The Book is Not for Selling.

"This is an amazing and unique work of art." – Martin Nicolaus.

I had my first inquiry from someone who wanted to buy a copy of my new pop-up book. This presented me with a dilemma because I had never intended to sell copies of the book. The rationale for not selling appears in the book – on pages eight and eleven. The nature of capital is that "real wealth must take on a specific form distinct from itself, absolutely not identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all." And...

...real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.

Real wealth thus cannot be measured in money. Any price I attached to the book would be arbitrary. Why not $62,885,000? "But you are not Andy Warhol!" O.K., then $62,885? $6,289? $62.89 plus shipping? A banana duct taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million last week.

In The Unknown Unknown Marx, I wrote: Toward the end of his 1968 essay, "The Unknown Marx," Martin Nicolaus quoted Marx's enumeration of four barriers to production under capital that "expose the basis of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital." Nicolaus qualified what Marx meant by overproduction to be "[not] simply ‘excess inventory’; rather, he means excess productive power more generally."

Marx's enumeration of those barriers – the infamous 'fetters' on the development of the productive forces – provides the text of page eight of my book.

Page eight of Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading

"It "would require a book," Nicolaus then observed, to present "a proper analysis of the implications of these rather cryptic theses." In lieu of that analysis, he offered a synopsis that "these four ‘limits’ represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’."

My contention is that the decoder ring for those 'cryptic theses' appears in the enigmatic statement, "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." The paragraph in which that statement appears gives a concise explanation of what it means. Two paragraphs earlier, Marx had quoted from the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulities, "Wealth is disposable time and nothing more..." 

Marx's amendment of the phrase from identity to contingency is decisive. Disposable time is necessary for the development of wealth but not sufficient. This contingency returns with a vengence in the four barriers, culminating in the assertion that "real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself... to become an object of production at all."

The whole development of wealth...

Incidentally, a book has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, too – a 'book proposal' – for it to become an object of publication at all. Which is, of course, another reason my pop-up book is not for sale. The concept of the book, however, is available for free: The more the contradition develops: footnotes to "Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading" -- a pop-up book. A neat feature of that post is that if you click on one of the photos to enlarge it, you get a menu of photos that you can scroll through as a slide show. I also want to make it possible for people to assemble their own copy. I have a workshop scheduled for March and another one in the proposal stage for the end of May. I intend to make pdf files available of the page images and of the cut and fold diagrams.

Here is my cnc cutting machine doing its thing:

Coming Up For Air

 Like Punxsutawney Phil, I’ve started to come out of my hole after last week’s trauma. I was angry at Everybody, including myself.

Party politics of any sort will be a distant concern for a while. What is not is the burgeoning war in the ME. We should lean hard into support for an aid cut-off to Israel. Everything. Note that what’s in question here is not the material effect of the aid, but the political one inside Israel. We need to recognize the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Zionists, and seek Jewish allies rather than pre-judge or stereotype them.

Sure, other things are important too, and the incoming Administration will be setting all sorts of fires that will beg to be put out. In politics, focus and repetition count for the most. It will pay to focus on Palestine (and Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran).

Sadly, the Left has a clear field here, besides the agitation among Muslim organizations. Most important, EVERYBODY WILL KNOW WE ARE RIGHT. That’s a political advantage.

The specter of Trump’s wreckage of democratic institutions certainly looks threatening, but it will prove to be related to the ME. Defying the incoming Administration on Israel will be a challenge to the full spectrum of Federal lawless enforcement bodies on which MAGA power depends. Success on the former breeds success on the latter. You beat something with something else. Back in the day, the anti-war movement opened up all sorts of collateral doors.

Democratic Party voices these days can be pretty sickening. I read somewhere that MSNBC is hemorrhaging viewers. The only talker I still watch (in reduced doses these days), Chris Hayes, said the other night, “I wouldn’t watch me.” Joy Reid is just a hack. Rachel Maddow gives me hives. Lawrence O’Donnell, smart and sometimes insightful, is on too late; I can only take so much rehash of the day.

The Party establishment — its elite pols, consultants, donors — has discredited itself. Of course it wants to blame the Woke or the Left, like it always does. Recognizing the opening, Bernie with his unerring political instincts, plunged in the knife. Would that we could all help to exploit this opportunity. Topic A for moral, strategic, and tactical reasons is still Israel’s expanding rampage in the ME.

Politics After the Fascism Debate

By Max B. Sawicky

Here is a sample from my Substack.

The key antagonists on Trump and fascism, the ones I have noticed, include Corey Robin, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, Samuel Moyn, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Except for Ganz, they are all credentialed professors at well-regarded universities. No disrespect for Ganz; I tend to agree with him the most. I have high regard for all of them.

In another sense, however, the entire debate seems off. It is focused on relating, or distinguishing, Trump and the MAGA movement to or from historical analogs in Germany and Italy. To me it reads like a pissing contest for academics. I respect the scholarly activity, but the implied politics leaves me cold.

There is no lack of fascism-mongering among some Democratic Party voices, not to mention MSNBC, but their alternative, per Billie Holiday, is as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

What matters the most? I would say the combined threats of the U.S. government fomenting massively destructive wars around the world and an authoritarian regime trampling over U.S. law to violate the basic rights of people here at home. A friend likes to distinguish authoritarianism from fascism by suggesting the latter entails a mass mobilization of non-governmental forces to extend its own myriad oppressions. I’d take that as a useful amendment. Any heightened activation of the viciousness we can already see among heavily-armed U.S. citizens obviously makes everything worse.

We can see hints of all this in the coming order. As I’ve said before, if we were at the point where all the horrors were fully in play, it could be too late to do anything about it.

What matters the most is whether and to what extent this all comes to pass, not on whether anybody wins an academic prize for the best analysis of the fascist roots of the MAGA movement. The incentives facing scholars are not conducive to vigorous politics.

“He who has not learned from history is doomed to repeat it.” O.K., but he who becomes absorbed in history is doomed to political paralysis, or doomed to a guest appearance on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow.

The power of the U.S. presidency is greatest in the field of foreign policy, especially in the use of massively lethal military force. That is why I say a peace movement is the top priority now. To work for peace, we will also need to defend our civil liberties.

The lead item on the peace agenda is cutting off aid to Israel, which would matter more for the implied political signal than for its material impact. We have been here before. Way back in the mid-1960s, the apparent constituency for peace was invisible. Students for a Democratic Society and a few other groups began their efforts mostly in isolation, not least under continual harassment from the Federal government and its lawless enforcement bodies. We are in a better position now because U.S. Muslim communities, importantly including Jewish allies, are natural advocates for peace, but we face the new obstacle of a pro-war Zionist lobby that squashes dissent on college campuses and tends to curb Palestine-sympathetic messages everywhere else.

The Democratic Party is hopelessly compromised for this cause. At the same time, third party projects are hopeless and facilitate Republican Party rule. The reason for the latter is simple: the electoral rules for national office (the presidency and Congress) render such efforts counter-productive. We are about to find out exactly how much worse the Trump Administration will be for Palestine and for Muslims everywhere.

I’ve thought there is more space for 3rd parties in state and local elections. The dilemma there is that failure to hold onto state government power now imperils reproductive rights, a big deal in my book. In some places with very narrow legislative majorities, such as my own state of Virginia, this will matter.

Otherwise, my current thinking is the Working Families Party is the way to go. A separate ballot line in general elections, following vigorous primary campaigns, allows the peace vote to be fully manifested without sabotaging efforts to block the Right. But prior to that, organizing without much concern for party politics is the near-term priority. When the anti-war movement gets big, the establishment politicians will pay attention and the movement can begin to swing its electoral weight.

Before its slide towards irrelevance, Democratic Socialists of America was a natural vehicle for this sort of work. But its current leadership cannot bring itself to stand up an intelligent posture regarding national elections. What we get instead are moralistic, abstentionist messages in super-Left guise.

Where I live, in Loudoun County, VA, our Democratic member of Congress was forced to retire due to illness. Her replacement is one Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic state senator. Here are all of the Democratic candidates to replace Suhas in the Virginia state senate:

1. Hurunnessa Fariad

2. Ibraheem Samirah

3. Puja Khanna

4. Buta Biberaj

5. Kannan Srinivasan

6. Sreedhar NagiReddi

Do you get the picture? It tells me that right here at home in Loudoun is a place to start. To the best of my knowledge, Samirah is the most progressive of the group, though not necessarily one who can win.

The Prodigal Son Returns

By Max B. Sawicky

Hi EconoPeeps. I launched this cockamamie blog for my pals when I had to abandon my own and work for the Federal government (Government Accountability Office, not CIA). Then my webhost "1 and 1" (now Ionos) erased the entire blog, which I had been doing since about 2004. I was delinquent in a monthly payment and they failed to warn me.

Now I'm retired but still writing. I have a substack to which I've been posting regularly. Subscriptions are free and there is no segregation of paid from free subscribers. I tell people I don't need donations but they make me happy. 

I was dithering on how and when to restore my own website, but I've noticed this one seems to be going strong, one of the few genuine blogs still running. So I'm going to cross-post here for a while. It will be quite different from The Sandwichman's erudite, scholarly commentaries on Marx and such. I don't want to step on his toes, but with blogs I learned a long time ago that volume matters. So I'm going to amplify it on EconoSpeak.

The more the contradition develops: footnotes to "Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading" -- a pop-up book

Last June, I posted a book proposal to EconoSpeak: Marx's Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading. It was a lightly revised version of a proposal that I had earlier sent to two publishers who had rejected it. I realized that I didn't really wnat to endure the ordeal of pitching the book to successive prospects only to win the opportunity, if successful, to work tediously on a manuscript that would appeal to few readers and earn me little or no royalties.

Instead, I made this pop-up book. (Click on the images to enlarge.) I think it was the right choice. I intend to produce 1000 [1001] copies of the book, the numbers alluding to 1000 cranes and 1001 Arabian Nights. As I mention in the introduction below, the method for this project comes from Walter Benjamin. In addition to "theory of knowledge; theory of progress" text mentioned in the intro, my approach also inspired by his "Attested Auditor of Books" from One Way Street and his reflections on "the various modes of communication" in Some Motifs in Baudelaire. The graphic theme of the billboards is another story that will have to wait for another post: Behind the Billboards.

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Notebook VII, Grundrisse

Notebook IV, Grundrisse

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Notebook IV, Grundrisse

Notebook VII, Grundrisse

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Capital, volume 3