Spine Check 5 - Marx before Marxism: Value, Price and Profit
This Wreckage
Sean KB and AP Andy
4.2 • 980 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2020
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Andy and Sean are joined by Edwad @readcapital and Cordelia @cozyunoist, the confirmed superstars of #heinrichtwitter and co-hosts of the Reel Abstractions podcast to discuss Karl (Heinrich) Marx's 1865 address to the 1st International called 'Value, Price and Profit.'
As anti-Marxist communists steeped in Marxology, they help us confront this seemingly simple text for what it is - a fraction of Marx's total critique from a snapshot of time, and a Marx at his most Ricardian - which opens a conversation on: the difference between political economy and critical theory, the usefulness of Marx for communist theory, and the ambiguities that exist even in the mature theory we've inherited today.
This is a challenging episode (we stand in awe at the Reel Abstractions crew's grasp of the material) but well worth a listen.
song: Green Day - Nice Guys Finish Last
Transcript
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| 0:25.8 | Hello everybody welcome to spine check the Antiphata Side project where we discuss some of our favorite works of Marxist literature and today we're going to talk about something that doesn't have a very big spine to bend value price, price, and profit, which is a pamphlet. I actually got it in pamphlet form at a flea market. It's so beautiful. Put out by international publishers |
| 0:30.6 | with a little secret note in it from a member of the CP to a prospective |
| 0:38.2 | cadre leader or something like that. It's a letter from a teacher it looks like maybe a radical on the UFT. It's like internal Communist Party literature from 1946. |
| 0:50.0 | And it says, the assignment for the first session is as follows one study lessons one and two of the enclosed outline |
| 0:58.0 | to nature of capitalism pages 7 to 66 and then that's crossed out and it says value price and |
| 1:06.3 | profit pages 29 to 37 wage labor and capital chapters two three four and five |
| 1:13.6 | rigorous wage, labor, and capital, chapters two, three, four, and five. Regorous, I like it, man. |
| 1:16.0 | Got to train those cadres. |
| 1:17.4 | It's not like the CP USA was going to have a huge dive. |
| 1:20.7 | They were, you know, trying to get a new membership and trying to gear up for the next |
| 1:25.0 | level, next moment in the class war. |
| 1:28.7 | And so to discuss value price and profit, we are really excited to have the hosts of the hottest |
| 1:35.1 | podcast in Marxism. I'd say number one with a bullet. Real abstractions. We have |
| 1:40.6 | Edwad and Cordelia. Thank you for joining us. |
| 1:43.0 | Thank you for having us. |
| 1:44.0 | Hey, yeah, thanks. |
| 1:46.0 | So to start off, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourselves and the show? |
| 1:51.0 | Oh, okay. |
| 1:53.0 | Yeah, I mean, we kind of just decided that we were going to do a podcast after a thousand people |
| 1:58.6 | told us that we had to. And we got together. We did be recorded one episode and we pissed the right number of people off to where we decided to just kind of keep going with it. |
| 2:09.5 | Oh yeah. And for whatever reason now we're here and looking forward to the discussion actually because I don't know about you but the copy I have has actually a misprint on the spine too which makes it extra special. |
| 2:23.5 | Oh yes. |
... |
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