Jean Baudrillard vs. Marxism
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- čas přidán 9. 11. 2021
- In this episode, I expound on Baudrillard's criticisms of Marxism.
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Buddyard too
yup that's how I'm referring to Baudrillard from now on, anyone I actually speak to about his ideas will know who I mean anyway lol
One thing Id point out is the categorization of capitalists attempting to rob workers of the “actual value” of their labor to gain profit isn’t really technically true. In Capital and Critique of the Gotha Programme we see how Marx lays out that surplus is extracted via the fact that laborers can never own their own labor and are selling their ability to work which is being paid it’s “correct” (exchange) value for. specifically in Gotha Program Marx points out that “fair days work for a fair days wage” and similar slogans are not the point of the Communist movement instead of just the abolition of payment in general
A lot of these criticisms are valid. They don't fully undermine the marxist project as much as they show the need for new approaches that build upon and expand marxist ideas (Deleuze did this pretty well imo).
Regarding Baudrillard's critique of Marx reducing all value to human labor: It is important to note that Marx didn't see value as something that is simply innate to human labor (as though it were independent from social & historical contingency), but instead that the value of human labor is something socially agreed upon. This means Marx his idea of value coming from human labor is far less essentialist than it might seem.
Banger video as always David!
Yup. That's the great uroboros of capitalism: value derives from labor that exerts itself to earn what is valuable (food, shelter) that only comes into existence through labor. Value is value is value
Yes good point on value. Though afaik there are contrary readings of the meaning, nature, implications, origins, etc of value, I think its also worth pointing out that this "socially agreed" (though maybe that's not exactly the right word -"agree" might imply voluntary) value really only exists in commodity production, and thus the full abolition of class would have to include the abolition of value, or at least of the kind of value talked about in the LTV(a new meaning and social system of value might exist). I think this is pertinent because a lot of people imagine communism as rationally computed/allocated/coordinated labor (without formal money obviously), but that doesn't necessarily abolish value, it could just entail a social whole which is the collective manager of a sort of hidden capital.
@@weatherlylinn-adams2353 the expression "hidden capital" is interesting because the soviet union used to describe to itself it's own economy with economic models designed by neoclassical (neoliberal) economists, which implies that the USSR used credit, investment, and profit in the way commodities were produced and were distributed even though there were no capitalists : that's hidden capital right there (the surplus being used here in the production of bombs and weapons and for the lifestyle of the administrative elites)
“Socially agreed upon value.” Yes, almost like a free market…
I’ve been on a Baudrillard kick lately so I appreciate your work even more than usual. Have you looked at McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead (late 2019 I think)? She does a good bit of Baudrillard and Virilio in her work.
Hey man, great video. Thank you for making it.
I’m new, instantly subscribed!
Heh, super agree at the end there. While it's super easy now to pick apart Marx, we have to understand the ground he was trying to break to realize the strides he made.
digging the new camera
Comment for the comment gods! I'm really excited to hear this one!
Very much appreciate your commitment to and obvious passion for philosophy- that sounds redundant... but I'm grateful for your work. This is what makes CZcams valuable (in my biased opinion).
Thanks👍
Hi
Can you do a video on Deleuze and subjectivity?
Damn, uploaded just one day after I submitted my essay - where there's a section contrasting Baudrillard's ideas with Marxism.
"it is not the product of his or her labor that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature" - Joseph Dejacque
I just wanted to ask you something. Are you familiar with anarchism and certain anarchist theoreticians view on Marxism and productivity? Some that come to mind are Bob Black who wants to reimagine work as play or what he terms "productive play". It's sort of the same thing as Fouriers "attractive labor". You might want to check them out and some other anarchist as well past and present. I really enjoy your work.
The Dejacque quote seems reminiscent of "from each according to his ability to each according to their needs"
In contrast to "from each according to their ability to each according to their work"
Hey sir, could you make a video about tge Question of Agency of homk k bhabha.
Also, Ania Loomba's colonialism and postcolonialism
In which text or book does Baudrillard explain these criticisms?
mirror of production?
he starts in simulacra and simulation and pretty much does it in every text.
Great video, but I take issue with the idea that communism award workers with the "full value of their labor". I don't have specifics quotes off the top of my head to reference, but from my reading, Marx basically says that work as such is abolished. Instead of labor being *required* for some social need but *performed* in order to get compensation, labor is done "according to one's ability" (however much a person or maybe community can or wants to labor), to fulfill whatever social need is present, and then one is able to receive "according to their need". If laborers are still being "compensated" as a direct reward in exchange for labor performed, then alienation persists, as does value in some form.
the first line you spoke is lassallean drivel, not marx.
@@MaxvergaxS I know. That's why I said I take issue with it
Nice ads bro hope they stay up.
Hey!
Please take a microphone.
One advice from a fellow researcher Brother : you have the world's audience, and that is why you should pronounce a little more clearly and speak a little bit slowly. I found your that video on dialectics (Plato....Marx) very helpful and it was easier to understand for me than this one.
Marx was writing about a different world, a 19th century Victorian milieu of what today would be called Third World poverty.
By the 60s much of Victorian capitalism was eradicated, at least in a Western sense, which ostensibly made many of Marx's ideas appear redundant. .
Capitalist production seemed to outperform communist production, seemed to offer workers a better quality of life than communist production. Sure workers were relatively impoverished, but they were better off than workers in the communist countries.
However, if we take Wallenstein's One World System into account. Victorian capitalism essentially is still here, it's just been expanded by globalization
Wherein workers in the First World, closest to the hubs of surplus value, have been co-opted into the wealth generated by global capitalism.
Essentially the world of Marx and Engels is still with us, it's just not in the West anymore, it's in El Salvador. Guatemala, the Philippines, Nigeria, South Africa etc etc.
Now if we were in splendid isolation from such exploitation, we could claim that the success of Western capitalism is autonomous , but obviously if the goods are manufactured in the Third World, we are benefiting from said exploitation,
In fact, you might make the argument, that we are the global bourgeois to the Third World's proletariat.
In that respect, Baudrillard hardly looks at the bigger picture of capitalism. His critiques of Marxism are all within a First World context. Baudrillard only saw the success of capitalism through a Western lens. Very much a superficial reading, not that dissimilar to standard Western tropes on the failures of Marxism.
Moreover, you might say that Baudrillard himself is a hollow simulacra of Western philosophy. A Western sophist engaging in theoretical masturbation, as the Sorkal affair exposed.
That said his essential superficiality gave him insights into the direction Western capital was moving.
Even though he missed the bigger picture, he's useful in describing the essential hollowness of Western capitalism. A hollowness he put down to technological developments in mass media, advertising, computers etc, whereas Marx would have seen it as 'all that is Holy is profaned, all that is solid, melts into air'.
As the West becomes wealthier on the back of globalization, it becomes evermore cosmetic, ersatz. Simulation once only the preserve of the aristocracy and the rich, leaks down into every facet of the West, envelops the entire society, The simulation once contained within the Neo Classical, the Neo Gothic, Mock Tudor, now infects all culture, all politics - everything.
We need to remember that ruling classes never lived in reality, they preferred simulation to hide the truth of their mendacity, Hence people getting rich off the back of slavery built Neo Classical villas alluding to ancient Greece and Rome, or romanticized the medieval period.
Or think prince Ludwig building his Wagnerian castles in Bavaria, or Marie Antoinette living her life as a milk maid in Rambouilliet, or Henry Ford's Greenfield village - the simulation of his Victorian homestead.
Simulacra albeit on a far more modest scale, is now present everywhere in the West giving the lie to the realpolitik laying beneath globalization and post modernity.
What do you think of the argument that the levelling up of the developing world is simply a matter of the time necessary for economic growth to take place, that shifting production to low-wage areas will lead to growth and wage rises and eventual equilibrium etc.? The main impediments to that appear to be debts taken on by corrupt governments/imposed or encouraged by the west, along with complexities of currency control and dollar dominance, rather than something intrinsic to the way that production is organised.
@@lukeskirenko Capital can never achieve equilibrium. If you are not exploiting, you're dying.
The political and economic biases of globalization, even if eradicated, would not lead to a leveling up. Rather the developed countries could start falling into poverty as the emerging markets rose.
As we started seeing with the rise of the Brics in relation to the 08 great recession.
Or as we saw with the rise of OPEC in the 70s, and the blackmail of the Gas and Oil producing countries today.
The world order could suddenly flip, it's flipped many times in the past.
Globalization however is better than de facto imperialism, which in essence was an outsourcing of feudalism to the colonies - with its slavery, segregation, bonded labour etc.
The world is at a crossroads, it either progresses to global redistribution, global governance; or older more primitive forms of capitalism will reemerge.
The developing world is fairly sanguine with the development that globalization brings, but that won't last forever. Antipathy to the West is bound to grow in the developing countries. As is working class resentment in the developed countries to outsourcing and migration.
Unless the global system is stabilized by redistribution, it's bound to fall apart, if it hasn't already.
However, the next stage of global capital may see competing versions of globalization - China and Russian reactionary trading zones on one side; with liberal trading zones of the West on the other.
One thing's for sure, the days of nationalism are over. No country can now survive without some form of internationalism. Some form of international trading bloc of partners.
But maybe these fast emerging vast blocs of conservative and liberal capitalism, actually still speak to a singular global order, it's just a global order breaking up into ideological binaries, much as the Cold War did.
It's just the binary between global communism and global capitalism, has been replaced by competing forms of capitalism. As reflected at the domestic level. The Culture War writ large across the world.
Hence ideological schisms once contained within the nation state are now manifesting at a global level. Which is a marked departure from all previous forms of imperialism, that really had no ideological element. It was just a case of pure power, of great powers competing with each other for economic dominance.
So I'd say globalization really dates back to the Russian Revolution, when ideology first emerged into the global order. A global order created by capitalism's subjugation of feudalism, led to its antithesis.
Just as capital's destruction of communism, has empowered the forces of global reaction to reemerge from the stone its been hiding under since 1945.
As above/ so below - as below/ so above.
A small inaccuracy: CZcams is your distributor, not your employer.
Who is the employer then
@@user-td3ut4tg3v The relationship between CZcams and a CZcamsr is not that of employment. Hence, in this particular relationship, no one is the employer or employee.
It’s all dialectics fault: that duality between body and soul between use value and exchange value between male and female, isn’t soul just body? Isn’t exchange value also a use? Isn’t male the same with female…
10:34 it's frightening how you're perfectly summarising latest Macron's discourse and the ideas they want us to follow, the way they summarise "value" to their own extremely cynical neo-liberalist agenda.
Loved your approach.
Record at a higher volume I can't hear s***
your mic is quiet! but this was really interesting.
> I can't pay you what you want, so I have to under pay you
It seems like your talking about the labor theory of value. I am trying to figure out if the LTV makes sense to me, I think I disagree with it. Is there a summary on the LTV that you recommend?
Vincent, there are different interpretations of Marx's LTV: the substantialist view (abstract labor as a substance that exists in itself, hence a pre-monetary theory), and value-form view (abstract labor as dependent on social relations, a monetary theory). Michael Heinrich elaborates on the latter view in Introduction to Karl Marx's Three Volumes of Capital. If you want a shorter run down, I recommend "Communisation and Value-Form Theory" by Endnotes. To me, the value-form view of LTV makes much more sense than the substantialist view elaborated by people like Cockshott.
Thanks David. Yes , Marxism never challenges the human potential for production.
Baudrillard’s critique kinda sucks tbh. Seems like he didn’t understand Marx’s project. Does he talk about Althusser? His critique only applies to historicist and humanist readings, which just kinda suck themselves. The point about the luddites is wrong as well, didn’t he read the chapter on machinery or the working day on capital? He directly addresses how strikes relate to productivity.
I really love the mirror of production, it expanded my view of how Marx can be critizied. I think a line could be traced betwen different french filosophers to stablish an alternative "marx free" political economy and Baudrillard would be the star 😅. The differece betwen exchange value and use value (for example) seems to have lost all its meaning at some point. Whoever who has had the horrible experience of having to work sellig something knows that people NEVER need the stuff capitalism tries to sell them and it takes more money to convince them about their needs than producing the actual stuff xDDD Marx was a classic positivist of the enlightment era fascinated with the idea of progress... he luckily didn't live long enough to see what progress came to be 🤣🤣🤣
Working at a clothing store really drove the point home for me...
You are a learner bortha trust goodness and dont trust wrong mindset of athiesm hahaha
I think however strong his critique, Baudrillard cannot fully appreciate the more fundamental errors of Marxism because he is too steeped in the tradition. The idea of a prophet-philosopher who can by their own genius understand all the essential factors governing our system of production and also deduce which direction this complex system is heading, and that this destination just happens to be aligned with what Marx advocates as a communist, is on the face of it, absurd. But it is difficult to argue this because the deeper you go into Marxist scholarship the more these assumptions are simply taken for granted. It's like theologians arguing how one god can at the same time be three. It couldn't possibly even occur to anyone within this discourse to question the idea that humans could even know the qualities of god (if such an entity does in fact exist). Baudrillard is only the tiniest of baby steps away from European enlightenment pretensions.
I think it would be helpful to flesh out your thoughts a bit more. Describing “the backbone of capitalism” you said “this is obviously unsustainable.” Now that is quite a claim. Wouldve loved some more details on that position.
Read Marx
@@danic2514 My comment was more of a critique/suggestion - anyone with such a strong opinion that so obviously contradicts the empirical evidence needs to do more than gloss over it as if it is some obvious triviality.
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