Loneliness, love, affection, and all the sort are topics that I care about deeply, and a Marxist analysis of these topics is of particular interest to me. So, I was quite excited to see Rev Left Radio make an episode about it. I'm not a regular listener of Rev Left Radio, but I decided to give it a shot anyways. Also note that although I will be very critical in this post, the episode did make some good points still. Keyword "some".
The introduction was a little strange, as it said that they will touch on "spiritual notions of love". Why? The intro promised materialist analysis, I don't see the point in dwelling on mystical conceptions, unless you were analyzing it as a part of the superstructure of society. I assumed they would do the latter, so I continued listening.
"The relations and modes of production are changing" No they are not. We are still in imperialism. The capitalist still extracts surplus from the worker. The specific forms of it may be changing (gig economy, etc.), but the fundamental logic of capitalism has not changed one bit. "Technofeudalism" is a horrible term that tries to obscure the fact that this is still just capitalism, we have not entered any new mode of production! Already off to a terrible start...
The guest then drops possibly the most catastrophically wrong reading of Marx I've heard to date: "So the difference between the price of these mugs (a fancy mug and a plain mug) is their exchange value. Because their use-value is exactly the same. They hold my tea."
What in the fuck??? Did we completely forget the part where Marx said that it didn't matter if the need sprung from the stomach or the fancy?? Aesthetic pleasure and status signaling, for example, are use-values of a fancy mug that are very much qualitatively different from a plain mug. If a fancy and a plain mug had the same use-value, you would not be able to differentiate them qualitatively at all, and therefore, in a market, they would be the same commodity. Who in their right mind would buy the more expensive one of two identical mugs? Furthermore, exchange between two identical use-values makes no sense. If we exchanged two identical mugs, well, nothing would have changed, as we both still have virtually the same mugs as before. If you gave me two identical mugs for my identical mug, well, you just got scammed.
But it makes perfect sense why you'd exchange plain mugs for a fancy mug! If I exchanged some amount of plain mugs for your fancy mug, then I would have a fancy mug and you would have plain mugs. That makes sense because the mugs are different use-values!
We're Marxists, can we please use Marxism properly?
I stopped listening somewhere around where they started spewing weird Buddhist slop. I had more problems with the episode than listed here, but I won't get into them now. My overall impression is that there is a completely unnecessary insertion of spiritualism into a "materialist" analysis and a disregard for any sort of rigor.
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