http://www.bigthink.com/business-economics/11893

This economist likes capitalism, but her critique is interesting because she is talking about more than distributive justice. She not only challenges inequality but laments how all human relations are seen as transactional today. This was what bothered Marx, too, when he came up with his labor theory of value. For the younger Marx anyway, the thing that made us human was our ability to labor. Mankind is the only species, as he noted, that could change its very species being (ants work but don't *labor* in this sense, if I remembering the nomenclature correctly). Labor is how we express who we are, and who we might become. So in this sense there is a qualitative virtue to labor that can't be captured simply by measuring its value in a wage. Instead, the whole process is rendered vulgar as the system obliges workers to go to the market with their 'wage hours' for sale. Given that the capitalists are required to make profit, they will want to hire the minimal labor required at the minimal price. As such, the capitalist system creates a labor market wherein the workers compete with each other for these relatively scarce jobs. The result is that the workers develop the habit of thinking that life is about work, not labor. This is the great tragedy for Marx: for if we are all to be workers, then there shall be no more poetry in the world. That is to say, we are reduced to robots and lose our ability to truly think. What communism is supposed to achieve, if nothing else, is to finally give us the true value of what we labor on. In other words, the 'wage' for our work plus our share of the 'profit' that the market says our product is actually worth. With all that extra capital in the laborer's pocket, he/she is free to work fewer hours in the day: to write poetry, to create music, to create wonderful new recipes for food, to explore the world of science, philosophy, go fishing, snow board, plant a beautiful garden, help in the production of lovely public spaces, etc.

So life would be less vulgar if we all got the true value of the 'wage hour'. But if that happened, there would be no profit left for the capitalist, and so the wheel turns...

NiK

Tags: Capitalism, Marx

Leo Marx
The Idea of Nature in America
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3671/is_200804/ai_n25419913/print?tag=artBody;col1

But it also should be said that the word nature is a notorious semantic and metaphysical trap. As used in ordinary discourse nowadays, it is an inherently ambiguous word. We cannot always tell whether references to nature are meant to include or exclude people. Besides, the word also carries the sense of essence : of the ultimate, irreducible character or quality of something, as for example, 'the nature of femininity' or, for that matter, 'the nature of nature.' When this meaning is in play, the word tacitly imputes an idealist or essentialist hence ahistorical - character to the particular subject at hand, whether it be femaleness or nature itself. The word's multiple meanings testify to its age : its roots go back (by way of Latin and Old French) to the concept of origination of being born. As Raymond Williams famously noted, nature is probably the most complex word in the English language. And when, moreover, the idea of nature is yoked with the ideologically freighted concept of American nationhood, as in the historian Perry Miller's sly allusion to America as Nature's Nation, the ambiguity is compounded by chauvinism.

Well, Brooksie at his brilliant best! Tho please don’t tell any of my friends I enjoyed anything by David Brooks. Cuz’ he’s conservative and mental and thinks anything to do with theory is crass idealism.

Lord of the Memes
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 7, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)