On Jun 30, 2010, at 10:27 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>> Homo Indeterminatus
>>
>> Totally not getting the reaction on this. I was surprised by the post
>> I first replied to precisely because I think of you as pretty smart -
>> so I figured you could take being called out on citing the opening of
>> Capital out of context like it provides some kind of defense of
>> relativism. I think it was a legit crit on an important point; I
>> gather from the reactions it was taken as pedantic, grandstanding,
>> whatever. In any case the thread feels pretty stale at this point.
>>
>> ^^^^^^^
>> CB: Gee. I wonder why ur feeling the thread is stale (smile)
I don't think so, actually, but it's okay, and shag just freshened it up anyway.
>> Surprise ! I don't agree that the citation was out of context nor
>> totally cogent to the issues in the thread.
>
> I didn't either. You were replying to me and my comment that those
> people weren't working for a salary to sustain their labor, but were
> working for money to sustain their hobby.
And that was in reply to Doug's "Wait a minute - we've got people working for play money and you think there's something *good* about it?"; it wasn't a discussion of what counts as a use-value. Of course the passage CB quoted is pertinent - because it's axiomatic for Marx's whole discussion of Capital. But that's the point: precisely because it's axiomatic, it doesn't exactly support an argument about a concrete case; CB's quoting it struck me as a bad case of "invoking The Gospel According to St. Karl," which I think is a significant hindrance to vibrant, responsive left thought. Maybe I'm overly sensitive to that; maybe I misunderstood. If I'm at fault, I happily apologise.
I found the original story vaguely horrifying and so was trying to follow the discussion closely; Wojtek's comments were excellent, and I was looking forward to seeing someone engage with them, since it seemed like there were wildly different views in play. The thread started to seem stale when the original issue seemed to have gotten lost, or been abandoned, or burned up in the flames.
> Homo Ind: My Steven den Beste comment was a reference to the fact that
> den Beste would write a lotta words to say what could have been said
> in a sentence or two. Bloggers started teasing him, replying to his
> posts with "Shorter den Beste" posts that said what he'd said in a
> sentence or two. It became part of blogging culture to then do the
> same to anyone who had a case of logorrhea.
News to me; thanks for clarifying.
> It was just fucking around.
Fucking around is good - paid or not, play money or real.