Let's have a class thread! It'll be fun!

[ymu]

Now that I've had some decent sleep, maybe I can try and explain what I'm getting at here.

I don't think you can turn ideals into concrete real-world attributes, without first looking at how the real-world operates. I don't like hand-waving when you get to the bit you don't know how to do - because I don't want to battle down a road and find, when I get to the end of it, the bridge is out and we've got a helluva long way around to get to the other side.

And I haven't been able to get a proper grown-up Marxist, from any political tradition, to give me a non-hand wavey answer to the question of how do we live in the undoubted paradise that would be a world with no money, without bureaucracy and rationing.

There's a million reasons why I don't think it is how you achieve economic justice, and I think it fails to optimise the opportunities available to all by failing to optimise the economic system. Capitalism is so successful that most people who live with it have trouble imagining an alternative, because it feels organic, and you can't see the con-artistry that makes us think that illogical structures make sense.

When our senior management handed over the management to the workers on the basis that scientists are shit managers and we knew how to do our jobs better than they did, we developed paradise on earth. A harmonious office where everyone needed everyone else because everyone else had something they could do for them, if it made sense for the organisation, And it got done because the people at the sharp end knew what mattered, so they got it done.

Profits are illogical. They are what is left when everyone in the supply chain, from earth's crust to end-user, has been paid for their labour. They're not necessary, except for reinvestment and a safety net. It is an obscenity that idle savers can just buy shares in an entity, which will do what it does whether they buy them or not, and demand that more money be handed over to them just because they want to beat the interest rate on a savings account. This is not investment - this is saving. It is parasitical, and no true democracy would allow it.

But there's not enough money in the world to make me want to work down a sewer, so sewerage workers should be rewarded for their incredibly insensitive nose. And firemen, soldiers and, yes, police, should be revered for being willing to put their lives at risk for us, and we should make sure that their families will be OK if the worst happens, and that they can enjoy their rewards in the potentially short time they may have to enjoy them. And much as I loved working in pubs and pizza places, it is hard fucking work, so I'd rather keep my cushy office job, which means I cannot possibly demand that I am paid more than someone working in hospitality.

And if I was a skilled master craftsman with 40 years of honing my skills and huge added value to my work because of it, I would be kinda pissed off if my 16 year old apprentice is taking home the same money - especially if I can tell he doesn't really fit the trade and will probably never have what it takes, so he'll be fucking off somewhere else and I wasted my time training him.

It's not possible for a hair-dresser to provide the same use-value as a doctor, simply because of the nature of their skills. But that doesn't mean the hairdresser deserves less exchange-value in return for their labour. (Am I using these terms OK - using terminology outside my field makes me feel very insecure!) But the doctor had to do a fuck of a lot of work to become a doctor simply because if they didn't, they'd be ready for retirement before they were of any use. And they have to take responsibility for their mistakes, and there is no doctor on earth who hasn't killed a patient by accident.

So I'm not going to be bitching about the doctor getting a decent wedge - because I want my surgeon well-rested and with nothing else on his mind, because my outcomes will be better. There is a lot of evidence on this too, so I ain't just making it up - tired, worried doctors kill more people than ones with easier lives. He doesn't need 10 times more, no chance, nowhere near - but they're doing us all a big favour, and I want talent attracted to the profession, not just those who want to check out naked bodies on the operating table - where plenty more sexual assaults take place than you'd think.

I don't want a system where some jobs don't get done because no one wants to do them, or the wrong people do them because, frankly, you'd need a reason to take it on, because that means coercion or sub-optimal allocation of people to jobs. I don't want special bonuses for certain jobs because that way lies destruction of what we are trying to create.

I want peace and harmony, which means enabling people to reach their dreams - not packing them into equally shaped boxes and insisting that this is what equality looks like. Because it isn't.

I'm a parallelogram in a world full of circles and squares, and I am sick to the back teeth of people trying to force me into the wrong shaped box and reacting with surreally vicious ferocity, simply because I can't fit in it. I have the kind of lunacy which means I will work 80-90 hour weeks simply because I want to, if the work is important enough and I'm just alllowed to get on with it. But if you're not working with me, all you see is someone who rarely turns up until the afternoon, if at all, yet gets treated like royalty by the bosses. Of course they don't understand, and of course it makes them bitter. I've never been promoted in my life. I've never had a payrise above anyone elses. I left a job to do a studentship rather than compete with someone for a job he deserved but I'd beat him to. I turned down a permanent contract because someone else needed it more than I did, and told his boss that he was feeling undervalued and to fucking sort it out.

I don't say any of this to polish my halo. I say it because I have a 18 years of being adored by bosses and bullied by bureaucrats and co-workers, simply because I am who I am. And I know what perceived unfairness can do to a workplace. And a life.

And that is why I want to take the ideals - personal freedom and economic justice - and work out how best to achieve them in the real world that we have with us, right here, right now.

Maybe we will eventually become the kind of animal that can just get on and do what needs to be done without jealousy or taking unfair advantage, but it will take a long time to undo the damage done by the abusive parent that is capitalism, and I think we may have to have a transitional recovery period, comrades, before every human being feels safe simply because what human beings do is look out for each other with no strictures necessary.

And that's why I'm trying to look at this in ways that are constrained by ideals, but not ideology. Because, frankly, I think ideology is part of the problem. I have massive respect for the content-providing Marxists here. Too much respect to litter your theory discussions with my under-read witterings. But I do read them. I am in awe of your massively well-stocked brains. But I don't think it's accessible, and I'm not convinced it's doable.

Which is why I'm trying to have a plain language brainstorm, in much the same way as we would look at a huge mess of a problem in medicine and work out the steps needed to solve it. Doctors won't always step back from what may be doing harm. The only evidence for using drips for shock due to blood loss after trauma (leaky blood-loss from stabbing or bullets, internal bleeding from bruising in a car crash) is that it kills people quicker. But it's weak evidence, and paramedics wrecked the very expensive trial DH set up to try and find out for the very best of reasons - because they could not bring themselves not to do what they had always done because it saved lives.

Part of my job is working out how to coax doctors into admitting that what was in their textbooks 40 years ago, or their prof's preferred approach in training, might not be the best we can do now. You can't always answer the right question first, because no one is willing to help you find the right answer. So you design a series of trials which will slowly persuade them to be responsible and find out whether what they do does more good than harm before they just do it routinely because it seems to make sense.

Eminence-based medicine is the capitalism of the evidence-based medicine revolution of the 1980s. And most doctors still hate us.

So, for me, revolution is a process. I don't mean reformism - I mean a conscious, calculated process to coax scared, damaged people into a more rationally organised world. When they feel safe, then they will work out how to feel safer.

I don't disagree with your endpoint. I just want to know the best way to get there before we set off. Because that is who I am.

 

[Spanky Longhorn]

I don't think there's anything wrong with rewarding people for fulfilling certain roles that are either specially skilled or specially arduous or unplesant, but I think the exact nature of distribution of rewards will be determined by various factors, not limited to but including the broad opinions of the given community or state.

However who is more deserving is a tough question - compare a surgeon or a lorry driver who drives a tanker containing dangerous but essential chemicals both a have a huge responsibility but one might earn 150k and the other 35k?

I'm not saying you support that differential merely pointing out that there is a huge need for flattening wage differentials.

There's also a need for a massive bonfire of non productive work - but again what is and isn't non productive work will have be determined by society - it is impossible to determine every detail of a better society though we can certainly think about and promote possibilities.

 

[ymu]

I support (small) differentials based on demand for the job, not demand for the person, I guess.

There was someone ages ago bitching about the train drivers being on strike and earning more than him (an office worker! for shame!). He finished with "I wouldn't want to be a train driver. It's boring and they have to concentrate for long periods. But I should earn more than them."

Er, if you wouldn't switch, why wouldn't you need to be paid more?

Most highly paid people would do their jobs for a lot less. They're cushy jobs.


I'm banning share-holding and private banking, so we're all on 25 hour weeks as the fuill-time norm in my world, with full employment and a decent payrise too.

 

[discokermit]

(because of my thick south London accent) stupid,

that's fair comment though, surely?

 

[Wolveryeti]

It is an obscenity that idle savers can just buy shares in an entity, which will do what it does whether they buy them or not, and demand that more money be handed over to them just because they want to beat the interest rate on a savings account. This is not investment - this is saving. It is parasitical, and no true democracy would allow it.

I disagree with most all of this. Investing in shares is never a risk free affair. Shareholders are generaly the last creditors to be paid back in the event of a company bankruptcy (i.e. behind all kinds of debt). Also, in practice, shareholders do not call the shots on dividend payments, and there is a huge volume of shares that both pay no automatic dividend, and carry no voting rights.

Also, you seem to be skirting over the fact that a lot of companies invite the purchase of their shares through offerings etc. How can that be parasitical - especially given that the bosses of the company can potentially walk away having blown the investment money, and raked in mucho salary, while the shareholders get wiped out?

 

[ymu]

Doesn't matter.

Buying things that already exist is not investing. It is saving, and it parasitises the workers who will be squeezed to satisfy your idle command to get richer without doing any useful work.

Stick it in a savings account you idle cunt. It's doing no good to the economy on the stock market. Quite the fucking opposite.

You're too fucking entitled to even get the point.

 

[teahead]

What's so great about being working class, anyway?

But the meaning of 'working class' has changed. Used to describe a whole diverse range of skilled workers who took pride in their skills and how they contributed to the day-to-day. Glass blowing, gas fitters, watch makers etc. Now it's all push buttons, mass process monitoring and trying to undermine the fat boss in the big office at the back. Childish, by comparison.

It's a shame people took the economic thing as the most important bit of Marx. And, like Freud, developments have superceded lots of what he said e.g. digital technologies have created a whole new paradigm for progress that's not dialectic.

The working class as first defined has disappeared. The middle class is a redundent category because, one way or another, everyone's involved in patronage - either directly like in ymu's definition, or culturally because we're constantly being pushed into signing up for things (loyalty cards, surveys... you only have to sit still to get grabbed into the workings as a 'component'. Sorry, 'stakeholder').

And the criticism about 'saying its outdate means you're middle class' is just a propaganda strategy. It doesn't 'mean' anything more than that you've used your knowledge to come to a particular conclusion. The next step would be to suggest that if you're capable of using your intelligence then you're not working class. Which is often a quick route to a punch in the face.

 

[audiotech]

Marx does refer to technological change within the labour process, with many artisans, the skilled and the professions becoming de-skilled (pushing buttons), leading to the proletarisation of these groups. He also refers to the peasant class being forced from the land and migrating to urban centres looking for work in the factory system. This continues today in developing countries. Again the proletarisation of labour. Internationally the working class has grown massively. Too many here appear insular and examine developments by just looking at this tiny island instead of looking at the global picture.

 

[teahead]

Marx does refer to technological change within the labour process, with many artisans, the skilled and the professions becoming de-skilled (pushing buttons), leading to the proletarisation of these groups [...] Too many here appear insular and examine developments by just looking at this tiny island instead of looking at the global picture.

Sure. But what Marx didn;t foresee was the genuine advance of digital technologies. The exclusive focus on what changes, with a simple 'repeat' of whatever doesn't, has for example completely transformed the communications industry. So much of life in the analogue, mechanical age involved maintaining what was there, while simultaneously building what was new. It kept many things very slow, and preserved a kind of industrialisation that strongly favoured workers with a capacity to maintain processes. So, for example, an engine driver would partly sustain the business by good maintence of the tool he used.

The decoupling of workers from the means of production has a new articulation: production now focusses more on the development of processes: knowledge management, and 'smart' (ie responsive just-in-time management of resources), cross allocation of reources to preserve use while maximising output etc).

And yeah certainly the wider picture is a complicated one too. Ziauddin Sardar wrote an article somewhere about how Western conceptions of physics favour large corporate processes over localisation because of the economic scale-ability issues. So that, for example, power generation in India was 'proved' more effective when given into the hands of an efficient corporation, rather than into the coordination of mixed technologies suited to different contexts and environments - you know, solar energy where its hot, hydroelectric in the mountains etc.

If capitalism is going to go down, it will be because of its insistence on trying to maintain a grip on resource allocation without developing the necessary skills to maintain complexity and responsiveness in that managment. Which is what the 'working class' is now being engaged in. In that sense, we are maybe all becoming middle class in being roped into executive processes rather than maintenence processes.

 

[ViolentPanda]

that's fair comment though, surely?

Only from your mum.

 

[audiotech]

Sure. But what Marx didn;t foresee was the genuine advance of digital technologies.

I haven't got time, nor the inclination presently to go into detail, but I suggest you read section 6 of 'Capital': "The Compensation Theory". There you will find Marx focusing on the aggregate relationship between capital and labour as a consequence of technological changes.

 

[teahead]

I haven't got time, nor the inclination presently to go into detail, but I suggest you read section 6 of 'Capital': "The Compensation Theory". There you will find Marx focusing on the aggregate relationship between capital and labour as a consequence of technological changes.

OK. Thanks for the direction. Always good to know more.

Though a guy I know who's recently finished his PhD thesis on Marx's ideas about progress seemed to think I was onto something.... I'll be back

 

[audiotech]

If capitalism is going to go down, it will be because of its insistence on trying to maintain a grip on resource allocation without developing the necessary skills to maintain complexity and responsiveness in that managment. Which is what the 'working class' is now being engaged in. In that sense, we are maybe all becoming middle class in being roped into executive processes rather than maintenence processes.

David Harvey in his 'Companion to Capital' states:

It's time for capital to be gone and make way for some sensible mode of production, more imaginable if not absolutely imperative.

It's also worth stating that the beast has a capacity for adaptation, flexibility and is fluid. Any opposition to capital should be careful to not underestimate this. It is a process, in continual motion, even as it internalises the regulative principle of "accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production."

 

[teahead]

^^^^^^^^^
But hold on. Even the Wiki seems to shed some light here.

In the concept of 'compensation' Marx seems very interested in the dialectic of matter-into-energy. He talks about labour as one amongst other raw materials. But what about data-mining? Enriching the product by augmenting its relevance? Like, for example, linking your google and facebook and whatever. He seems to leave out the concept of 'mind', and its capacities to recombine and make use of information itself as a tool that can manipulate the world in new ways that equate to Production.

I'm not a big fan of the idea that paper shufflers do anything useful, but if you take knowledge into a different context, it can produce new functionality. Say we're having this chat and it inspires someone to produce, say, dinner in a new combination for their partner. You can focus on the nourishment (just another meal) but what if the nourishment has a flavour that surprises them both and leads to a different evening from the usual one in front of the telly. Say they decide they feel like going out, and meet some other peeps, get a band together. Something from 'nothing'? Or something that derives from human perception.

Or take data mining. Analysis of data. Data itself is much more lively than a raw material, because it has a semantic function. And in terms of digital paradigms, you can forget about reproducing the context in which the data exists - it's just 'repeat that' if you're writing code, or 'send the same block' if you're broadcasting. The 'world that exists' in digital representations is like a peak that you can reach then keep as a ground. So building is incremental and once done, doesn't continue to require the same resources as discovery.

Or am I wrong on this?
Tell me why/where/how?

 

[teahead]

No, OK, I can see problems with the 'delighted eaters/band analogy': resources used by peeps to buy tickets and records there would otherwise just be allocated somewhere else.

But doens't Marx miss something about refinement of use? If progress isn't an ethical dimension (towards 'god' or 'jerusalem' or 'nirvana' or some strictly non-material entity - complete transmutation of matter into energy maybe - then isn't the digital age about transmuting capital into process? The complexity of process is a term that maintains. Matrices and all that. The problem, for me, is that Marx is essentially a humanist who views persons and particularly the 'working class' in a mechanical way. He's obsessed with social heirarchies. Like Freud, he's got a chip on his shoulder.

Capital can form the basis of complexity, which has a paradigm that's dictated by terms other than capital. Workers can generate new tools, without necessarily applying them to a particular social function. And even if 'the ruling class' still in some ways dictates understanding of what's been produced - there's a nice Ray Bradbury story about a man who makes a flying machine but is unable to explain what he's done to the Emperor and so is killed because, for the Emperor creation isn't something a person can do even when they describe the process that appeared in front of their eyes - we now have a situation in which technolgies escape their author's intentions. P2P file sharing is a discovered entity with material repercussions. The ruling class is involved in a game of catch-up. The lunatics are taking over the asylumn. QED?

 

[teahead]

Sorry - we seem to have posted at the same time so I didn't respond to your last post. The word 'sensible' bothers me a lot. Also the word 'accumulation'. These are paradigms that belong to a context of centralised authority that seems to be fragmenting. Anyway I'm babbling on...

 

[ItWillNeverWork]

Western conceptions of physics ....

What's a western conception of physics then?

 

[teahead]

What's a western conception of physics then?

One that fits scaleable corporate functioning. So, for example, if you're thinking about raw materials you can set up a cheaper process if you bulk buy and bulk transport one material under one contract, instead of sourcing materials from a variety of suppliers to suit several discrete situations. The result is a conformity of process in accordance with supply-side emphasising economics. The reason I (perhaps oddly) said 'western' is because its in this part of the world that such paradigms have been most prevalent in industry... I don't want to babble on and on again but colonisation has been partnered by very assertive practices managed centrally.

If you look, say, at Heart of Darkness, the essential conflict at a social level seems to comprise the contrast between the 'orderly' intentions of The Company, and the wild chaotic heart that's in us all. It was an extensive trope in literature at that time. "What did it matter what any one knew or ignored? What did it matter who was manager?" Where power is centralised, these things do become important. Conrad takes class struggle to the level of cultural struggle and hooks that back to psychology and cultural identity, motivation and creativity and so on.

When it comes to physics, money has made something like the large hadron collider possible. Without the funding, and the deals, collaborations, concessions etc that sit behind that funding, it wouldn't have happened and the discoveries made there wouldn't either. They will shape progress, and certainly by producing revenue promote the interests that set the thing up. Whereas activitist working on a smaller scale, and 2nd world countries developing their own infrastructure - like say Africa, and perhaps still China - are necessarily dependent on the West for components, models, equations etc. It's the oppressive functioning of discourse. If you have the knowledge and you're authoritative with it, you can shape the story that's told. History is the story told by 'the winners', generally.

The West has ruled for a long time, and its leaders have often used this as an excuse to solicit the support of the bourgoisie. Heck, some things can even be run temporarily at a loss for the sake of the longer term aim of squeezing out other options and other voices. Look at Tescos!

That's what I mean about the western conception (of physics and much else). It only favours diversity within the context of its own survival. And that spreads into scientific practice just like anything else.

 

[dennisr]

The West has ruled for a long time, and its leaders have often used this as an excuse to solicit the support of the bourgoisie. Heck, some things can even be run temporarily at a loss for the sake of the longer term aim of squeezing out other options and other voices. Look at Tescos!

That's what I mean about the western conception (of physics and much else). It only favours diversity within the context of its own survival. And that spreads into scientific practice just like anything else.

Marx covered this aspect - monopolisation. It could have easily been 'northern', 'southern, or 'eastern' if capitalist development had been initiated elsewhere. Its not a particularly 'western' concept - it is a 'capitalist' concept.

As for your earlier comment on us all becoming 'middle class' - it ignores the international reality. Working people in China and India are not becoming middle class and the idea that even a minority of workng people in the UK are being absorbed into 'executive processes' seems to fly in the face of reality. If anything folk are increasingly pushed out of any control over process. burger-flipping is not an executive process

 

[teahead]

By 'western' I mean colonising western discourse.

I'm also saying I'm uncertain whether class distinctions according to some traditional interpretations of Marx still pertain.

I absolutely agree that increasing numbers of people are disenfranchised, with more and more draconian laws and increasing assertion of superstate power very evident. The current disasterous promotion of 'democracy' in the east and supposed liberalisation comprising current complexities of presentation re issues like the burca and faith schools seem additional cases in point.

If I'm saying anything in respect of Marxist theory, it'd be that despite best efforts, social cohesion in opposition to prevailing authority appears to be failing. Part of that, it seems to me, is the tempting 'baubles' much more cheaply available to the average worker. Society seems to have found effective new ways to get people to sell their souls. Its insidious. Depending on this internet to say these things here requires a mode of compliance in itself that is actually shocking in its extent and power. The fact of talking like this instead of in a pub is another really powerful means of dislocating community power.

Social 'development' seems to be outstripping and sucking dry the less regulated and less regulatable physical world. Competence is more about manipulating tools and less about production. Yes divorce from the means of production. But we're no less busy! Instead of moving towards crisis and revolution, it seems we're all more tamed.

 

[Streathamite]

As for rights, political parties have none.

well, there's the right to exist, the right to stand candidates at all levels, the right to campaign, the right to not-for-profit status...

 

[audiotech]

I'm finding it difficult to see through your posts and understand what you're putting forward here teahead?

Nevertheless, I'll put this question to you. If you take the technology of a capitalist mode of production and try to construct something else with it what are you likely to get?

I would say another version of capitalism? This is what tended to happen in the former Soviet Union, with the use of Fordist techniques.

Having said that, there's nothing wrong in utilising advanced capitalist technologies in order to revive production and so protect the gains of any progressive alternative to capitalism, but in the long term it's difficult to avoid the question of an alternative technological basis, as well as a new '...relationship to nature, social relations, production systems, reproduction through daily life and mental conceptions of the world'.

I would agree therefore with David Harvey in his 'Companion to Capital' that technologies and their development are not "neutral", but are intrinsic to the mode of production as it is.

 

[audiotech]

Further to the above. Marx "never views or treats of the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative". As noted in the Communist Manifesto.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society...Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all other ones.

Then we see the coercive laws of competition come forward in the search for relative surplus value. Any weakening of these coercive laws, through monopoly and the centralisation of capital, will have an impact on the pace and form of technological development.

Also importantly, as Marx points out and as Harvey puts it:

....a stimulus to technological change arises out of the desire on the part of capital to have weapons to deploy against labour.

 

[teahead]

@ audiotech: ok and apologies. , What do you mean by "capitalist mode of production"? Maybe that's the principle issue I'm trying to address.

 

[audiotech]

@ audiotech: ok and apologies. , What do you mean by "capitalist mode of production"? Maybe that's the principle issue I'm trying to address.

A distinctive mode of production, based on private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Principally, a market economy based on capital accumulation (profit), with a labour process that's exploitative.

 

[Wolveryeti]

Doesn't matter.

Buying things that already exist is not investing. It is saving, and it parasitises the workers who will be squeezed to satisfy your idle command to get richer without doing any useful work.

Stick it in a savings account you idle cunt. It's doing no good to the economy on the stock market. Quite the fucking opposite.

You're too fucking entitled to even get the point.

I don't know how you've arrived at the conclusion I own shares, but given the general level of frothing-at-the-mouth financial illiteracy, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. May I suggest an introductory textbook on finance?

 

[Pickman's model]

I don't know how you've arrived at the conclusion I own shares, but given the general level of frothing-at-the-mouth financial illiteracy, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. May I suggest an introductory textbook on finance?

you're not quibbling with the 'you idle cunt' bit then?

 

[teahead]

you're not quibbling with the 'you idle cunt' bit then?

... I reckon this thread'd be more fun audioT. But mebe I'd better get some refreshments and consider your definition...

 

[teahead]

A distinctive mode of production, based on private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Principally, a market economy based on capital accumulation (profit), with a labour process that's exploitative.

OK. So... problems with this definition:

Private ownership. That's complicated in terms of P2P and digital replication. We can now replicate the experience by copying the 'shape' of an experience and replicating it through a converter of some kind. Wasn't this initially the arguement about taped music/video killing production? Seems to me that actually its enriched production by recasting performance as the principle expression, rather than commodification of past recordings. But in more sophisticated fields like data manipulation - social networking, edit software, assemblage and data management software, VOIP... hasn't technology moved beneath the nostrum of personal ownership. At best, people now try to own processes. But modern processes incorporate feedback from the host. It seems to me that we've moved away from what Marx might have described as material ownership, of 'land'. Hence the desperate battles to reiterate the idea of land and geographically located nation states. The reality is that communities (like this one here) can exist in networked servers. And there's a problematic relationship between users and the ground that sustains them. Newspapers online are currently battling with this. Their best rememdy is to try and come up with some kind of broad sense of 'value'. It's not doing so well.

Means of production. In a contemporary setting I'd guess this is 'the tool purchased in exchange for capital'. But what about tools that can be modified and customised. Open source. And what about tools that grant access on a multiverse (like p2p). And what about manipulated representation that 'looks like' what you'd see in unmediated space? News is full of photoshop now. And marketing is complex and generates energy through processes like 'viral' and spam generation. Energy may not actually be produced from nothing, but from a cultural point of view, that can appear to be the case without capital expenditure.

Distribution/exchange. The costs, as per the above, aren't bottom line as per the above. The cost seems to be soaked up in the monitor-ability instead. Look at store cards. These circumnavigate legitimately conscious processes of distribution/exchange.

Capital accumulation. Of course profit still forms a baseline from which capital interests operate - their life blood. But aren't there different time-frames for profit these days. Complex investment vehicles that allow sustainability (yes at the expense of life amongst the poorly resourced) but which are stretched without an analogue accordance to the damage they inflict. I mean look at the global warming/energy generation/availability of water debate. Markets have diversified in the same way that power has. It seems simplistic to talk about a ruling class now. So many different prospects for the 'best' way to rule longtern.

Exploitation. Well it remains the same or has become worse because of the success of persuading comsumers to contribute to their own destruction as a coherent group. Products and profit-oriented educational paradigms, and aspirational products - shit have you got the iPhone 5 yet? - have turned what Marx might have dimly regarded as the proletariat into 'experts' in the field of nothingness. We now have tools that allow us to engage in processes that would have seemed a null sum back then. Talk to someone. Listen to some music. Receive news about what's happening in another part of the world? These weren't life changing events in Marx's time, but they are now. In some ways, we've all been trained to welcome the exploitation.

 

[audiotech]

Reductionist prattle. 40 percent of Egyptians are illiterate. Have a think about your little island utopian vision Robinson, read some more and take it from there, as I believe there's little point in discussing this any further with you.