/edu/ - Education

read lacan

>>13048
also read deleuze

>>13047
Freudian psychology encourages the liberal version of fascism

My question is why they're so obsessed with some dead guy who peddled woo instead of modern, scientific forms of psychology

>>13047
They think Fascism is caused by sexual repression, which is bunk because ᴉuᴉlossnW, in spite of him being evil, was a gigachad

>>13052
That was Adorno not Freud

>>13052
You don't have to be sexless to be repressed

>>13054
ᴉuᴉlossnW wasn’t repressed in any way. Arguably Hitler was, but then again, probably so was Lenin, Stalin, Marx, etc. to some degree

>>13050
there is no other version

but whatabout the conservative version? conservatives are liberals

>>13055
I think the preeminence of the German strain of Fascism has muddied the perception since Germanic society pre-War is definitely repressed in some form or another, which is why it was far more deadly than the Italian or Spanish ones

We turn to Freudian psychology as a way to explain away the emergence of false consciousness (i.e chauvinism) among the working class. Personally i tend to lean more to Lacan's view that people derive ego enjoyment from racism instead of the Freudian view of Reich et al

>>13057
> since Germanic society pre-War is definitely repressed in some form or another
Lol no.
Weimar Germany was literally the most sexually liberal country in the world. Actually, part of the reason Hitler was elected was because Germans didn’t like all the sexual promiscuity going on

>>13059
>we didn't want to do the holocaust but you couldn't stop being so tolerant
t.

>>13059
Anon, who is to say that those two things cannot coexist together? It is precisely the authoritarian conservative nature of Germanic society that made Weimar as promiscuous as it was, we can see this today with immigrants of Arab descent; the more conservative their homeland is the more degenerate they become in the West. And who can forget the pinnacle of puritanical conservatism, Victorian England, where a quarter of all women became prostitutes?

>listening to the "LOL SEX LOLLLLLLL" neurologist to combat fascism
how and where the fuck did you come to this conclusion

>orthodox Marxists
Who? What is an "orthodox Marxist"?

>>13047
OP, you are labeling "orthodox" Marxism stuff that isn't actually orthodox Marxism.
My best guess is you confuse contemporary western academic Marxism for "orthodox Marxism". That's in error.
contemporary western academic Marxism do indeed try to juggle Freudan and Marxish theory.
Orthodox Marxists OTOH critiqued (and continues to critique) Freud and psychoanalysis more broadly as a bourgeois science (see Lenin's comments on it for just one example).

>>13047
I don't know if people are obsessed with Freud specifically but more psychology in general. Depending on what you mean by orthodox Marxist there could be several reasons. Some people who call themselves orthodox say it as a rejection of Lenin to say that he strayed from Marx. Those people are usually in the same group as liberals that try to use psychoanalysis to explain why people turn to "totalitarianism" and try to equate communism in practice with fascism. Some Marxists call themselves orthodox to say they are anti-revisionist for some specific change in the USSR which can vary depending on their view of how and why the USSR failed. They think its important to study psychology to explain how the masses could let the revolution be subverted. They might say something like blue jeans coca cola and rock and roll convinced people to give up on communism.

A lot of communists don't think there is a psychological reason for the failure of the USSR and think that it was overthrown by forces from the outside. Psychology might also be important to them to understand western propaganda and color revolutions and to explain them to others. Edward Bernays was the creator of modern advertising wrote a book called Propaganda and was Freuds nephew.

>His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954.

I think if your adversary is using this tool its important to understand it if you want to be able to have some kind of counter.

Freud was just one element of a large-scale German intellectual reaction against Marx and Engels that lasted decades

okay so hear me out:

communism is about society and stuff right?
And society is made of people
And people have their subjective experience, and they have agency and also conspicuous lack in agency.
This is where the unconscious comes in, and psychology as a whole after it.

Freud is a very prominent historical psychologist, and actually out of the early psychoanalysts he was one of the less woo, and out of the field of psychology as it is now, psychoanalysis is one of the most focused on theoretical understanding rather than an empirical approach. Lacan sort of takes this a step further and he pivoted away from clinical work towards theory; this is relevant because so many of the different approaches in psychology have to do with selling something, but his very theoretical approach is not so easily translated to any single marketable therapy method.

Given all of this, i don't get Freud hate? Tho OP: orthodox marxists like Lucaks are sort of idealistish in orientation so idk… i definitely understand the uneasyness around the big focus on subjectivity, but at the same time psychoanalysis is a science of subjectivity, and subjectivity is something we all deal with, so… it's a science of revolutionary subjects, we might as well at least consider what it has to tell us. Especially as another anon said, the bourgeoisie are using this stuff against us, because it's real, and we should know how to at least come to terms with or counter that if we can.

>>17633
Are you familiar with this?

I've not dug deep into psychology yet, only surface-level, but this was apparently the psychological theory that the soviets (pre-Khrushchevization) developed.
Would love to get some input from other comrades ITT about what you think of this, if you've read some of the papers etc.

Oops, here are the relevant links >>17854
>Cultural-historical psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural-historical_psychology
>Vygotsky Circle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vygotsky_Circle

Bumping for input on these
>>17854
>>17855

>>13047
freud is only good for novelists

>>13075
>Orthodox Marxists OTOH critiqued (and continues to critique) Freud and psychoanalysis more broadly as a bourgeois science (see Lenin's comments on it for just one example).
site:site:www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works "freud", "psychoanalysis"
>0 results
Post proofs or you're full of shit. I'm far from an expert on Freudian theory specifically, but it's obvious that it had an early impact on the socialist movement.

As for the definition of "Orthodox Marxist" - there's no universally agreed upon definition, but the people who call themselves Orthodox Marxists usually support a political strategy and party model closer to the early Second International than the Third International. Theory daddies being late Engels, early Kautsky, pre 1917 Lenin, Liebknecht, Bebel, etc. So if we're dealing with that period the connection is obvious. One of Freud's most foundational works was a case study of Ida Bauer, the sister of Otto Bauer, the Austrian Marxist leader whose whole schtick was how impeccably orthodox he was against revisionism and Bolshevism. Not just him though - Trotsky respected psychoanalysis and had his daughter moved to Berlin to undergo treatment. His confidence probably came from the fact that socialists dominated the first wave of Freudian practitioners, after all the Frankfurt School was founded starting in 1923.

Again, not an expert on Freud, but the connections seem obvious. I also very strongly doubt that the socialist movement would have preferred the alternative to Freud - for all the unconscious sex stuff people like to mock him for, his central thesis was that mental distress was a result of traumatic personal experiences. That's a hell of a lot better than mainstream biomedical psychiatry was at the time, which was deeply tied to the eugenics movement and blamed all anti-social behavior on "defective" genetics rather than a sick society.

>>18532
Humble yourself.

http://www.marxists3va6eopxoeiegih3iyex2zg3tmace7afbxjqlabmranzjjad.onion/archive/zetkin/1924/reminiscences-of-lenin.htm

>Clara Zetkin - Reminiscences of Lenin (January 1924)
>Chapter 6
>Women, Marriage and Sex

Read the entire book, or at the very least the entire chapter.

>>18533
I stand corrected.on Lenin. You yourself state that this is "just one example", however - what are the others? I'm not trying to tear you down or to try to defend Freud's theories, I'm curious to know what classical ("orthodox") Second International Marxism thought about psychiatry.

One interesting thing I found while looking around on Marxists.org was that Karl Kautsky, who was definitely an authority of the Second International era, made a fairly in-depth critique of Freudian theory in his 2,000 page magnum opus The Materialist Conception of History published in 1927. Here's a quote from page 58:

<Truly, the notion is absurd that the nature of primitive man, as he was prior to all culture, could be studied by examining the waste-products of civilization in Professor Freud’s office.

<That is not to say anything against the importance of the Freudian hypotheses for medical science. They may stimulate it in a very fruitful manner. On that question I cannot pass judgment. But the object to which they refer, the unconscious, demands for its study, more than any other, the acutest self-criticism, sobriety, and precision. And it is just this object that most easily tempts one to arbitrary construction, exaggerations, and premature hypotheses. Unfortunately, Freud is very much inclined to such excesses, and many of his disciples have taken over from their master not his genius but his excesses. [Kautsky here quotes two passages from Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 137, 121, and comments:] When one reads Freud, one could believe that all of man is only an appendage of his genitals. …

<I have repeatedly been called on to incorporate results of psychoanalysis into my conception of history. However, I have not yet found any that would cast a new light on the historical process. 1 therefore sec no reason to move onto this, for the present, at least for me as a layman, still very insecure territory. Should others who are more familiar with the nature of psychoanalysis want to draw upon it for the solution of historical problems, there is no objection to that; only it must be demanded that they understand something not only about psychoanalysis, but also about history and political economy. Without these, a conception of history is impossible.

Interesting stuff. It's worth noting that the bulk of Materialist Conception.. is said to have been written before 1914, with the project put on hold in favor of Bolshevik-bashing polemics and the like, so I'm especially curious when these lines were written. I still stand by my claim that classical / orthodox Marxists originally became interested in Freud's theories, rather than cabal of academic Freudians suddenly attaching themselves to Marxism at some point.

>>13047
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism

Freudo-Marxism mostly arose as a way to explain fascism. I am critical of the pathology paradigm and the psychocentric reductionism of Freudo-Marxism but there are some valuable insights there.

It's hard to dismiss freud when your enemies are trying to make their breeding fetishes enforced by the state.

>>13047
>and I don't understand why.
They are stuck in 19th century pseudo-science.

I am starting to read "Neurosis and civilization : a Marxist/Freudian synthesis" of Michael Schneider, but is my first book about the subject, and i am not experience in neither Freud nor Marx.

We may first read Lacan's assessment of Freud's project (1956):
>"Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language."
<Jacques Lacan, Seminar 3, Ch. 19, Sct. 3
This "torture" we can see structurally, by the separation of the signifier from the signified, and further, of the signifier's internal separation from itself, as we may read from chapter 14, from seminar 3:
<The signifier, as such, signifies nothing […] Experience proves it - the more the signifier signifies nothing, the more indestructible it is […] There's no other scientific definition of subjectivity than one that proceeds from the possibility of handling the signifier for purely signifying, not significant ends, that is, expressing no direct relation of the order of appetite […] the signifier, which is that it signifies nothing and is therefore always capable of yielding various meanings.
I take this to mean that the signifier "as such" (S) is separated by its formality from what is "signified" (s), and so, the appeal to the signifier (S) is an end in-itself, not a means to an end. An example is in religion, where the signifier "God" only refers to itself, and so is internally contentless. as an example, we may read hegel (1816):
<This proposition in its positive expression A = A is, in the first instance, nothing more than the expression of an empty tautology. It has therefore been rightly remarked that this law of thought has no content and leads no further.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl409.htm
Thus, the signifier cannot signify anything other than itself (A is A), yet the internal content of A is also empty, so A is not-A. Hegel works this out by applying negativity to give identity totality, but Lacan resists totality, speaking of "set" (Ch. 14, Sct. 1):
<I said a set, I didn't say a totality. As a matter of fact, the notion of structure is analytic […] I think that you're well enough oriented to understand that the notion of structure is by itself already a manifestation of the signifier.
So then, in the signifier is irreconcilability, which backgrounds the "torture" of the subject.

The signifier operates as the symbolic particularity of Freud, where in his dream analysis for example, he sees the way in which dreams are only "remembered" by the interruption of flow by an intrusion of a particular object (e.g. A red car). The dream itself then only expresses meaning by what is fixed by attention on this. As a plainer example, trying to remember a particular word shows the separation between signifier (S) and signified (s) quite clearly, where the harder we strive for the thing, the more distant it becomes, by its approximation (where it can literally feel painful to have it on the tip of the tongue - it is clearly unconscious, as a denial of access from ourselves, like paruresis). Connotation is achieved, without singular denotation, showing that signification may be supplemented by negativity, but that it is inadequate to the positivity of the form (as opposed to content). Practically, this psychic phenomenon also occurs with sleep; the more we try to sleep, the harder it becomes - even attempting to "trick" ourselves into falling asleep. This "tricking" is also part of common superstitions we have, like avoiding jinxes, or feigned apathy to events so that they proceed automatically (such as waiting for game console menus to load). Thus, the signifier holds separation from signification, the same way the set is internally contentless. This is also present in the orgasm, where Freud sees that "pleasure" (eros) is generally understood as aristotelian "catharsis" (release of tension), rather than a positive "substance" added to the psyche (e.g. Dopamine). The orgasm then, as he sees it, is the ultimate object of pleasure, but in itself, is contentless of the erotic drive. This is very similar to what Oscar Wilde writes, that everything is about sex, except sex itself. Freud appears to concur. Finally, and with this, we may broach into Marx - the fetish object contains the abstract "essence" of sexuality within its concrete universality. It exudes the infinity of fantasy within its finitude, and so appears like the signifier, as a form without determinate content, since it acts as all things to the subject which projects onto it.

In Chapter 1, Section 4 of Marx's Capital Vol. 1 (1867), Marx speaks upon the "fetishism" of commodities as they appear as "values", which in turn, subjectify themselves as "social" characters, as man becomes an object, guided by the demand for "value" to reproduce itself (the concrete possesses the abstract essence). This analysis can be likened to previous hegelian criticisms of religion, like Ludwig Feuerbach's "The Essence of Christianity" (1841), which sees how man alienates himself as an object, relating to the subject of Christ, an emblem of humanity. In the same way, to Marx, "value" or money, is man's form of self-reproduction, but by the idol of a false God. Marx does not merely suggest a change in consciousness, as the Young Hegelians think, but rather, that since consciousness is a result of material conditions, the mode of production must itself be changed (e.g. Capitalist commodity production). This relates to signification by the mode of exchange, which "stamps" products as values, as Marx writes, with the second chapter also stating that value can only appear where property is mutually recognised as having ownership by subjects, placing value into relations of legal contract. It's the contract which also manifests the particularity of the capitalist commodity, the general purchase of labour-power, bought and sold by the labour contract, which gives property to the worker in his own person. It's this subjectivity which is later remarked upon (Vol. 1, Ch. 19); that "labour" has no value, since it is not "labour" which is purchased, but is the labourer himself. Value is a subjective relationship, since value to marx only appears between two subjects, who signify the "stamp" of value in their commodities. For a product of labour to "become" a value thus entails this mode of signification, emanating down to the labourer himself. For example, Marx says in Chapter 19 and elsewhere that a slave is only an object, so his accounting is tallied as input costs, while a free worker has a wage, which signifies his subjectivity, initiating a relationship of value. Value then, is not objective, but is subjective of commodity exchange, with its appearance being signified by a particular commodity (e.g. In its price). Marx makes confused comments in this regard however (Vol. 1, Ch. 3, Sct. 1), where he says that an item may take the form of commodities (i.e. Value), but may nonetheless fail to contract a "real" relationship, stating that it is rather a relationship of "imaginary" value imposed onto the form of commodities. Here, Marx attempts to see that the signifier (S; the form of value) must correspond to the signified (s; the magnitude of value), for it to be a "real" relationship of value. As yet, Marx accepts the possibility of incongruence, but not without bitter comments as to the "indirect" value-relation which may be obscured within it.  Here, Marx is not yet poststructural, as with later economists, who see that price and value have no necessary relationship.

What we see here then, is that to Marx, "value" is both a signifier and signified. It has its formal reality as a commodity, but a significance as a quantity of labour. Freud begins as a physiologist, attempting to locate neurosis in biological causes, but sees rather, that many causes are psychic, desubstantialising the material for the psychic (symbolic), giving independence to the abstract signifier, which gains ascendancy in Lacan's poststructuralism. Marx approaches the illustrative illusions of capital in Vol. 3 with comments on "fictitious capital" being the basis of credit, which supplies itself without redemption, such as fractional reserves, which hold values as a cost against possible expansion. As yet, Marx still criticises the pure "symbol" of money as inadequate, equally speaking against fiat currency (t. Vol. 1, Chapter 2, Footnote 11), appealing to the "reality" of exchange. This also goes into Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labour (t. "Theories of Surplus Value", Chapter 4, 1863), which further sees "material" and "immaterial" commodities possessing "real" or "imaginary" values in their consumption. So then, Marx holds to the structuralism of signification, while Freud and Lacan are more poststructural, or desubstantialised in their symbolic forms of exchange.

We can also compare Marx's structuralism against Baudrillard's poststructuralism, by looking at simulacrum. Marx insists upon a real relation in symbols:
<The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol […] Lawyers started long before economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely imaginary. This they did in the sycophantic service of the crowned heads, supporting the right of the latter to debase the coinage, during the whole of the middle ages, by the traditions of the Roman Empire and the conceptions of money to be found in the Pandects.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm
<the issue of paper money must not exceed in amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually circulate if not replaced by symbols […] Paper money is a token representing gold or money. The relation between it and the values of commodities is this, that the latter are ideally expressed in the same quantities of gold that are symbolically represented by the paper. Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
Thus, money can only be "real" if it directly represents a proportion of gold or silver, to Marx. This distinction is older than Marx, however, such as in the work of Adam Smith (1776), who distinguishes between the "real" and "nominal" values of currency based in their relationship to exchange. For example, a currency which is depreciated by excess, loses its real value, while preserving its nominal (or "face" value). £1 is still £1, but may purchase less per unit. The £1 is constant, while its purchasing power is variable. This variability is the measure of its "real" value, since it represents what it can really exchange for, not what it denominates. For example, being a millionaire in America makes one really rich, while being a millionaire in Zimbabwe makes one poor. Equally, being a millionaire yesterday meant more than being a millionaire today, due to the rate of inflation by depreciation. So then, we can hold to this distinction, between what money is "really" worth, and what it presumes to be worth. Marx writes:
<We know, however, that, the values of commodities remaining constant, their prices vary with the value of gold (the material of money), rising in proportion as it falls, and falling in proportion as it rises.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
Here, Marx explains currency depreciation by a decline in the value of gold, affected by an increase in the supply of currency (e.g. Less labour costs per ounce of gold). He confuses cause for effect however, since the money-commodity can be issued as mere symbol, whose integral reality is only fixed by proportional supply, not to the imparting of any substance into the symbol. This can be proven by falsification within a model of fiat currency, which marx rails against in its very concept:
<The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol […] it was a maxim of the Roman Law that the value of money was fixed by decree of the emperor. It was expressly forbidden to treat money as a commodity.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm
The claim I'm making is not to say that there is no difference between real and nominal value, but only that the "reality" of value is based in its proportion to the market, not as a substance of labour unto itself, since of course, money today has no labour content, yet still expresses value, which according to Marx's "value form", is impossible. Thus, the poststructuralists appear to be more correct, since if the "universal equivalent" commodity has no formal equivalence, and as a signifier, signifies nothing in itself (since money is not even a commodity), then the real becomes nominal, by its "mere" symbol. This, as I must stress, is spoken as against Marx's own potential as a theorist. Clearly, Marx sees "value" as nothing more than a "hieroglyph", yet pertains to the "magic of money" all the same. He sees that the sign of the wage denotes value by its subjectivity, yet only anthropormorphises labour, and not exchange (such as Smith). He sees that "labour" is only a sign, as incorporated into accounting (since he writes that useless labour "does not count" as value), yet sees that value may also relate to us "indirectly". He is full of contradictions in these analyses, by treating value as a quasi-autonomous abstraction, and not as a mere signifier. What is strange is that to tell a marxist that "value is subjective" is more offensive than to tell them "value is objective", despite the metaphysical absurdity of the statement, which shows the conceptual confusion, which initially begins in Marx himself.

As against Marx's semiotics, we have Baudrillard's simulacrum, which in his book "simulation and simulacra" (1981) begins by a Borges fable, describing a cartogropher who finds that the truest map of a territory must cover the entire territory itself. Thus, the map *becomes* the territory, and there is no difference, in effect, and in reality. Baudrillard extends this medium of the simulation to show that "hyperreality" operates the same way (e.g. "If it talks like a duck, and talks like a duck, then its a duck" - a phrase which incidentally refers to a mechanical duck created in the 18th century). Thus, the medium becomes immediate to the terrain, like how Goebbels is attributed to have said that a lie repeated long enough becomes the truth - religion is a perfect example. The insistence then, upon what is "real" beyond what is apparent, can cause confusion, since it would be like asking what reality would "look" like, or "sound" like without eyes and ears. Reality itself is interpreted by the medium of sensation. There is no feeling, and no knowledge without embodiment (even God has a throne, and so a buttocks to sit upon, and presumably thus, an anus to defecate from). We are resigned to subjectivity.

The purpose of simulation is to demonstrate the function of signs in an economy. If "symbols of value" must be based on gold to have "reality", then what is the objectivity of gold besides an accounting measure? Tungsten has very similar physical qualities as gold in its means to be discerned by collectors, so forgeries circulate. This "fake gold" has the same price as "real gold" until measured, where it then loses "value", based on the prejudice of its origins, not its usefulness. We can equally read Aristotle on this issue:
<Further, what is rare is a greater good than what is plentiful. Thus, gold is a better thing than iron, though less useful: it is harder to get, and therefore better worth getting. Reversely, it may be argued that the plentiful is a better thing than the rare, because we can make more use of it. For what is often useful surpasses what is seldom useful, whence the saying: "The best of things is water. "
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.1.i.html
Gold's value is attributed to its rarity, not its intrinsic qualities as a metal, which when compared against steel, is less useful. Further, Aristotle saw the value of money as determined by the state, such as here:
<money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and this is why it has the name 'money' (nomisma)–because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless.
https://sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico048.htm
Thus, "value" here appears as a sign, which in its natural qualities, is determined only by its rarity and function. The limiting of the supply of money makes it appreciate in "real" value, proving this basic causation as regards to price, as being a "signal" relative to demand, as Aristotle understood it. If this signifier is denied, then nothing can maintain its value. Another example is the Austrian village of Wörgl in the 1930s, which adopted the use of paper money, by decree of Silvio Gesell. A parallel paper currency was issued due to limits in the existing supply, and it naturally increased sales. Here, the money had no "value" besides its nominal stamp. Nothing was necessary to "back" the currency (e.g. S ≠ s), proving its fiction. Contemporarily, currency mostly operates as "paper", yet papers of different "values". For example, USD is purported to be "less" valuable than GBP, despite the equivalence of their relative material. Thus, the signifier truly signifies nothing, including itself. You may initially retort, but if I counterfeit USD, I become rich, while if i work for USD, I become poor. The means are not the end. The £1 coin is made from £0.04 worth of material, yet £0.04 is not £1. Further, £100 in credit is worth £0.0000… in expenses, yet £100 is worth £100. A mere symbol.

In another book, Baudrillard attacks Marx directly; "The Mirror of Production" (1973), where he accuses Marx of reproducing the logic of value, while seeking to critique it. Of course, this is obvious to anyone who has read "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875), for example. Baudrillard begins by seeing how post-capitalist imagination seeks productivity as an end in itself, not a means (e.g. profit):
>Everywhere productivist discourse reigns and, whether this productivity has objective ends or is deployed for itself, it is itself the form of value. It is the leitmotif both of the system and of a radical challenge-but such a consensus is suspect […] Marx did not subject the form production to a radical analysis any more than he did the form representation.
<Mirror of Production, Preface
Baudrillard is only perfectly correct, even in reference to Marx's own syllogism of production (t. Grundrisse, Introduction, 1858) which sees exchange and consumption as emanations of the principle mode of production. In Marx's later polemics, such as "Gotha", we see that Marx appears to favour the capitalist mode of production, just with altered relations, where for example, the means of production are owned by the state, and the means of consumption are distributed directly, rather than purchased (since exchange is the constitution of value). The worker still gets a wage and all other basics, so we may characterise it as a type of "state capitalism", perhaps akin to Stalin's discourse upon "socialist commodity production" (1951), rampantly supported by today's pro-China communists. Of course, Baudrillard is offering an attributed Bordigan alternative, "The hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that the firm has a boss". It is not simply the form, but the principle. Baudrillard in other places speaks as to his preference; a wish for a return to "symbolic exchange" (1976), or what we may call "gifting", as opposed to the debt systems which realise themselves as commodity markets, and their spectre of "value" as an intrinsic property of objects. Baudrillard then sees how the freedom of exchange is limited by the imperative of value to equivocate labour, which itself has its concept in the principle of production, rather than consumption, lets say. So then, Baudrillard's ultimate criticism is in the insistence upon value to begin with, which begins in the "principle" of production, and which he sees communists reproducing, even to a great extent, beyond capitalists; "real" relations impose themselves over "symbolic" relations. Man is forced to become "himself":
<In the same way atheism, being the supersession of God, is the advent of theoretic humanism, and communism, as the supersession of private property, is the vindication of real human life as man’s possession and thus the advent of practical humanism, or atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion, whilst communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only through the supersession of this mediation – which is itself, however, a necessary premise – does positively self-deriving humanism, positive humanism, come into being.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm
but perhaps even "communism" is alienating? if we are free, are we then also free to abandon our freedom?
see: "brave new world" by aldous huxley (1932)

Baudrillard:
>In the distinction between exchange value and use value, Marxism shows its strength but also its weakness. The presupposition of use value- the hypothesis of a concrete value beyond the abstraction of exchange value, a human purpose of the commodity in the moment of its direct relation of utility for a subject- is only the effect of the sys­tem of exchange value, a concept produced and developed by it […] He does not radicalize the schema to the point of reversing this appearance and revealing use value as produced by the play of exchange value […] In other words, the signified "use value" here is still a code effect, the final precipitate of the law of value.
<Mirror of Production, Chapter 1, Section 2
Thus, "use-value" is essentially a "value in use" (as per Smith). Marx makes a category error by stating, for example, that "a use-value can exist, without being a value", since he (in the german text), distinguishes "use-value" ("Gebrauchswert") from "utility" ("Nützlichkeit"). If indeed, as Baudrillard properly concludes, use-value is the symptom of the form of value (e.g. money) relating value to itself, then use-value is an effect, not a cause, and so cannot exist outside of the commodity form, but is only within it. As a "code effect" then, use-value is signified by its constitutive status as commodity (e.g. a use-value is only produced in being subjectively determined as an exchange-value, or a product of abstract labour, concretely expressed. Thus as Marx states, useless labour "does not count", and so cannot precede its abstraction. This leads to great confusion, in the same sense that Engels footnotes, separating "labour" from "work" in itself. The originary abstraction of value of course makes sense from an empirical outlook, where "labour-time" as measure of value is obviously accounted from wages, *not* the other way round, owing to its particular historicity, not a transhistorical essence, as Marx and Engels assume. Baudrillard quotes Pierre Naville on this point, in Section 3). Here is further controversy, since if use-value is only within the commodity form (i.e. the form of value), then is our "imaginary" value equally an imaginary use-value…?

Baudrillard offers his political critique:
>Failing to conceive of a mode of social wealth other than that founded on labor and production, Marxism no longer furnishes in the long run a real alternative to capitalism.
<Mirror of Production, Chapter 1, Section 3
Baudrillard's point here is that the "fetish" of use-value is composite with the order of "labour" in its two-fold character, which itself is a capitalist concept, that generalises production to facilitate "value":
<Viewed correctly, this fantastic proposition is both arbitrary and strange with respect to man's status in society. The analysis of all primitive or archaic organizations contradicts it, as does the feudal symbolic order and even that of our societies
Of course, Marx does accept the capitalist notion of wealth, and attempts to extend its organisation into communism, such as we may read from "Critique of the Gotha Programme" (1875), which is a startling piece of capitalist realism. Marx preserves surplus, wage labour, money and the state, stating that it is only form and content which have been reversed; thus, "value" still appears in content, just not in form (the same way "commodities" become "products", or "exchange" becomes "distribution" - like how some memes show "the people's police" as inherently false). This arbitrariness is the root of much irradicalism, which extends into real-life marxist projects; all ending in failure (if, of course, the aim of communism is social emancipation, and not just bureaucracy).

Baudrillard opens Section 4 with a recap as to the semiotics of use-value, being the constutive element of exchange-value's evidential "referent" in a chain of proofs:
<In fact the use value of labor power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in the three orders of production, consump­tion, and signification. Exchange value is what makes the use value of products appear as its anthropological horizon. The exchange value of labor power is what makes its use value, the concrete origin and end of the act of labor, appear as its "generic" alibi. This is the logic of signifiers which produces the "evidence" of the "reality" of the signified and the referent.
This is very similar to what Marx writes in Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 3, where prices manifest both in a true and false appearance, with a real "transubstantiation" of the imaginary price form into a "real" price occuring by the exchange of equivalent values. Like how Marx previously assesses a "symbol of value" as expressing a "real" symbolism. He of course, says very little as to what an "unreal" symbolism implies, besides it possessing an "imaginary" form of value. We have already deconstructed the poststructural semiotics of political economy, however. Baudrillard is insisting upon the textuality of "value" as a chain of signification, which is certainly true:
<In this sense need, use value, and the referent "do not exist." They are only concepts produced and projected into a generic dimension by the develop­ment of the very system of exchange value […] productivity is not primarily a generic dimension, a human and social kernel of all wealth to be extracted from the husk of capitalist relations of production […] In other words, the system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential […] man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy. In the last instance, the system rationalizes its power here. And in this Marxism asszsts the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the "inalienable "power of creating value by their labor.
This relates to some comments made by Marx in the Grundrisse, that "value" as a concept did not exist in antiquity, implying that capitalism abstracts value retroactively into homo economicus. As yet, Marx's central discourse is based upon the same notion of an inherent "value" in exchange, stating for instance, that the most elementary form is the "germ" of the bourgeois form, applying teleology to exchange, rather than particularising capitalist conditions as historically novel. Marx also states that Aristotle conceived of the form of value (i.e. price) yet did not perceive the substance of value immanent to its investigation, displaying that Marx believes value to be transhistorical. This is proven by Engels' statement in his "Supplement" to Capital Vol. 3:
<Thus, the Marxian law of value has general economic validity for a period lasting from the beginning of exchange, which transforms products into commodities, down to the 15th century of the present era. But the exchange of commodities dates from a time before all written history — which in Egypt goes back to at least 2500 B.C., and perhaps 5000 B.C., and in Babylon to 4000 B.C., perhaps to 6000 B.C.; thus, the law of value has prevailed during a period of from five to seven thousand years.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm
This ground of human potential (i.e. "labour power") is then naturalised by Marx as presently abstracted, even where it is not conceived, and so is the subject of history, incarnated in the proletariat. As yet, Marx in his 1844 manuscripts appears to designate "labour" as categorically alienating, repeating similar sentiments in Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 1, that labour "does not count as labour" if it has no economic subjectivity (with Engels supplementing this by stating that "labour" is to be distinguished from "work"). Thus, Marx appears to want to abolish "labour" itself, but only in form, not content (i.e. Critique of the Gotha Programme). This is more political confusion then, since the ends of labour are use-values, abstracted as means for exchange-value, limiting the methods of production. Yet, the expansion of production (t. The Communist Manifesto) as the doctrine of communists insists upon the liberation of "labour" by its concrete ends (a capitalist concept, as discussed). This is why in "Gotha", Marx openly and obscenely states that "labour" will become "life's prime want", contradicting the supposed "alienation" which proceeds from its category. All that appears to be true in Marx's program is a system of state capitalism, which sublates all integral attributes of this mode of production. Further, press marxists on this point and they will admit it; what they want to change is not the mode, but only the relations of production (e.g. ownership and distribution), which is only to say, that they want the state to act as the capitalist…

Baudrillard's point here is very radical. What he is proposing is that the very notion of "value" as existing from labour makes one possessive of a rhetorical fiction, which indeed, has its political mobilisation, but only to the ends of labour, the original and false abstraction (e.g. the elementary particle of production). Moishe Postone also writes on this, that the very category of "labour" is inherently capitalist and it must be abolished. The proletariat then, has its inherent irradicality, such as Postone perceives in Fascism, which he diagnoses as a form of "labour fetishism" based in industrial capital, as opposed to "unproductive" or "valueless" sectors like financial capital, personified as "Jewish". Another thinker in this regard is Murray Rothbard (t. "The History of Economic Thought, Vol. 1"), who states that the idealisation of "labour" as "value" is a protestant notion, equally implied by Marx, but outlined by Max Weber's sociology (which Baudrillard later polemicises). Indeed, the LTV only appears after the reformation, and especially from Britain.

Continuing, Baudrillard writes this:
<Criticism and history are strangely arrested before this anthropolo­gical postulate: a curious fate for a Marxist concept. The same fate has befallen the concept of need in its present operation (the consumption of use value).
I have written previously on Marx's anthropocentrism (t. Vol. 1, Ch. 7, Sct. 1), but this is his own stated aim (t. 1844 Manuscripts), since he imagines "humanism" (communist atheism) as the self-determined positive concept of humanity, and is thus disalienating, since it has no means of reaching its own object (i.e. use-value) by a medium, and thus becomes an end in itself. Baudrillard's criticism is that use-value is inherently mediated by a form of value, and so becomes a means, rather than an end. An example would be hypothetical - could a communist society produce waste? This is then where the explicit oppression of a "central plan" emerges to counter non-use values - thus, production is economised to an end which is not for itself. This then makes "use-value" as alienating as exchange-value in the cause of its product, since it denies the domain of non-product.

Baudrillard finally condemns Marx as a simple modernist, inhabiting bourgeois thought:
<Radical in its logical analysis of capital, Marxist theory nonetheless maintains an anthropological consensus with the options of Western rationalism in its definitive form acquired in eighteenth century bourgeois thought. Science, technique, progress, history- in these ideas we have an entire civilization that comprehends itself as producing its own development and takes its dialectical force toward completing humanity in terms of totality and happiness. Nor did Marx invent the concepts of genesis, development, and finality. He changed nothing basic: nothing regarding the idea of man producing himself in his infinite determination, and contin­ ually surpassing himself toward his own end […] even the "dialectical" generalization of this concept is merely the ideological universalization of this system's postulates.
This should of course be concurrent with Lenin's own admissions of Marx's position (1902):
<By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. 
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm

After this, we will proceed to Section 5…

In Chapter 1, Section 5, Baudrillard begins by a description of the ontology of labour as the self-determined essence of man, by various citations, including Marcuse. This is the pinnacle of the Marxist concept, of Labour as the means by which man is subject over his personified essence in a dialectical manner (e.g. Entailing reversal in political economy, where his objectivity becomes the medium of his own subject, i.e. Man worships himself in money, rather than the other way round). In this way, man imparts himself into nature, and thus "humanises" nature, as Baudrillard says. With further citation from Marcuse, Baudrillard diagnoses Marxism as inhabiting the "protestant work ethic", by reference to Weber; that if Labour is the means by which abstract Man "creates" himself, then his very Being is determined by his subjection to productivity in labour:
<this aberrant sanctification of work has been the secret vice of Marxist political and economic strategy from the beginning.
After this, Baudrillard cites a brilliant excerpt from Walter Benjamin on the folly of Marxism's divinity of Labour (t. "Poesie et Revolution", 1971) which exposes the nonsense of esteeming Man's Being as a symptom of his capacity to labour (which, we must remember, was also the slogan above Auschwitz, "Arbeit Macht Frei"). Even "play" is defined by Marcuse as a "useless" product of a rationalised labour. Thus as Baudrillard sees it:
<In effect, the sphere of play is defined as the fulfillment of human rationality, the dialectical culmination of man's activity of incessant objectification of nature and control of his exchanges with it. It presupposes the full development of productive forces ; it "follows in the footsteps" of the reality principle and the trans­formation of nature. Marx clearly states that it can flourish only when founded on the reign of necessity. Wishing itself beyond labor but in its continuation, the sphere of play is always merely the esthetic sublimation of labor's constraints […] Work and non-work: here is a "revolutionary" theme. It is undoubtedly the most subtle form of the type of binary, structural opposition discussed above. The end of the end of exploitation by work is this reverse fascination with non-work, this reverse mirage of free time (forced time-free time, full time­ empty time: another paradigm that fixes the hegemony of a temporal order which is always merely that of production). Non-work is still only the repressive desublimation of labor power, the antithesis which acts as the alternative.
Here, temporality acts as a "measure" of the non-product, incorporated as a negative mass of "consumption", totalised within the productive concept. It is the eternal accountancy which irks Baudrillard, where content is reversed as pure form:
<Exactly as the pure institutional form of painting, art, and theater shines forth in anti­ painting, anti-art, and anti-theater, which are emptied of their contents, the pure form of labor shines forth in non-labor. Although the concept of non-labor can thus be fantasized as the abolition of political economy, it is bound to fall back into the sphere of political economy as the sign, and only the sign, of its abolition.

Section 6 has this comment from Baudrillard, in reference to Georges Bataille:
<If there was one thing Marx did not think about, it was discharge, waste, sacrifice, prodigality, play, and symbolism. Marx thought about production (not a bad thing), and he thought of it in terms of value.
Thus, assertions of "anti-value" (as per David Harvey) are simply conjectural projections into Marx's revealed scripture. As Baudrillard properly states, "production" is "re-reproduction", and it is determined toward its own ends, which cannot facilitate anything "outside" the system. This is made plain in the introduction to Marx's "Grundrisse" (1858), where he elaborates upon the "syllogism" of consumption being the terminus and constitutive sign for the universal model of production (as such). Upon the notion of non-utility, Marx banishes uselessness only to a realm of potential consumption, not a realm of deposited destruction:
<According to Bataille, "sacri­ficial economy or symbolic exchange is exclusive of political economy (and of its critique, which is only its completion) […] The quotations from Marx to which Kristeva refers do not at all carry the meaning she gives them. The genesis of wealth by the genital corn bination of labor-father and earth-mother certainly reinstates a "normal" productive reproductive scheme- one makes love to have children but not for pleasure. The metaphor is that of genital, reproductive sexuality, not of a discharge of the body in enjoyment! But this is only a trifle. The "discharge" of human power Marx speaks of is not a discharge with a pure waste, a symbolic discharge in Bataille's sense (pulsating, libidinal): it is still an economic, productive, finalized discharge precisely because, in its mating with the other, it begets a productive force called the earth (or matter). It is a useful discharge, an investment, not a gratuitous and festive energizing of the body's powers, a game with death, or the acting out of a desire. Moreover, this "discharge of the body" does not, as in play (sexual or otherwise), have its response in other bodies, its echo in a nature that plays and discharges in exchange. It does not establish a symbolic exchange […] This discharge [of labour] is thus immediately an investment of value, a putting into value opposed to all symbolic putting into play as in the gift or the discharge.

Baudrillard comes to Section 7 of the first chapter with a repudiation of western metaphysics hitherto, since he sees Marxism reproducing its trappings:
<Historical materialism, dialectics, modes of production, labor power- through these concepts Marxist theory has sought to shatter the abstract universality of the concepts of bourgeois thought (Nature and Progress, Man and Reason, formal Logic, Work, Exchange, etc.). Yet Marxism in turn universalizes them with a "critical" imperialism as ferocious as the other's.
He for example, treats Marxism as being purely Hegelian in its consideration of Concept (e.g. History as absolute idea). His general criticism is that the discourse (code) of universality impresses itself upon all available subjects in an imperial struggle to affirm the chain of signification. Marx is guilty of this in basic terms, where he regarded capitalist powers as singularly "progressive" (by the telos of communism) and so supported various colonial projects as hastening their own ends, by their own strategies of power. Of course, capitalism has been prophecied to sell its hangmen the rope for nearly two centuries, yet it has never come, and so its hegemony is not a means to its immanent deconstruction, but the movement toward even greater control. The fantasy of finality is the error:
<Perhaps then we will break this fascination, this self-fetishization of Western thought- Perhaps we will be finished with a Marxism that has become more of a specialist in the impasses of capitalism than in the roads to revolution, finished with a psychoanalysis that has become more of a specialist in the impasses of libidinal economy than in the paths of desire.

Finally in Section 8, Baudrillard sees that Marx's "Critique" is really just a sublation. Baudrillard offers a cure, "Symbolic Exchange", or "The Political Economy of the Sign":
<At a much higher level, his critique falters under his own objection to Feuer bach of making a radical critique of the contents of religion but in a completely religious f orm. Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of politiCal economy. These are the ruses of the dialectic, undoubtedly the limit of all "critique. " The concept of critique emerged in. the West at the same time as political economy and, as the quintessence of Enlightenment rationality, is perhaps only the subtle, long-term expression of the system's expanded reproduction […] For us, the critique o f political economy is basically completed. The materialist dialectic has exhausted its content in reproducing its form. At this level, the situation is no longer that of a critique : it is inex­ tricable. And following the same revolutionary movement as Marx did, we must move to a radically different level that, beyond its critique, permits the definitive resolution of political economy. This level is that of symbolic exchange and its theory. And just as Marx thought it necessary to clear the path to the critique of political economy with a critique of the philosophy of law, the preliminary to this radical change of terrain is the critique of the metaphysic of the signifier and the code, in all its current ideo­ logical extent. For lack of a better term, we call this the critique of the political economy of the sign.
Baudrillard discusses this concept in other places, namely "For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign" (1972) and "Symbolic Exchange and Death" (1976).

i thought u said u quit leftypol

beware psychoanalysis. lest you end up like an ineffectual crank that preaches eternal circular analysis of the current state of things, like zizek, a liberal, like contrapoints, or whatever the fuck happened to jordan peterson

Teste

>>25644
contrapoints and jordan peterson hate Lacan tho