Recording Surface

One of the unfortunate aspects of having children is that it’s occasionally necessary to consult parenting books. We do this during crisis: when real-life situations overwhelm our confidence in our parenting skills or when one of the kids reaches a developmental turning point. Reading these books is usually a dreadful experience, as they tend toward clinical enumeration of developmental milestones, New Age solipsism, or feel-good humanism. Despite their philosophical leanings, the point of all of them, stated or not, is to supply parents the tools needed to (micro)manage and control their children, ensuring their docility and obedience. (more…)

Quinlan Vos and his (ridiculously smart and well-read young) friends have been discussing Marx, the work-labor distinction, and Michael Albert’s postcapitalist economic plan, Parecon. Problem is, Quinlan shows, Parecon’s not really all that postcapitalist, as it envisions the continuation of waged labor, though under an assumed name, and of money as the general measure. This, as Quinlan says, is a complete abdication of everything implied by the slogan “From each according their ability, to each according to their needs.”

Albert’s preoccupation in his Parecon (short for “participatory economy”) schema is with hierarchy, as in destroying it in the workplace, in the form of the market, and in the economy as a whole, and instead implementing hierarchy-free collective management. This tenet guides, for instance, a recent article on his tours of Argentine factories that have been recuperated by workers, in which factories that hew closer to capitalist management structures are eyed more critically than those that don’t. In short, Albert’s is an anarchist economics. (more…)

In June 1848 (that fateful month, a thousand times cursed by the bourgeoisie), […] the working class took over the stage, and they have never left it since.–Mario Tronti

The recent New York Times article about Decemberists songwriter Colin Meloy noted his fondness for bygone characters, for “songs set in a fantastical world of Victorian chimney sweeps and dockside prostitutes, infant ghosts and exotic royal parades.” But the Times misses the way that Meloy’s narrators’ anachronisms are an attempt to decode modern life by resetting contemporary scenes in the characters and social relationships of previous eras. (more…)

Nate has set up a blog to facilitate a group reading of Tronti’s Operai e Capitale, a work that has only partially been translated into English. Smartypants that can read French, Spanish, and/or Italian are able to read the book in its entirety, while Anglo-centrics like me can only read the few chapters that have been translated into English. One of those is called “Lenin in England,” and I’ve posted a few rough and sketchy notes on it.