a little differently instead of just assuming that it's one for one the exact same as in the, you know, eighteen sixty five.

Because it's not

And you know uh further

Why do so why don't I think service industry um

People are parasites.

Even though the nature of their job is parasitic on the rest of the economy, why aren't they parasites?

Well, here's why.

Something because something strange happens with super imperialism after the monopoly imperialism that Lenin was talking about.

You know how uh like Rockefeller and the Vanderbilts and they could they were able to use these uh industrial monopolies as collateral to issue credit?

Well, like sometime around the nineteen thirties or forties

After World War One at least,

That's what um entire country started being.

uh collateral.

Entire countries through the um values of their currencies started acting as forms of uh financial collateral with which to lend that banks could use to lend.

Um

So at the total level of the

whole mode of production.

Somehow,

Entire countries could be thought of you could think of them as like a uh like a factory.

Like all of America became one factory.

All of Britain became one factory.

All of Germany became one factory, right?

And this factory is a collateral asset.

Which could be used by the banks of these countries, and banks around the world for that matter, to give out loans.

And they had predictables and they could endanger and produce predictable streams of income.

This is where the MMT people kind of like to, you know, go wild, you know, because the way they um interpret the

The the monopoly is a monopoly on taxation.

You know, it's the ability to levy taxes that produces a guaranteed source of revenue and income.

And you know, you think about austerity and austerity politics,

and you know the need for governments that are in debt to pay back the debt and how this cuts into their ability to fund you know social programs and just just the society in general.

You know, you know why I hate the word welfare state?

Because it just assumes that, like, oh, we still have the same capitalism, but there's just like a new department where the government, like, you know, helps people sometimes.

And it doesn't give full it it doesn't give full um

Proper justice to the fact that, like, everything is fucking reliant on the government, like, literally, everything.

It's not just.

Some like extra thing that the government has been doing.

It's not just welfare.

It's like, it's literally like the government of every modern country today.

Is a fundamental factor of production.

Okay?

It's like a fundamental factor of production.

Now how is the surplus value being produced at a national scale?

Um you want me to tell you?

I fucking don't know.

I literally don't have a definite answer.

I just have suspicions.

I have interesting.

Um avenues of investigation, but I don't have a definite answer.

I straight up don't.

I think it's an open question and I would like more people to investigate it instead of getting upset and offended.

You know, why don't people think about this though?

It's like

In order for me to like draw on a def definite I need to sit down for like three months and just focus on only this, researching it and thinking about it.

So after my book on political philosophy, maybe I'll do that.

But I'll just give you w where my head is as far as

Um

So okay, there are a few things that we have to work off of.

One is the MMT idea that it's taxes.

I am very skeptical of that and I'm not satisfied with it.

The pro the reason I'm not satisfied with it is because I I feel as though it's a proxy for something more fundamental.

The ability for the society to pay taxes does clearly indicate that it that there is a social product

um that everyone is participating in the creation of

But I I feel like that confines taxes to the status of a proxy rather than the direct

thing that creates uh the value itself.

So I'm not a fan of the MMT conclusions people have drawn.

I think about the strategic sectors of the economy taken as a totality.

So the way in which monopoly capitalism has been incorporated with the government, from oil to mining and all this other kind of stuff.

And I think about how in states like Saudi Arabia and even the late Soviet Union, this was directly the case.

The states and Russia today, the state's monopoly on oil.

Voila, that gives you the whole key.

It's like uh Rockefeller's Standard Oil uh elevated to the status of an entire state, an entire country, funding the entire country.

So that seems like a very easy way to think about it.

Um but I don't find that one particularly satisfying.

Because why?

Because the it's the demand for oil that gives oil its value, not the labor of the oil workers drigging it out of dili dr sorry, drilling it out of the ground.

Um, Marxists have struggled to wrap their head heads around this fact, but it's the truth.

Uh oil has value because it's a proxy for the energy needs of a society.

And those in turn have value because something else is

It's drawing out the process of economic activity.

It's drawing out the economic activity that.

Makes things like energy and electricity valuable and worth paying for and things that can be paid for, right?

And what is that?

Again, MMT people will say that's just taxes.

But I'm not satisfied with that.

And I think it's an open question.

But I've started trying to reconcile these ideas with ecology, you know, not just cybernetics, but ecology more specifically, and broadening ecology.

To encompass what the way in which modes of life.

Or uh ways of living

somehow somehow are being valorized.

Now that that is the thing that I am the most interested in exploring.

What if in some kind of way

The let's just call it the total, what do they call the data?

The total personal data of a given individual.

Somehow that is producing that is being valorized.

There are patterns of consumption, not just their patterns of consumption, but the necessities of their lives being reproduced, the rent they pay, the groceries they go to the store to get.

What if this is somehow being valorized?

What if this is somehow producing a surplus in excess?

of its conditions of possibility.

Um

The valorization of modes of living.

That is the thing that I'm the most interested in, thinking about.

It's pretty explicit with um

Data, you know, data as a commodity.

It's very mysterious, but I don't think anyone's really cracked the code or has really dr anyone who's telling you they have a definite s you know, answer or conclusion they're wrong, I know they're wrong.

The question but again, the question today isn't where is the surplus value coming from, it's where is the capital coming from.

That is a much more interesting question.

All we have to go off of is that it's physically possible.

It's not physically irrational.

That society um

Exists the way it is.

It conforms to known laws of physics.

It just doesn't conform to any known economic laws of that are socially produced in the sense of

in the sense of uh the commodity form.

Has to come down to energy in the end.

Well, here is basically broadly what we know.

What we know is that we don't simply live.

In a pure capitalism, if that's still what we're living in, is not strictly a mode of production of civil society.

And what I mean by that is that

Broadly speaking

Every modern state and country has arrived at an implicit consensus that there is a minimum of social not just social welfare, but economic activity and function which is necessary, which is a necessary use value, whose reproduction is literally inscribed into the law of the state, so to speak, such that in economic times of crisis, even if it does not fulfill any immediate economic interest, we'll have the New Deal, for example, right?

Or we'll have the bank bailouts, even though that's a little different.

2008.

Use value, ironically enough.

Um

has become a very important economic factor.

the the BlackRock's ESG scores are a huge example of this.

China is a living example of the dominance of use value over exchange value.

But I think why use value has been dismissed in the way it has for so long within Marxism is because

The assumption back then was that use value is basically an immediate utilitarian uh object for for consumption.

I have a use for this object to do with what do with it what I please, right?

Um but then you know you realize actually it becomes more broadly socialized through this kind of uh process of exchange, how it's incorporated in the production of surplus value and so on and so on.

But now we're met with an enigma where socialized use values have become fundamental economic factors.

You know, the the plans of a five year plans of a country, what goals does the country want to meet economically, what is its industrial policy, these have become incorporated in the economic laws that govern uh modern societies.

Um so use value has been socialized.

And that's where kind of everything um

Seems to begin.

Even if capitalism breaks down as a mode of production in the sense of the falling rate of profit.

Somehow we have committed social civilizationally, we have acquired the resolve.

By which to continue existing and reproducing and economically existing.

Um even though it makes no sense from the standpoint of the logic of capitalism.

Uh that's what nineteen twenty nine proved, that's what two thousand eight proved.

It's what nineteen seventy one proved.

The will to create.

I don't know what that means and I have nothing to do with it.

And I really hate that interpretation.

Frankly, it sounds like retarded.

Sorry.

There's no will to create, it's just

It's not a will to create, it's not a will to anything, it's not about your will, it's it's about a fundamental fact of civilization.

Um

Sorry, I haven't slept in three days, like I said.

Uh

Uh the normal thing.

I don't know.

I'll talk about that tomorrow.

Um

Super tired.

Why don't you guys like ask me questions?

Because I feel like a lot of people are confused about this shit.

What is use value?

Um

I don't think use value can be quantified.

Maybe it I'm trying to think if it could.

But use value is just broadly what's referred to as the way in which the value of something the way in which something acquires value according to its use.

You know, it's like to what extent do I want to use it for something.

So for example, like you know, your phone has a use value in the sense that like it's valuable to you because you want to call people on it, you know?

You use it to call people.

So use value is different from exchange value though because the exchange value of this phone, let's say,

is totally indifferent to how anyone wants to use it or what they want to do with it.

Rather, uh i it can be defined uh purely in terms of like how much could it be exchanged for, basically.

Like uh this one phone equals um five hundred rolls of toilet paper, I don't know.

I don't know how much rolls it would be.

Probably not.

Probably not.

I don't know.

But anyway.

Does the chair have more use value than shoes?

Well,

Well, uh that's the thing is that use value, like I said, I don't I think the assumption is that it cannot be um it cannot be quantified.

So it's up to you to decide that.

That was the assumption that political economy began with.

That was the assumption.

You we have no way of objectively knowing the use value.

But the problem with that assumption is that today,

Uh that doesn't seem to be the case.

Today it seems like uh

Use values.

It seems like they have acquired a degree of objectivity, social objectivity.

And that is the enigma, that is the mystery.

Yeah, yeah, by some human demand.

But

It's like, um, to what extent is that demand rooted in an objective social necessity?

That is what kind of was left out.

Uh you know, Marx and Engels, they would talk about uh

They would talk about how I think, uh, again, haven't slept in three days, so forgive me if I um

If they haven't said this, but I I distinctly recall, I think one of them said something along the lines of that socialism.

Will amount to the subordina the supremacy of use value.

It's determined by labor and by nature.

Um

It's the source, according to them, it's the source.

The source of the use value, yes, comes from labor and comes from nature.

But for example, let's say um

Let's say a Funko Pop has use value.

See, this is the enigma, right?

This is why we're fighting about baristas or something.

Because, well, something like a Funko Pop can have a use value to someone.

Let's say someone wants a Funko Pop and they want to rub their feet with it or something weird like that.

That's that's the human demand that it fulfills.

Um

Our knee-jerk reaction would be to say this is not an object this is not a legitimate use value.

Because it's somehow like antisocial.

Why should all of society have to produce this thing for some weird guy's fetish?

But then the liberal Marxists, the liberal individualistic ones, let's call them that, they'll go ahead and they'll tell us, well, no, no, the use value doesn't matter.

It's all then it's gotten to such an absurd degree that they'll try to say now that prostitutes are proletarians.

They say, well, it doesn't matter what kind of labor they're doing.

It's still proletarian because as long as there's a demand, um

It's being valorized into c and they're productive laborers.

And it's ironic because in Marx's day they didn't regard prostitutes as proletarians, so why the hell would they be today?

It's so stupid.

But even then, the main crux of what makes this position so outrageous isn't just that it's wrong from a technical Marxist perspective.

It's wrong from because it neglects how use value has become fundam uh an objective social use value has become objectively intertwined on a on a systemic level with exchange value.

um such that we could all clearly see that there are unproductive and parasitic forms of economic activity that are just mooching off of the fulfilment and production of objective use values.

And that is something we regard as intuitively self evident.

Um

In Marx's time

To speak of objective use values

uh was ridiculous, right?

It was meaningless.

This was a time of the full reign of exchange value.

Everything was subordinated to exchange value.

But ironically enough, precisely because everything was subordinated to exchange value, there was no consumerism.

Now, stay with me here.

Stay with me here.

We tend to associate all of the excesses of capitalism and all the the reign of the dollar and the reign of money with mindless consumerism.

But consumerism is actually proof of the triumph of socialism, not capitalism.

And I can explain to you why.

Because in nineteenth century classical capitalism,

Use value was fully subordinated to exchange value.

And because of that,

Rather than uh uh things being produced to meet primarily desire as a f as a clear and obvious factor of production, an explicit factor of production, it was just this monstrous mechanical kind of like uh

Expansion of material wealth to fulfill the basic subsistence of society.

Desire did not have an explicit role economically in shaping that.

Because everything was subordinated under the under exchange value in a way that was totally indifferent to the use values.

Um

Everything was being produced just to kind of uh acquire capital and acquire surplus, which ironically led to a society that was this kind of monstrous mechanical, you know, um purely indifferent to our desires and even our greed, right?

So that was a society, that's why it was so clear what the proletariat was back then, right?

But consumerism is the opposite, right?

With consumerism,

When desire becomes a factor of production,

What does this prove?

It proves that exchange value by itself.

Is not the supreme, not everything is subordinated under exchange value alone, at least, right?

How people's subjective desires and wants become a fundamental factor of production.

Let's call them their socialized use values.

Such that there can be a craze for Coca-Cola and McDonald's and all these other kinds of things.

Not necessarily, it's like Coca-Cola and McDonald's were not necessary things to realize and light industry as a whole, because FDR and the New Deal, he was backed by the light industry capitalists.

And he was fighting the financial monop and financial and industrial merged.

Those monopolies is the ones he was fighting on behalf of the kind of up-and-coming light industry capitalists.

But the light industries

Um

As much as they're profitable, um

You cannot say that this is a society purely motivated by profit anymore.

It's a society that's also motivated by satiating desires, satiating unique demands, demands which themselves are not purely defined by the goal of acquiring exchange value.

A great guy to read about where Marx got his ideas about value and about the relationship between desire and need is Nicholas Barbin.

Work is called A Discourse of Trade 1690.

Thank you so much, Chris.

I appreciate you so much.

Let me put it this way, right?

What were the desires what were the things that capitalism produced in the 19th century?

They were things that just produced more capitalism.

They were things that people needed in order to

continue and endanger the pro process of capitalist valorization, and that's really it.

You know, you the things that were being produced were predictable in the sense that i it wasn't about satiating unique desires, it was about s satiating needs that were themselves endangered and created by uh uh exchange value itself, as s surplus value itself, I should rather say.

Right?

Like for example

Let's just use like a dumb example.

Like, um like like the pollution created by the factory uh in the neighborhood is creating um

It's creating like pollution and and sh some shit everywhere.

I don't know.

So that created the new need for um producing brooms to sweep it all away.

just to make the environment habitable.

That's a good example of like the feedback loop that I'm talking about, right?

It's like capitalism itself was just creating i the things that it it's that were necessary for itself.

But uh you can't say that's true for a consumer economy.

What makes McDonald's more of a lubricant to reproducing a capitalist uh society or the ultimate fulfillment of uh surplus value than Wendy's?

I mean, McDonald's is more desired than Wendy's is.

Why is McDonald's

somehow more capitalist than Wendy's.

At the level of what causes people to desire it more.

So you see what I'm talking about.

This is proof that uh exchange value is not dominant anymore over surplus value sorry, over uh use value.

Yeah, of course, the workday, that's so important as well.

So uh this is these are the things that are are necessary to understand.

Um

Today.

Anyway, guys, I'll see you tomorrow.

We're going to be streaming tomorrow as well.

Um.

But uh yeah, I'm gonna collapse.

out of exhaustion.

Could this be extended to digital and intangible use value?

You know what's crazy?

Because the attention economy started bothering me as a Marxist.

Because I'm actually a real Marxist and I want Marxism to be correct.

So I started getting bothered by how the fuck it was that so much money is being made from data and these intangible digital stuff.

Like, how does the labor theory of value, quote unquote, that's not what Marx ever called it, but how does that factor into like the attention economy?

Like, how the fuck is Mr.

Beast making more money?

Oh, from advertise.

It's like, okay, but.

It's like the data is becoming more valuable than the fucking product, you know, the product itself.

Like we are the product, right?

So I saw this crazy guy, Atlas, what's up?

There was this crazy guy who wrote a he wrote an article about it.

It was like an academic thing.

And I admire him for his insanity.

But you know what he said?

He said that the labor of our eyes

reading and looking at the screen,

Was somehow

The source of the value.

And I shit you not, I saw someone say that, who was like a serious Marxist academic.

And he said the labor of our eyes

Is what

The the labor of the energy expended for our eyes to see

And I was like, yeah, we gotta rethink a lot of things.

We gotta rethink a lot of things because this is fucking crazy.

But that w it was a serious Marxist academic who said that.

Like like uh when an ad pops up and we're looking at that.

The labor of our like eyes is creating the value, the surplus value.

And I found that fucking crazy.

I was like, alright, we need to change we need to completely rethink everything we think we know about Marxism, because clearly it's not.

This is clearly not where Marx was coming from, all right?

This is a little ridiculous.

Anyway guys

Anyway guys

See you all tomorrow.

Bye-bye.