No Other World (Chapter 1)

Gunnar and Massad made slow but steady progress through the waist high grassland. There was no way to properly judge distance, but a full day of steady walking, to Gunnar’s thinking, put them at least 20 or 30 miles away from the Andara Colony. Not that it mattered much, no one would be forming a search party to track them down. Their absence would be obvious of course, but Andara wasn’t a prison. Exile, yes, but confinement, no. Distance and geographical ignorance were the only assurance the empire cared about. Gunnar remembered the maps he had seen in the library when he was younger, then winced at the memory of watching them burn. All the books, all that knowledge, devoured in flames at the hands of unwavering tyrants. The radio towers torn down, the power plant turbines slowly grinding to a halt, 150 years of marvelous technological progress, five thousand years of recorded human intelligence, all wiped from existence forever.

Not just here, the whole world was torn apart. The wars had lasted almost a decade, nations devouring each other before turning inward and devouring themselves. But unlike all the wars of bygone centuries his teachers had described, human submission and power were never the goal. This war was against intelligence itself. And it had succeeded. For Gunnar, there were lands across oceans he would never reach, but in time even that knowledge of the wider world would fade into oblivion, replaced once more by the all consuming immediate need to find food, water, and shelter. His thoughts were interrupted by a short gasp from Massad.

“Gunnar, do you see?”

He chuckled at the sound of Massad’s strange accent, pronouncing it “Goo-Nar,” but he could indeed see the terrain begin to descend in front of him, the grasslands slowly fading to rocky ledges and further down the unmistakable meandering slash of a river. “I see, my friend. Another hour or two and we can camp by the river for the night.”

I might have no idea where we are, he thought to himself, but one direction or the other we’ll hopefully run into someone who can tell us.

PRIVACY or KINDNESS IS KING

 

PRIVACY or KINDNESS IS KING

            Everybody has their favorite “scare the middle-graders” stories. The one I remember best went something like everybody gets an A/V implant when they graduate, recording, broadcasting, backing up to the local servers 24/7. Doesn’t matter if you’re pretty, ugly, fat, or contagious, some pervert somewhere has a subscription package to your shower feed, or kitchen cooking experiments if that’s their thing. Some kid is writing their current events paper watching your vacation to Spain during El Colacho and hoping some dude accidentally trips and faceplants on a baby. Ain’t no stories or fantasies anymore because cold hard reality is infinitely more strange. There is some truth to stories like that, but only some.

I myself go through ups and downs. It’ll be motivating for a while. You do something interesting or never been done, and bam you’re an instant celebrity for the week. Then again, you’re just as much a celebrity for stepping on a rake or accidentally falling into the duck pond. Everybody has their turn to look cool or fool, so it’s not like you ever feel too embarrassed or get picked on for more than an afternoon.

The lows, though, are agony. Not everybody gets them, but when I do I just lie in bed crying until I have to eat or go to the bathroom. Even in the worst of it, though, I know there’s somebody out there using it for primary research, it will turn out to be helpful for someone else, and it’ll be itemized on my next monthly statement. If you’re not back up and muddling through in a week or so they’ll send out doctors to evaluate you for Milson’s Disease. Not a bad thing at all, whatever kind of help you need, an actual professional will show up to get you going again.

I know they mention Milson’s Disease somewhere in your classes, it’s one of those classic stories from the early experimental days when  Broadcast Economy was completely optional. Adrian Milson was one of the early pioneers, but I guess he subconsciously developed an addiction to the idea of reverting to a state of being completely unobserved. They had a word for it back then: “privacy.” Honestly, I could never wrap my head around the concept; nobody knowing or liking or even caring what you’re up to. I’m no philosopher, but it just sounds so lonely.

Anyway, the way Mr. Sanderson explained it back when I was in school, it was like life was some kind of competitive sport or something, and in that respect I can’t say I’d wanna go back. Can you imagine how horrible that must have been, having to compete for everything, even just basic attention?

The religious zealots, there aren’t many but they are out there, will of course tell you he was secretly a pedophile or something even worse, but I dunno. I have to imagine my lows are just some remnant of that same subconscious primal fear of change and the unknown. Like I said, very few people have lows the way I do, but I certainly won’t complain about the money I make from researchers interested in fringe cases like mine. Realistically, there isn’t a choice; you either go out and live your life for money, or you stay in and live your life for money. Either way they send you the monthly breakdown and tell you the latest trends and viewer demands so you can at least estimate the return on whatever strikes your fancy.

Scary stories aside, nobody’s out there making you do anything repulsive, they’re just telling you how much it’s worth. You can make just as much money spray-painting a funny message on a freshly painted brick wall as you can being a stripper, and nobody’s out there judging you either way. It’s hokey, but there’s a whole fan community out there who adores you exactly the way you are, and they tune in just because you’re you. Don’t sign up for stuff you don’t want people to recognize you for doing, but even there there’s no shame in quitting and going in a different direction. Somebody else will happily do whatever somewhere. It’s the Controller’s job to sort out the streams and direct them where the demand is. You just do whatever you were planning to do anyway and pick up a couple extra side quests if you want more spending cash.

Yes, it’s a little intimidating right out of high school. A lot of people shower with the lights off or sign specific non-broadcast waivers at first. Obviously, you don’t get paid for it, but everything’s recorded regardless for the simple fact that it’s worth something to someone. Payments aren’t retroactive, but you can nullify those waivers anytime you want. I know a few people who timed it just right to hit peak popularity by releasing their back catalog while a particular market was super hot, but nobody ever needs to actually do that. This is all 8^th Grade Broadcast Economics, the bottom line is you lose a lot of money for no good reason and if you can’t get over a lot of it you’ll be back for reeducation or possible removal.

Hypothetically, even if you just sat on the street and pretended to be poor, you’d just end up making more money because everyone would watch it a hundred times just to see you obstinately suffer for no good reason. Even if you went total Milson and signed up for one of those amnesia farms, that stuff is super fascinating for cognitive scientists because they hypnotize you into not realizing you’re still being broadcast and use the money to take care of you in relative isolation. It’s not like you can just break the law whenever you want; soon as it gets uploaded and categorized the police will be knocking on your door because real life arrests are like special event viewing, and if you’re terrible enough they’ll just wipe your memory and keep you in a farm until you die of natural causes. They have to or they’d be recorded torturing you without express written permission, and you can’t do any of that hardcore stuff without the appropriate training and licenses. Plus, your revenue can’t be transferred, so it’s not like there’s any real incentive to volunteer to be beaten to death or jump out of a plane without a parachute. You could literally live alone in an underground bunker in the woods and you’d still have enough money to go get professional help whenever you changed your mind; Survivalism is never not popular. Literally everything can record an audio and/or visual signal that some specialist can reconstruct. My point is, yes you can get real creeped out if your mind starts to wander, but stalking and harassment are Class A felonies. 85% of all crime is thwarted before the potential victim even realizes they are in danger, 99% before it actually happens.

I know you kids are about to graduate, so you’re all in your mid 20s with a few practice runs under your belts. Some of you have had to say goodbye to dear friends who aren’t ready to step out into the weird, wild world, but they’ll still be here when you want to come visit, just like I’ve been visiting some of my childhood friends around the academy today. It can be sad when they don’t really remember you, but I can still remember Mr. Sanderson’s lecture on how very few of our childhood friends remain close friends in later life, even under the best circumstances. People naturally want different things in life.

A couple final thoughts before I go. I remember how surreal it was to hold the actual indexed hard copy of my entire childhood in my hands after walking across that stage. It may be years before you pluck up the courage to watch any of your own, but when you do you’ll be in for a wonderful surprise. Sure it’s full of love and laughter and more than a couple cringe-worthy hairstyles, but it’s also full of the objective truthfulness all those writers of all those crazy books your Historical Literature teachers made you read every year were so desperately craving.

Last, but not least, I’ll end with a bit of truth your teachers could never directly tell you in the classroom. We’re all adults here, statistically speaking by the time you’re 30 you’ll have already seen all your friends and their moms and granddads and neighbors naked whether you intended to or not, and they’ll have seen every compromising position you’ve even found yourself in. Kindness is King once the Controller flips off the Child Safety Filter. Yep, whether you’re a registered Dominatrix with an Amputation Endorsement, or a 60 year-old coin collector with a genuine love for K-Pop like your principal, Dr. Dustman, out there in the real world, Kindness is King.

Parents, Teachers, Titans of Industry, I give you the graduating class of 2174. I’d tell you they’re going to go on to some spectacular success, but I don’t really need to. You’ll get to see every bit of it with your own eyes.

Labor vs Utility, an introduction

There is a remarkably common misconception about the Marxist Labor Theory of Value. It goes something along the lines of "the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor necessary for its production." The ensuing logic is that labor intensive commodities are more valuable and therefore cost more than easily produced commodities. This is simply false. 

The Labor Theory of Value begins at the assumption that the value of labor is equivalent to the value of the product of that labor, and assigns comparative value to other commodities according to the comparative value of the product of their production. When one value is decided, the other is equivalent. An example will help, even if the values themselves are unrealistic. 

Let's say it takes 9 hours to paint a house and 30 minutes to kill and butcher a chicken. The labor theory of value says that painting a house is equivalent to the butchering of 18 chickens. Note that the labor is equivalent, not the price (there is no price at the moment). We assume the cost of materials will be radically different based on the comparative values of the tools and materials needed to perform that labor. Let's say the paint and brushes and things cost $100, and the painter wants $15 an hour for his labor. 15×9=135. Therefore, the butchering of 18 chickens should be worth 135, so the cost of labor to butcher 1 chicken should be $7.50 + whatever the chicken cost to raise (a number derived from the inherited cost of raising them). Let's just pretend it's $5 (that's a guess based on my own fuzzy memory of the last time i actually calculated it 5 or 6 years ago). 

So, we can say that having your house painted costs $235 whereas buying a chicken for dinner costs $12.50. Those specific numbers might seem wrong to you personally in real life, and that's totally fine, all we really care about is the relationship. Compared to each other, this relationship seems completely agreeable: the commodities themselves represent reasonable proportions, the equivalence between disparate labors is fair. If all of a sudden that guy who paints houses wants $400, you'll reply "i'd have to charge $22 per chicken, GTFO of here with that nonsense!" 

Conversely, let's look at how the comparative value of painters works if the price stays the same. A painter who can do the same job in 7 hours will make more money in a year because they can do more gigs, a painter who takes 12 hours will earn much less. This isn't some nefarious scheme by the way, this is the chicken butcher's perception of value based on a days work. So long as the painter is charging $135 for the labor of painting the house, plus or minus an hour is fairly irrelevant. Now, if you're painting the house in 5 hours and therefore charging me $27 an hour, we might need to renegotiate before i call shenanigans with a shotgun, and if you're painting the house in 12 hours at a measly 11-something an hour, then maybe house painting is not a productive use of your time and energy. But notice, the time factor is its own penalty. You can get ahead within reason, and you can grind away if necessary, but either way my house gets painted, so i don't really have to care. 

You are intimately familiar with Marxist labor value if you have ever taken your car to a mechanic. It monetarily rewards the exceptional and punishes the lackadaisical, so long as they provide equivalent quality. 

For contrast to the labor theory of value, we look to the Austrian School theory of Marginal Utility. If labor is the mindset of production, utility is the mindset of consumption. Keep in mind this is not the same as referring to demand-side or supply-side economics. This is about the psychology of the participants, not the analysts.

The theory says that the value of a commodity is determined by its most trivial usage. As supply increases, people find new and creative ways to use that commodity, resulting in higher steady demand and lowering the overall cost of production. 

It's harder to give a good example, but we can look at corn. It is a labor intensive staple that requires processing to be viably nutritious, but at high levels of production we use it to make corn syrup, animal feed, ethanol, etc. Mining silicon is another example. We use silicon for all sorts of ingenious things from potholders to microchips. These commodities, then, get their value in terms of their most trivial usage, their marginal value, and when we zoom out to the macro level we can see that the result is a relatively stable commodity value over long periods of time. That phenomenon is the basis of sociopolitical systems like the "gold standard," and prioritizing investment over savings. 

What we need to understand is that both theories exist at the same time, both theories are in essence true for their own descriptive values, but both theories fail to describe real world phenomena when they collide. That is the conflict between the US and OPEC, two capitalists arguing about the nature of value. Oil producing countries want an equivalent exchange of labor value, American consumers want cheap gasoline at the expense of its producers. The end result is a lot of war because neither side agrees about what is or isn't fair. 

I think the source of this problem is the misinterpretation of the theories themselves as not simply descriptions of psychological states, but as ready-to-wear policy making decisions. They can't be. It is certainly true that people tend to respond to certain situations en masse, but no person is actually bound by any analytical construct. People tend to make what they think is the best choice for themselves, and that includes intentionally sabotaging their own goals and doing the opposite of what authority suggests. Any authority, a person, a book, conventional wisdom, mom and dad, etc. Policy has to equally address both sides of that coin.

So, to continue on from my previous explanation about the labor theory of value, we need to understand an important structural aspect of Marx's definition of Capitalism. Keep in mind that i'm not picking one side or the other to defend or bash, i'm simply describing the misconception. 

In my example i showed where surplus value is created by performing the same job in less time, or what we would colloquially call "working hard." Marx is primarly concerned with where that surplus goes and how it is used. 

Again with the caveats, but we have to use Marx's definition of Capitalism, not yours. If you call this structure something else, fine, but you are responsible for translating the terms for yourself. We are also using Bottle's reading of Marx, which is pointedly different from Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Bordiga, and on and on and on. If you haven't read my books or 3 years of facebook posts, you are at a bit of a disadvantage. I can't do anything about that except tell you to read my books (4th one coming out soon). 

What is this surplus thingamabob that capitalists exploit? It's the additional value created by doing the same job faster and/or more efficient than another person producing identical results. Pretend most people can produce 40 a day (of whatever it is). Dudelady can produce 60 of equal quality in the same amount of time, but if you try to make everyone else do 60 the quality of their output decreases. Dudelady is generating surplus value. If Dudelady cuts corners to accomplish it, that's cheating and Dudelady gets demerits or slapped with a wet noodle or something, but in this essay we'll say the situation is legitimate. 

Capitalism is any system where someone other than Dudelady owns that surplus as profit. Communism as Marx vaguely describes it (not the political parties or the Soviet Union like you're thinking about), is the absence of that structure, so it does not actually exist in the real world. Communism is the afterparty after we all watch Capitalism eat its own tail. 

Marxist Thought is a bunch of people trying to make the structure of Capitalism disappear, but Marx specifically says you can't make it disappear, you can only redistribute the surplus, and by the way the whole thing is stupid. That's Marx's assessment, and i happen to agree that for the most part the whole thing is stupid. That's my bias, and i'm sticking to it. 

Now, most people would say that Dudelady's surplus should rightfully be redistributed back to Dudelady. Trouble is, Dudelady sold that surplus during the agreement to be an employee. Yes, even if Dudelady is a sole proprietor, Dudelady is 2 different legal entities and must account for the actions of both of them; you cannot spend the same dollar twice, even though it looks like that on paper. That's not my definition, that's Capitalism, and no one has ever proven that it isn't. 

Now, some people will be tempted to argue that Marx's conception of Capitalism is wrong, but will almost inevitably use fundamental theories of Classical Economics to prove it. That's a problem because Marx's description of Capitalism is Classical Economics, so you end up rejecting your own argument. The inverse is also true, you might recognize it as the evolution from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism, or the Post-Modern Apocalypse. It's all the same extra-dimensional twist because economics is nothing more than a theoretical description of human behavior using counting. That's tough because we're bad at behaving and my goodness do we fight about it like Marx says we do. 

To be clear, my official opinion is that we need to stop using abstract economics as the decision making factor in our lives. It's a zero-sum game where both the winners and losers die having never received a trophy or a medal or even a "thanks for playing." It might be entertaining to watch on the weekend for some people, you might even make a career out of it, but i think you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who can honestly say it's fun. 

But back to compounding the problem. Marx advocates a Stateless global society, then quite confusingly seems to think that the State can be used to eliminate itself. We know that's not true, the state becomes a capitalist enterprise, and a lot of people end up selectively choosing who can or can't be a Capitalist. Same problematic twist there as well because you're arguing for taking away the private property of the people who you think are trying to take away your private property. 

Property is another one of those problematic terms, because as i outlined above, if you think you own what you produce you are by your own definition Marxist. Yet again, i didn't make those rules, i'm just climbing up/down the Escherian staircase so you can see what it looks like. 

As always, I both apologize and you're welcome?

Helmet - Aftertaste

Ok, ok, i can't end it that way, the aftertaste is terrible. Luckily, i heard Exactly What You Wanted and i haven't reviewed the 3rd Helmet album, Aftertaste. I'm certain me picking a fight with Erlewine is exactly what you wanted, so let's do it. 

He calls it bland, numbing, and a downright shame for such an intriguing 90s alternative metal band. His narrative is that they made the awesomeness that is Meantime, pushed too far to the experimental side with Betty, and failed to return to the grandeur of their original immediate and visceral hooky riffs and stuff. Disheartening. 

You know what Stephanie? Thom Yorke says it best, we hope that you choke. I guess if it helps you sleep at night, we'll pretend like we care. See, although the sonic onslaught is indeed loud and cacophonous, the harmonic language is insane to the point that it's actually impressive most of these songs have an identifiable, dare i say, demonstrable tonic considering whether he's driving somewhere slow or nowhere fast, United Arab Emirates still keep the gas in his car. Also, he'd rather be insulted by you than someone he respects, so that works. 

To be fair, i didn't like it that much for a long time either. It's a very acquired aftertaste. Like it or not, it's Post-Metal. I won't coma you with much of that, other than to say "post-" is kind of the catch-all term for using a type of music as a texture on top of which you do whatever thing you do. It's a bit like the floating head of David Bowie music i'm known for not being fond of. For this album, it's really just super noisy guitars playing extended harmonies over John Stanier's drumcophony while the bass does all sorts of weird stuff and Page sings little snippets of Alternative Pop songs. You really do have to put your brain back in 1997 mode because we're drowning out the madness with 10 times the madness. 

Long story short for a change, whereas Erlewine gives it the predictable D for disappointment, i give it an A for accuracy. 17 year old Bottle just nods his head and says "yep, that's exactly what it sounds like out there, glad my brain is melting inside this helmet." Interesting fact, it went out of print way back in 2006 of all places, so i better take extra special care of my OG CD copy. 

And that, as they say, well, that's all folks. Porky Pig-ed it out of the park. Look for new and excitingly different things from Bottle of Beef some time that is later than now. Skip's got some typos to wrangle, and Compy's got that appendicitis look in his eyes. Sandra of course took the liberty of already showing you the cover, so that cat's out of the box with the subatomic quantum thingy that might or might not have happened. Only one way to find out what's in the box, Mr. Pitt. Take a look, it's in a book, possibly one i've written, but you don't have to take my word for it. Space cadets, stand down. Que sera sriracha. Catch you on the flip side. Bottle out.

The End (at least until the next beginning)

Friends, Minions, Skeletons, please don't throw miscellaneous body parts at me. We stand upon the gateway of the future. Not a future we can predict in detail, but a future nonetheless. Where will we go? What will we do? That is not for me to decide, i simply keep meandering in a forwardish direction. But wherever you go, whatever you do, you can rest assured that me and my pals will be right here goofing off and finding new ways to amuse ourselves with the produce of your vegetable gardens.

Do not be sad, do not be afraid, every Bottle must face The Corkening. But you, my heartiest minions, you have your helmets, you have your shovels, you have each other. As i've said before, there are no goodbyes, only pulses in the stream of existence. So, now that we've seen how things are fermenting, it is time for me to put the proverbial cork in it. Any questions?

MEEP?

No, i already said that, i'm not going anywhere, i'm just shutting up because i ran out of things to talk about.

MEEP MEEP?

No, of course not. No exploding today, no exploding tomorrow, well unless you walk past the warning signs, or stick scissors in the socket, there i can't help you.

MEEP MEEP. MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEP.

Are you new here?

MEEEP?

What a jackass. Oh, is my mic still on? Oh well, at least i honestly think you're a jackass. Don't worry, i'm a jackass too. It takes one to know one, you know?

Prelude to the epilogue of the ending of the Saga of Beef

B: alright, Skip. Towel time, giving up ghosts and stuff, how do we end this thing?

E: well, i mean, it's kind of the epilogue in its own right, right?

B: riiiiiiight, but how do i end it? Do i just Porky Pig the thing? A This Was Your Life montage? Pan out to "and so on...?" 

E: i don't know, they're your books.

B: good answer, good answer. Well, the first one had a structural ending at a full year. The second one ended at the beginning. The third one had that switcheroo where we realized it really is the same coin. There is no actual end, maybe Madam Eternity really does deserve a proper ellipsis.

E: sounds like you've decided.

B: i suppose i have. Don't actually publish it though?

E: i agree, save the ending for the book because it's not the end of the whole thing. We'll still be here, we've got no place else to go.

B: there's millions of unexplored hallways, but i see your point. It's merely the end of this particular chapter. Ok, i'll work on it all properly secret and we'll publish it as one final hurrah. 

E: works for me.

B: me too.

Welp, everybody, i've got some ends to tighten and a little bit more money to burn, but the Corkening appears to be nigh. It's been real and it's been fun, but it's also been real fun, so look for it in the place where i put that thing that time (yay, Hackers reference). This 4th and actually final book is nearing its completion. No clue what i'll do next, but i always seem to do something. Cheers.

Ideologies are bad, m'kay?

 I suppose we could revisit Zager and Evans, ideologies are bad, m'kay?

Why are they bad? Because they usually become lampoonishly infallible dogma that fallibly fails to accomplish anything except abject horribleness.

Does that mean your particular religion, your party, your ideals, your wants and needs? No, of course not. Unless it leads to killing people, then boo to that.

What's the deal with Ukraine? I guess Russia doesn't want Ukraine to join NATO? The invasion of Crimea back in 2014 was predicated on the dispute about who owns it. Is it part of Ukraine or is it part of Russia? The Russians who live there supposedly say Russia. The narrative has always been first-world America vs second-world Russia in an economic grudge match for the championship belt. That's dumb.

Before we all get confused, i'm not talking about human rights violations, war, shirtless horseback rides across the tundra, any of that stuff. I'm talking about the kind of "our sports team is better than yours and we'll light this car on fire to prove it" garbage blasted from all directions into our poor, fragile central nervous systems. 

We're dealing with second and third generation connotations here. "Welfare State" doesn't refer to food stamps and social security and unemployment insurance, those are merely three poorly constructed manifestations of a huge variety of possible systems that represent a government attempting to assist rather than dictate the lives of its citizens. 

I would argue that nation-states are simply Capitalism in is most extreme, belligerent form.  What differentiates a President from a King or a Despot? Certainly not the structure of hierarchical bureaucracy, that is their commonality. There is no structural difference between a constitution, a list of commandments, a book of proverbs; they are the structure of ideology itself. In themselves they represent not the path to a goal, but the conservation of privilege for their most devout evangelists.

Liberty and freedom, then, are not some state of being bestowed upon us by some benevolent being, but the result of our own refusal to infringe upon the liberty and freedom of others, to refuse to make choices in our own interest for a common good, to in fact reject the ideologies we most admire and desire. Liberty can only be given away, not seized or conserved. 

This is of course the radical Leftist in me talking, but an elected king is still a king, the cabinet and congress are still the king's court, the rival kings are still rivals in this game of thrones. A king who does nothing of consequence is absurd.

I am certainly not the first or only person to claim that Marxism is the worship of Marx as Christianity is the worship of Christ, nor am i the only person pointing out that America has never had a non-authoritarian President. How could it? 

The rude thing Biden said into a live microphone is no different than any other President, because the President is still merely a person. Rather than some supposed sign of hypocrisy, we must recognize it for what it really was: a window overlooking honesty built into a mansion of dishonesty. That honesty may not bear resemblance to your own, but the underlying/overdetermining dishonesty is not of the President's, or government's, or Constitution's making (the Russian Federation is now a Constitutional Republic, after all), it is instead the result of the collective psyche's refusal to accept the consequences of choice. I propose that that refusal of acceptance is in fact the pride of ideology itself. The winner must win, the slighted achieve justice, the good be rewarded, the bad be punished, immortality by any means necessary.

Our notion of Capitalism makes no such guarantee. In fact, it is predicated on the equality of failure. Not only must institutions fail no matter their size or intent, the more agreeable or popular their mission the more painful their failure must be. Those aren't my rules, this isn't my game, but they are the rules of the game nonetheless. The freest of laissez-faire black markets is the tyranny of the majority, it will make whatever choice it makes without hesitation and be replaced by another after it has reached saturation. 

The will of the people is not some magical teleological consensus, it is 3-million disparate voices screaming for a few moments of silence during the daily deluge of disastrophe. The rallying cry is, after all, give me liberty. The irony of course is that we confuse giving for taking, a fortune for fortune, freedom for the better of bad choices (which aren't really choices at all). 

There is immense sadness in the doing of good deeds, and that sadness arises from the recognition that for that brief moment in time that good deed is the exception, an abnormality. That brief moment of kindness, help, decency, call it what you will, that brief moment of trivial grace is an oasis in the desert of misery that forms the fabric of existence. That deep, unexpressable gratitude in the eyes of a fellow human breaks my heart, shatters my soul, and tells me there is so much more mountain to climb than i even imagined. 

These have been brain thoughts with Bottle. No  warranty expressed or implied. May cause dandruff. I have no idea why Polyvinyl records included this blue-raspberry flavored airheads with my Hum records, but i am definitely not complaining. Mysteries of life.

Warehouseman's Aria

 I've been secretly working on the libretto for the opera of my life. Here's what i've got for the warehouseman's aria (and yes the swearing is vital to character development):

(Recit.) ... sometimes people ask me what i do for a living. From this moment forward here's the answer i'll be giving....

Oh i

Pick shit up and i move it over there

Sometimes i use a forklift, sometimes i use the stairs.

Sometimes i just stand next to the dumpster and smoke, 'cause being an adult is a goddamned joke.

I pick shit up and i move it over there, sometimes i climb the shelving cause the product's way up there.

We may or may not have the thing you need today in stock, but if we do i'll pull it for you and i'll leave it on the dock.

I pick shit up and i move it over there. Sometimes i use a forklift, sometimes i use the stairs. 

Sometimes i just stand next to the dumpster and smoke, 'cause being an adult is a goddamned joke.

3rd half of story

 MEEP

Ahoy, there to you too.

Meep meep meep?

No, no, i'm always out of my depths. My flotation device might be a little worse for wear, but who knew Editors were so buoyant? Mind giving us a lift to the nearest island without a volcano?

Meep.

Thanks little dudes. We'll just tie this around his ankles like so and i'll climb up first. Heave ho and junk. No sense wasting good rum and algae water, he'll be fine, just leave him in that fish hammock. Mind if i take a nap?

Meep meep.

Excellent. Wake me up when we get somewhere...

But Bottle did not get anywhere. Instead he woke up with a terrible case of the Mondays, and an urge to hear something different....

2nd half of story

 E: oh, ok, i guess that makes sense.

B: does it? And more importantly, you're not even going to ask?

E: ask what?

B: you know, why they call them that.

E: call them what?

B: the "virgin islands."

E: i don't want to know.

B: horse hocky, you're just afraid to look naive and/or foolish.

E: ok, fine, why?

B: because Columbus was a tool.

E: what?

B: remember? Columbus thought Eurasia was it as far as Earth was concerned, so he logically believed he had already circumnavigated this newly round globe thingy, ergo everywhere he landed must have been India. Finders namers, so he decided to name these beautiful islands after St. Ursula and her 11 (or possibly 11,000 martyred Christian virgins, history is not good with numbers). That story, by the way, comes from a plaque on a building mentioning "Huns murdered Virgins here in Cologne a long time ago."

E: so basically none of that is even remotely helpful?

B: well, it is remote, but no not helpful. We're still lost at sea. Why don't you try floating and i'll see which direction you drift?

E: why don't you?

B: interesting fact, the lower half of my body is not bouyant. Never has been, never will be. Mystery of the universe, that one.

E: hhhhhhh, fine.

B: ok, good enough, follow me for about 11,000 stokes and we'll do it again. Keep an eye out for driftwood or turtles or something.

E: are we going to die?

B: eventually. Oh, you mean soon? Probably not. The trouble with washing up on a deserted island is that you can't actually do it until you're delirious and about to drown. I'm still disconcertingly chipper, so we got a while. If it makes you feel any better, you'll probably pass out first and i'll reach exhaustion trying to drag you along. If we're lucky we'll be sipping drinks from a pineapple in a day or two.

E: what if we're unlucky?

B: coconut water and a one-way trip up the volcano.

E: i wouldn't mind a few days stranded with meg ryan.

B: 1) i'm impressed, 2) i'm disturbed you actually know Joe Vs. The Volcano well enough to understand me, 3) grab that passing volleyball from that other Tom Hanks movie where a fedex plane crashes. He's not gonna like how his plot line turns out anyway; we're practically doing him a favor.

The end?

How to Read Marx Like a Human Not a Tool. 

Ok, we need to set some ground rules here. First, we aren't debating anything. I'm telling you my reading of the English translation of Marx's most famous works. All i care about is The Communist Manifesto and Volume 1 of Capital. 2) i think Lenin was wrong in his interpretation of a couple important aspects, and i think Stalin was a buffoon. I don't mean that in the common offhanded dismissal of mainstream Marxist Thought way, as in "ugh, those backtracking wusses, afraid of a little oppression and murder," i mean if Marx had lived to see Lenin's rise to despotism he would have said "no, dirtbags, you're doing it wrong. This is exactly what i said was the stupid part." 

Again, we aren't debating my opinion, i'm allowed to be wrong because I'm not telling you to do or not do anything other than form your own opinion and compare and contrast it with mine. That sounds antagonistic, i know, but it's the only accurate description of the scenario i can utter. You don't get to tell me that my opinion isn't my opinion, you just file it in the "Bottle's opinion as i understand it" folder until you have something to contribute to the conversation. I think we can both agree i would have been extra-special worked/starved to death in the gulags of 100 years ago Soviet Union because i'm a loud-mouthed jackass. 

I have a limit test/rule. If you end up having to kill or torture people to get a road repaved, you are some flavor of wrong. Marx doesn't try to justify it, he very clearly says violence and rebellion and war are an inevitable reaction to exploitation and oppression and History tells us there's no obvious way to actually escape it. The more developed an industrial society the less violence actually takes place, but the end result is always some qualitative version of war. His actual suggestion is the democratic election of representatives who will politically advocate for the working class so that people can support themselves rather than depending on generosity and pity (nothing is fair until you agree it's fair). He advocated spreading people out, giving them land and technology to support themselves and freely trade the surplus with others, rather than forcing them to owe a debt to a landlord for the privilege of being allowed to live in poverty. It's still possible to choose to be lazy and starve under that plan, but you can't argue you didn't have access to the knowledge and technology necessary for a productive and fulfilling life. I used to tell my students "i'm telling you what to do to pass this course, the people who do it get As and Bs, the people who don't get Ds and Fs. I have no idea how hard or easy it will be for any particular one of you, so drive your struggle bus over to my office hours and i'll gladly give you extra help." I didn't actually say it in those exact words, but maybe it would have been more productive. Se la mort on that one. 

The first problem i have with Lenin is that he clearly took the "inevitability of exploitation" as a justification for oppressing and exploiting the predominantly peasant population of Eastern Asia. Some days i'd rather be a subsistence farmer, to be honest. I know which part Lenin misunderstood, it's the part where Marx talks about looking down on the farmer as lazy and inefficient. It's easy to misunderstand, Marx doesn't reiterate the context of that statement as a specifically Capitalist point of view inside the larger process of exploitation; he doesn't clarify his rhetorical approach, he shortsightedly assumes you understand it. Stalin's notion of single-nation Communism is equally problematic, because that is just about as opposite of a global proletariat as i can imagine. The story about the hand-picked bloody roses and apology to Konstantin Rokossovsky is pretty interesting though, as are the happy birthday exchanges between him and Churchill right up until that Iron Curtain diatribe. FDR's in there somewhere as well. I know i'm rambling, i just think people tend to not actually conceptualize all the things that were happening at the same time. How many people mistakenly think Stalin was Axis rather than Ally and ignore the fact that Pearl Harbor is what actually forced us to choose a side in WWII? It was Stalin's war against Hitler and Mussolini when you brass tack it, and we had so many fascism fanatics Vonnegut had to write a book about it. Killed an imaginary pregnant lady and everything. 

Where was i? Oh yeah, it is certainly true that Marx envisioned a type of globalized society, but i think we have to look at that in its most honest and simple manifestation. A carpenter should be able to go anywhere on Earth and have a productive and comfortable life as a carpenter. A doctor is a doctor, a lawyer a lawyer, a mechanic a mechanic, and so on. Professions might have varying levels of importance in different places, but some amount of what you do is equal to some amount of what another person does; we should all be able to adapt to the changing needs of society as a whole and we should all have access to the technology and education that makes that possible. 

The next problem is Communism itself. Communism is clearly a religion in Marx's brain (he compares them to all the really nasty drugs made from poppies like Marcy Playground did): it has an origin story, it has a teleological goal, and it has a detailed series of devout behaviors that assure you'll get to the promised reward. I skipped over that chapter of the manifesto, but i told you that's what it actually does, it criticizes the utopian aspects of broader Communist ideas, and says true revolution can only come from the people usurping the power of their handlers. You know me, i say there's no bowl of Lucky Charms at the end of the rainbow, but i completely and respectfully accept your right to disagree with me so long as you aren't using it to try to take advantage of me.  Marx might scold me for that, but i ain't afraid of no ghost. 

Back to the point. What are the real dynamics of Marx's evaluation of Capitalism? First of all, Capitalism very much works. The boss exploits his workers for profit, consumers get happy and demand more, it gets bigger and bigger, but before any one guy actually wins, the people being exploited chop off his head. That's not allegorical, by the way, that's literally the French Revolution and the umpteenth time it's happened in Marx's "History is Fun" library reading list. Marx very clearly implies that's stupid. The end result is a crash either way, so we should use the best tools we have to make the process as survivable as possible. Economically speaking, Marx says it would be better to approach the cataclysm by letting the global economy actually reach its equilibrium rather than waking up one morning to find that one guy actually won and the entire rest of the world has no money until he decides how to divide it all up again. 

I'm reminded of the very peculiar and interesting distinction between a Republic and a Soviet Democracy. The term "Soviet," by the way is the actual name for the type of democratically elected representative and by extension the congress of elected representatives. Soviet isn't merely a synonym for "Russian" like most of us Americans naively think it is. If you are one of those Americans then you're really gonna hate the fact that our Electoral College is really difficult to intellectually differentiate from Soviet Democracy. By all means, go read the thousands of pages of text about it and pick my consolidated appraisal apart, i will very much respect your efforts. 

I myself am a "do it or don't" kind of guy. I don't find much value in putting off what you're still not going to want to do tomorrow; if it's a coin flip, i'll flip an actual coin so i don't have to care anymore. If you have to waste time threatening me, you could have already killed me by now. James Spader would have (a Blacklist reference, where did that come from?). And that, believe it or not, winds us all the way around to a sentiment best expressed by Neil Gaiman's Mary Katherine Gallagher impression from American Gods. We all know the game is rigged, but it's the only game in town. 

My question is, do you think he punned his own name on purpose, or was it just a happy little Bob Rossian coincidence?

Post up down sideways

 And just like that, i'm stage right as rain. Up on the downside? It's hard being the only practitioner of Bottleism, mostly because it's so hard to think while talking to myself.

I suppose you can blame Ozzy Osbourne's No More Tours Tour for that. Maybe it was No More Tours Tour 2, i dunno. I am of course referring to seeing the news that the student loan interest deferral has been pushed back to May instead of a couple weeks from now. Crazy considering i got the email that the transfer from Navient to whothehellever was finalized yesterday or the day before or whatever. It's like Gladys said, you have to know which hallway you're walking which direction. I'm sure i mentioned in writing that sound travels freely down here. Compy for the confirmation...

C: it just so happens i read that second book recently, and yes that's exactly what you said.

B: ok, good, glad i'm not crazier than the crazy i fully admit to being.

Now, we're halfway through this 4th book and i'm out of records. That's a lie of course, i just don't feel like listening to a lot of them at the moment. Logically we should find an Ozzy or Black Sabbath album to listen to while i logorhate all over the ethersphere; roll your own.

Look, i didn't grow up in Soviet Russia or newly Republicanized Iceland like Björk (she says it rhymes with "jerk" in case you didn't know), and i don't have any firsthand experience with being in "government," but i do have a fair bit more than professional experience being me. I'm the leading world expert, you might say. Stoic Skepticism. I neither believe in absolute knowledge, nor care much about the whimsical oscillations of pleasure and pain. Que será será, except of course that it's not in any way mandatory. Nothing HAS to be the way it is, and you certainly don't have to believe it if you don't want to.

I choose to view life as an endless series of smashing your face against the wall because that's what people seem to want to build. What i've noticed is that other people seem to be very confused as they watch me just walk through them, or around them. None of that garbage actually affects me, it affects other people who then freak out and infiltrate my secret lair of minding my own business.

The saving grace at the moment is that most of the Republican legislation being drafted is deposited directly into a garbage can, but sadly the Democrats aren't making any headway because they aren't writing any legislation and when they do they vote against it because it isn't mildly left of hard right enough.

This might sting a lot, but Biden isn't Left, Sanders isn't Left, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn't Left. Same argument i've been making all along. How can you be a Capitalist if you don't own a factory and employ thousands of workers both in house and by proxy? You can't, that's the definition of Capitalism.

What's the real issue here? Well, us people can't pay our debts without money, and we can't get money without being taxed by the same people who handed it to us. If the government pays that debt, i owe the income tax on 200,000. I don't feel like actually doing math so let's go overboard and say 40% effective tax rate. That's 80,000 due the next time April rolls around. I currently have 10,000 of that. So yeah, not good. What's the opposite, no income tax and no payoff? How would that help? The answer is that both things have to happen simultaneously, or the whole thing really does have to crash into a pile of rubble. Is the outcome actually any different in either direction? Does it actually matter if you intentionally or negligently drive your car off the cliff?

If you've read this far you're probably wondering where this hallway is going. I don't know. I do know the next room is all about how the roles get switched when you're actually out here living it.

Just to show a baseline let's say the money supply (aka national debt) averages 30,000 per person. How do you create one legitimate billionaire, a person who actually possesses a billion dollars? Well, you can take away 33,333.33 peoples' money. You could take 333.33 dollars from 3 million people and leave them with an average of 29,666.66 each. 10 billionaires? 20? 30?

I'm just a regular schmuck on the street, the only money i have access to is the money that trickled down from some billionaire. It doesn't matter what I think or feel or want or hope for, i have to wake up and put on pants and go do whatever it is makes a person with more money than me more money than that so they'll hand me some of it. Does it matter if that person is nice or terrible? Sure, of course it matters, but only if you actually have the ability to choose, and again only if consistently choosing to associate with the nice people lowers the number of terrible people. I worry that it actually increases the number of terrible people.

At the end of the day, all decisions are made by the person who decided them based on the known and unknown consequences. I can't do anything about it, there's like 95 degrees of Kevin Bacons between me and the President, and i'd be willing to bet close to 94 of them don't want to be the person who decides anything. If i wanted to waste the time and energy to write them a letter it would really just say "do it or don't, you wanted to be in charge so you get the responsibility of being in charge. You're allowed to quit as far as i'm concerned. In the meantime, i have a building full of chicken poop to shovel."

My opinion has always been, and probably always will be, we don't need a centralized governmental authority making poorly informed laws that do nothing. Instead, we need people who will do what they say they are going to do and clean up the mess afterward. You don't need 47 pieces of paper and 12 initials after your name on a cheap plaque on an expensive door; the results should speak for themselves.

It's not a governor's or mayor's job to tell us how to live our lives, it their job to make sure that some jerk doesn't sell us a monorail we don't need then tear down our houses to build it.

Oh crap... a 4th book

 C: hey Bottle, guess what.

B: chi...cken...butt??

C: nonono, we've officially recouped the expense of the first book.

B: so you're saying my joke wasn't just a clever marketing gimmick?

C: no, i'm saying it only took 3 books worth of work to pay for the first book worth of work.

B: but correct me if i'm wrong, i'm still the expense of 2 books in the hole.

C: well, yeah, i mean there is that, but you put less time, effort, and investment into each successive one, so the karma kind of works if you squint just right.

B: fair rebuttal.

doubleVee

Today we're fully enjoying both kooky albums from doubleVee  (Allan and Barb Vest). If Pop-cabre were a genre, that's what i'd call it. I'm a huge fan of Starlight Mints so it's pure delight to hear Allan's eclectic orchestration and downright catchy melodies in any context. Give  The Moonlit Fables of Jack the Rider and/or Songs for Birds and Bats a listen and tell me what you think.

Doublevee.bandcamp.com

Publishing 5 6 7

 Part 5

Ok, last essay of the day, i promise. One of the first choices you'll face is size. Size and page count are highly maneuverable, and yes 1/4 inch can have a noticeable effect on print cost for your specific book. Ingram has a publicly available cost calculator you can plug random numbers into to get an idea. We are being fiddly here. The photo is a random assortment of books i read over the last 6 months. For comparison, my 3 books are 6x9.

Little secret, i absolutely don't care. As long as it isn't awkward to hold and you don't actually have OCD, it absolutely doesn't matter. My books are 6x9 because they are fairly enormous. They'd be 1,000+ page monstrosities that fall apart from their own weight if i sized them like Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick. Those Barthes books are practically pamphlets by comparison.

Play around with your book in your word processor and see what you like, then plug those numbers into the calculator and see the price. The only trick is that you add 1/4 (.25) inch to the dimension. My word processor version is 6.25x9.25.

The second tricky thing is that odd pages go on the right, and that's the opposite of how it looks on your computer screen. I've paid for that mistake so you don't have to.

Now some good news, that's it. That's all the actual formatting you have to worry about. Believe me, try properly collating those pages for double-sided printing in sheafs one time and you'll be ecstatic that that's Ingram's problem now, not yours.

That's enough for one day. I need my beauty sleep, such as it is. Hopefully i can remain on this train of thought tomorrow, but you know we never know ;) cheers.

Part 6 

Ok, just so we're all clear here, there is no market, only an entire earth full of potential customers. You're going to be tempted to think that people who buy books are "the market," but that's not true at all. "The Market" exists in the past of a future you who has already successfully sold some number of books. I know that sounds a lot like the future, but it's not. You are stuck living chronological while future realities buzz around like a swarm of gnats near the lake. The Market is the measurement of done deals, and the photograph you take of it is a bifurcating reality where you guess about the future actions of all the people who lived inside that photograph, and end up somewhere along THAT future with the relevant photograph from ITS past. 

The only data you have is the observable fact that nobody cares that you wrote a book, and they don't want to give you any money in the first place. The market is your interpretation of past sales as the basis for your guess as to how that picture will look in the future. In your brain, that fact contorts into the illusion of future people who might buy your book if you imagineer the conditions into just the right configuration of coincidences. That hallway leads to some heavy duty psychological feng shui, so we'll mosey off in a different direction. Plenty of familiar dirt to explore without inventing imaginary future dirt. 

Instead, we'll take some time to consider why that extradimensional fold in perceived reality takes place.

Part 7 

What the hell just happened in part 6? The answer is that i unfolded reality into its component parts as we psychologically experience them, not as they really are. This is the order of ideas, not the order in which we find out if those ideas are true or false. I am Bottle, welcome to my nightmare. 

What you've really done is created the architecture of your own future confirmation bias. At some point you will forget you did that and believe a fictional version of reality that bears no resemblance to the actual experiential process of getting there. You might never notice, you might smash into yourself running the other direction and explode, that one's a coin flip. 

You can see what's happening in my previous posts; we're thinking in two opposite directions at the same time. On one hand you have every human on earth as a potential customer and your brain tries to narrow that infinity down to some comprehendable demographic. On the other hand you have the reality of 0 customers and you're trying to bootstrap your way to creating that previously mentioned imaginary reality. Somewhere looming in the middle is the potential metaphorical car crash.

Yay, it's the 4th of July.

I tend to keep my mouth shut about national holidays. Occasionally i think of something i can say in polite conversation, but this one is too much.

Today, as we celebrate our Nation's ethically questionable war against the British Government, which we then turned around and reconstructed with different names for things, i'd like to take this opportunity to point out that half of you have spent the last year or so pointing out at every opportunity that our current President of the Senate did not earn that position with her professional performance as a lawyer, then Federal Prosecutor, then Senator, but instead achieved high public office by fellating men with lots of money and political power. So, as you bite into that German sausage grilled to perfection with any number of delicious condiments slathered on top, remember that you could be sucking dick for a promotion instead. You can only go as far as your own ambition, right?

Capital with Bottle, part 3

If my reading of Capital strikes you as weird, that's because it assumes that we aren't hell bent on burning the whole thing to the ground. Neither are we content to murder the bourgeoisie (whoever they are) and become the ruling class as a middle step toward utopia.

Communism as a political philosophy entails doing away with the market altogether, removing the system that creates a capitalist mentality. But, as i've showed you, his complaints are quite valid. He doesn't like child labor, the inability to have and use what you produce, the trophy wife oppression of women, the way that the exploited class revolts only to become the new bourgeoisie, in short exploitation.

The biggest problem with reading the theory is that it's very easy to just walk away and call it nonsense. But it's not nonsense. If there's enough food being produced for everyone to eat, let everyone eat it. If there isn't, produce more food. If there's too much food over there and not enough here, spread it out. Does that pretty shade of green come with a side of arsenic poisoning? Stop making it.

Am i a Communist? No. Am i angry about a lot of the same things all of you and Marx are angry about? Yes.

The biggest difficulty in all of this is that we get so wrapped up in the ideology that we lose the meaningful dialog about the actual problems. We forget that people argued with Marx on certain points, and agreed with him on others.

We are constantly bickering about theories of how people will react in a given situation, but making no effort to plan for those situations. I'm willing to work hard for the rewards of that hard work, i'm not willing to grind away at a stupid task just so you can have a mcmansion in a gated community and tell me i'm a loser.

There has to be some meaningful compromise.

---

Ok, so we've read volume 1 of Capital (and possibly revisited the Communist Manifesto in the process). Obviously we could keep going in the understanding that Marx the person isn't there anymore. He spent the last few years of his life doing exactly what i do. Writing notes, essays, doing more research, but he died and Engels did all the assembling. Marx isn't there to debate his ideas, debate other Communists with different ideas, change his mind, watch the US do all sorts of terrible things all over the world, privatize prisons and throw drug addicts in there then capitalize on their free labor. Sure, he was alive and reading about our civil war as it happened, but he would have had a field day over the last hundred years.

The popular sentiment now is that we are in "late stage capitalism," that information dump i mentioned where it's all wildly uncontrollable and everyone overreacts and we burn it all to the ground. Some people think Trump was trying to prevent that, others (like me) think that he was bafoonishly going on national television and unknowingly reciting Communist talking points. He inherited a capitalist fortune with absolutely no understanding of how he himself had been exploited to create it. 

Regardless, we should be able to come to some explanation of what is or isn't Marxism with regard to his narrow definition of Capitalism in general. Remember, Marx has told us that capitalism develops on top of market based economics through the manipulation of capital (obtained by draining the market of money by continually devaluing labor). Even though his theory is that this development is inevitable, we can see that the two things are quite different in his mind, and we know that his larger idea is preventing the exploitation. Marx the self-taught economic theorist has no idea how to do that, so Marx the Communist says unless you have a better idea, throw the whole thing in the dumpster and light it on fire. 

Is Marx the Communist actually saying "kill Barry the Boss anyway, make airplanes to your heart's content, and fly them wherever you want," or is he simply telling us Barry doesn't own the labor of his employees and we should refuse to work for him without adequate compensation? We can't answer those questions.

What we can do is compare the blatant idealism of Communism to the blatant greed of Exceptionalist Capitalism as Marx might understand it. I call it exceptionalist because America (the idealized nation) believes itself to be unique, devoid of similarity to past cultures and nations, the exception to every theory of everything. Obviously i think that's absurd, but that's not the point. The point is that Marx was simply building an opposite idea to the forms of Western Capitalism he himself experienced. Those forms are not exactly what we call capitalism in daily conversation, but more closely resemble what we call Crony Capitalism (not happy go lucky market risk, but political favoritism for certain businesses over others through lobbying or straight up bribery).

Arguing for a stateless society is actually a Marxist idea. The state before Marxism is the regulator of the commodity of money, the state after Marxism is the absense of the need for money because we collectively make what we all agree we want. Words are tricky little things, remember. "The State" can and does refer to very different ideas because it actually applies to the rule book not the referee. The conflict manifests between the participants inside the market and the regulators controlling the commodity of money. Marx says Capitalism creates a world economy in its own image; wealthy nations exploiting poorer nations for cheap labor and political power. That certainly seems to be what we are doing, and it's making the problem worse. And as for private property, grazing cattle on public land is only possible if it's "public land" after all.

Having the working class be the ruling class makes no sense, it is merely the closest analogy Marx could use to describe it. Saying that a heavily regulated market is Marxist makes no sense because there is no market.  The whole thing is nonsensical because it has been defined as an irreconcilable binary opposition with pure greed on one hand and complete satiation on the other. Reality lives somewhere in the middle. 

What i'm trying to get at is that defining your position in terms of this bizarre Capitalism v Communism thing is nonsense from both sides. The actual Marxist view of capitalism focuses on the common sense things that we pretty much all agree are terrible, and the capitalist view of communism defends those terrible things while blaming communists for forcing them to do it. Regular everyday people can't tell the difference anymore, so we get anti-capitalist conspiracy theories from ardent capitalists claiming that communists want everyone to be homeless and steal your car to drive to their tax funded abortion appointment.

Too much Bottle on that one? Sorry, i just don't want to go back to being exploited, i mean work tomorrow.

Capital with Bottle part 2

We have to be very careful when we read chapter 4 because words are tricky little things that twist and distort. So, rather than reading his words from our own internal dictionary, we have to read them with what Marx tells us those words mean to him. He's going to define "capital" and "capitalist" in a very specific way. It's a fun little gameshow: Bottle of Beef presents You're Not A Capitalist. You almost certainly participate in the thing we all call "capitalism," but probably not in the way you thought you did. 

Capital comes from the markup of a commodity, and it exists only in the act of obtaining a commodity in order to sell it at a higher price for a profit that you do not intend to spend. In his own words, you invest $100 in some commodity you don't actually care about simply to get back $110. Then take that $110 and do it again to get back $130, and so on, all the while refusing to spend any of that profit for things you will consume. A capitalist is a person who practices this type of money hoarding at the expense of the market, draining the market itself for power. In other words, a capitalist intentionally destabilizes the market itself for monetary gain. That is a radically different notion than our modern day usage of the term capitalism. For us regular everyday people the hoarding of money as Marx describes it is a perfectly acceptable practice because we are 1) saving in order to spend for much more valuable commodities than simple barter can support, and 2) we have no intention of radically damaging the market itself for personal gain. Scrooge McDuck is a capitalist, Papa John is just an extravagant doofus. 

Jokes aside, we have to understand what is and isn't capitalism according to Marx. The simple fact that each person who handles a commodity adds value to the final price of that commodity is not capitalism, per se. Rather, it is simply the accumulation of labor. Fruit from 1,000 miles away that came on two trains and a semi should obviously cost more than fruit grown 2 miles away by a local farmer (the difficulty of growing fruit in your specific location notwithstanding). That's because there are many more people exchanging their labor for money along the way. That is what Marx lumps under the term "coincidental," because the consumer cannot reasonably predict those fluctuations on a day to day basis. So long as they eventually even themselves out, everything is as good as it can be. 

In contrast, a Marxian capitalist is someone who intentionally manipulates that entire process in order to pull the commodity of money out of the system for purely monetary gain. That is a large part of the reason he equates a capitalist with a miser. 

Are you simply buying and selling things to amass more money than everyone else so that they can't afford to buy the things they want? No? Congratulations! You're not a capitalist, according to Marx.

Totally worth it to see the balloons and confetti popup on screen.

---

You might be surprised that that's it. That's the end of Capital.

But, but, what about the next 2,000 pages?

There's no easy way to tell you this, but Marx is dead. What follows is at best Christopher Tolkien's loving continuation of his dad's notes about Middle Earth, and at worst Lenin telling his goons to go ahead and murder the Romanov's in the basement where they are being held captive under false pretenses of rescue. But, he died well before that. That was Lenin's idea.

Volume 1 of Capital is simply a description of capitalism, what it is and how it develops. This is a materialist description, meaning that it focuses on describing the actual historical events that lead to a particular situation rather than philosophies and ideals. It does not pretend to solve those problems, it simply elaborates how they come to be a problem.

So, Marx is describing the abstract concept of commodity markets and he breaks the whole thing down into two binary relationships. There are producers of commodities, call them workers, craftsmen, laborers, whatever. They stand in opposition to merchants, not because there is any conflict or animosity between the two, but because trading commodities involves both a seller and a buyer, both operating from fundamentally different points of view. The producer is interested in exchanging for equivalence and the merchant is interested in maintaining that equivalence in the broadest sense. The producer compares wants, the merchant compares values. This whole market stands in another opposition to the owners of the market itself, that is "the state." Whatever form that state takes, it has the job of not letting the commodity of money grow wildly out of proportion to the entire quantity of commodities, money being the universal equivalent.

Marx the person sees this as a form of internal conflict. That conflict manifests in antagonism between the participants in a market and the shall we say regulators of the market itself. Marx is obviously referring to workers and factory owners (the proletariat and the bourgeoisie). The closest modern equivalent, in my opinion, is the conflict between everyday people and major corporations. I don't mean the people in offices doing their jobs like you, i mean that imaginary human that we have come to associate with the corporation itself.

Kevin in accounting is no more a Capitalist than Helen punching rivot holes on the line. They are both trading their commodity (abstract labor) for money and intend to spend that money for other commodities. Their individual salaries are theoretically irrelevant. I think the confusing part is that we forget that Helen isn't selling those rivot holes to the company for their equivalent value of money any more than Kevin is looking to steal some part of Helen's paycheck. Instead, Helen and Kevin and everyone else are simply contributing to the total amount of labor in the same way that everyone in your family might have specific daily chores. The general price of an airplane is determined by the amount of labor involved in producing it compared to other commodities.

So, can we construct a scenario that will give us some insight into Karl's opinion of this situation? I think so, we just can't get too carried away.

Let's say they make airplanes, and for all sorts of reasons nobody wants airplanes anymore. They can't sell their airplanes, so there isn't much point in working there anymore and they close up shop and head off in separate directions to find a different thing to make. That sucks, but such is life. 

But if instead, Barry the boss only cares about turning his 5 million investment into 7 million, he might invent all sorts of ways to manipulate the system. He might cut everyone's paycheck in half regardless of the final selling price without any concern for what that will do to the larger economy. That would make me mad, so i can see why Marx would be mad too. Marx would probably blame that terrible thing on Barry's Capitalist greed because there was no market reason to do it other than money grabbing. Helen and Kevin might be pretty mad too and kill Barry. Marx is saying he's seen it happen a thousand times and trying to describe why he thinks it happens. Obviously he doesn't want people like Barry to do that, but he doesn't have any sure fire plan to stop it from happening a thousand more times. All he's saying is that he thinks it is an inherent danger of Capitalism in general.

That's my interpretation of what we've read. Do you disagree with my interpretation? Have i unknowingly made some crazy assumption? Do we need to go backward and read The Communist Manifesto for historical perspective?

If you need some deeper explanation of why i'm doing this, it's because today's general daily banter about Marxism and Communism and lefty righty revolutions don't make any sense to me. People in general are saying things backward from how i understand them, and i think that's because no one has actually read any of this stuff. It's just empty headed regurgitating of third or fourth hand gossip.

Part 3

Capital, with Bottle part 1

 Note: copied from facebook posts

https://political-economy.com/capital-karl-marx/

A couple days ago i shared a link so you could download Capital and read it for free. I'll put it in a comment if you missed it. I've casually read chapter one, and i assume you all did too. Of course you did, you guys are inquisitive and not content to just recycle third hand catch phrases from the last hundred something years. So, you're probably thinking "why am i reading this boring treatise on classical market economics by an old dead guy in a library with nothing better to do than read history and politico-economic discourse and then write about it from his own point of view?" The answer of course is that that's what scholars do; that's what half the country thinks is a waste of time. It's why facebook and twitter and wikipedia aren't valid sources of academic knowledge. 

So, chapter one. What's a commodity? 

It's a useful thing people make/produce specifically to trade for other useful things. That's a loaded definition, and chapter one presents a reasonably thorough explanation of how the concept of value is embedded inside a commodity. If it seems boring and pedantic, that's because it is; you have to define all of your terminology or else no one will understand what you're actually talking about. A pretzel doesn't just magically equal 3/5 of a roasted peanuts (that's a Steely Dan joke if you don't regularly read my album reviews). 

It can be a little hard to really understand what we aren't talking about in chapter 1: no money, no different types of labor, no profit or loss, just the simple mechanism by which we determine the amount of different things being equivalent. Marx says that equivalence comes from human labor, whereas people before him said "i dunno." Not specialized labor like you're thinking about, but the abstract notion that there is an average time and energy required to complete any task, and that we can determine equivalences from the sum total of the labor involved. He uses weaving linen as an example. 

He also uses that infamous word "bourgeois," but he uses it only in the contemporaneous context that his audience understands it to explain why it makes the whole thing really confusing. 

Do you have questions about chapter 1? I might be able to answer them, or i might not. Please keep in mind that we are merely reading a book. Yes, it's a book that many people have used to justify killing each other, but so is the Bible, and so too are nonsense Beatles lyrics. The only purpose of this endeavor is to actually read it so that you can use the fact that you have actually read it as basis for your future feelings and opinions about Marxist theory, whatever they may be. 

Marx is not simply a crazy guy in the woods like the unabomber. He is widely considered the inventor of modern sociology. Capital is by all definitions a scholarly text on economics (albeit cutting edge 1800s economics), whether you agree with his theories or not, and i believe in complete intellectual freedom. I will obviously weigh in with my own opinions, and you should too, but i do ask that you make some effort to keep them inside the scope of the actual book. It makes no difference whether you or i agree with Marx or not, only that we understand the subject matter. I can't stress this enough, you must let go of any preconceived notions and simply listen to another person express their ideas. If you want to participate, please do. If you want to just insult people, please don't. I like funny comments as much as anybody, but don't forget that this is exactly the "public service" and "publication" component us doctorate level scholars do, albeit in facebook rather than auditorium form (i just don't have a major university sponsoring me while i do it).

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Chapter 2 of Capital should kind of smack you in the forehead like you could have had a V8. You have to A) understand that people own their wares, and B) mutually agree to exchange them. You trade things that aren't valuable to you for things you want (aka are valuable to you) in proportions you both agree are equivalent. 

There are some important points here. First, the value or equivalence of commodities is not magically apparent on the surface, it only comes into existence at the moment of trade, and each and every trade redefines those values. If you try to escape that exchange in some way, then there is no value of equivalence anymore. Second, money is itself a commodity, but it functions as a universal equivalent because everyone accepts the exchange of money as a commodity. The confusing part is that as soon as you accept this universal equivalent as money, you tend to forget all of the complex relationships that gave it comparative value in the first place. Third, you have to again remind yourself what we are not talking about. We aren't talking about the intricacies of haggling, bargaining, and negotiation. We are looking at a functioning system of trade after the labor/production is over. 

That last distinction is important. We aren't promising to do work in the future, or guessing about the usefulness of the commodities at hand. That usefulness is constantly being evaluated in the process of exchange, and we the observers are not actively participating. The active participants load up the useful things they have but don't need, and head out to exchange them for different useful things with other people doing the same. That's "the economy" as far as this book is concerned at the moment. 

I should also mention that we aren't really concerned with the end notes of each chapter. They serve as documentation of the ideas he is including or arguing about, but they don't really do much for the kind of naive reading we are doing. We aren't sitting around a table plotting world domination, or studying for a test. We might disagree with his descriptions or assumptions, but we have to remember that we're listening to Marx express ideas. We can't start debating those ideas until after we understand what he's trying to say.

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Chapter 3 begins the introduction to precious metals as the basis for monetary systems. We're getting close to our modern understanding, so it's easy to let your imagination run away with you. The important thing to keep in mind is that we imagine a "gold standard" for the equivalences of precious metals. We can use any such metal as money so long as its own value remains consistent to the value of gold, which is in turn based on the labour of obtaining it. The actual price of buying gold does not affect its status as a universal equivalent because that characteristic is based on units of weight. An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold no matter how much stuff you can trade for it. 

All this stuff is, to my mind, basic economics. Certain aspects of it may be more or less understandable to you, but i think we can all mostly agree that it is a reasonable explanation of the historical development of Western Economics, or at the very least the things you were taught with regard to economics in a "common sense" kind of way. 

It's easy to get carried away if you try to give a present day example, but i think i can do a reasonable job. Let's say i have way too many records that i don't want to listen to anymore, but i don't have any potatoes that i want to eat. I know from all my trips to the grocery store that i can buy a bag of potatoes for around $3, and i know plenty of people who would give me $3 for one of my records. In this ideal model of economics, i go sell a record to that guy for $3, then go buy a bag of potatoes for $3 and presto change-o, economy accomplished. Yes that's simplistic, but i think you'll agree that it's a tangible example of real world activity. 

We can let our minds wander a little at this point. With regard to labor, it's easy to justify why used records are cheaper than new records, computers cost more than a bag of dirt, boiling up a pretzel isn't quite as costly as roasting peanuts, a day spent driving a bus isn't really that much different than a day spent entering receipts into a spreadsheet. We all have a mental checklist of things that are roughly equivalent and we exchange the results of that labor frequently enough to keep those relationships relatively stable. We might wake up to find that my potato/record exchange cost $4 or $2, but i would instinctively try to compensate because i haven't changed my mental equivalence between a record and a bag of potatoes; that would take several instances of failed exchanges to adjust. From an observer's standpoint, i'm still selling some quantity of records and using that money to buy some quantity of potatoes, or some other equivalent commodity. So long as there are people who buy my unwanted records, i will exchange them for things i do want in a similar fashion. 

Got it? Good. 

The rest of section 1 is a historical synopsis of the development of fiat currency. Regardless of your feelings about it, it has repeatedly happened throughout history and it's where we are today. So long as nobody jumps ship or tries to get too sneaky, it still works well. 

When we continue reading we see that my example is exactly what Marx describes; his example is the weaver selling 20 yards of linen and using the money to buy a bible of equal price. We aren't reading anything into those specific items, by the way, the weaver is simply trading what he has for what he wants via money the same way i did in my example. 

Continuing to read we see that Marx addresses exactly the same problem i raised. I'm looking at pages 136 and 137 in the pdf i shared with you. He talks about all those scenarios where the guy gets surprised by not being able to effectively trade, and points out that so long as he is able to make some trade for his wares the system is functioning properly. One bad day doesn't mean the system is broken. One day he might not get much, the next he might get more, such is life. 

What follows is a lengthy description of the process of buying and selling commodities where each purchase removes a commodity while the money continues toward infinity, enabling further purchases. That continual drifting away only stops when someone "takes the money and runs," or less humorously has no intention of spending it. To put it bluntly, if you stop buying things, the economy dies. 

The rest of section 2 is kind of an information dump, but it's easy to follow the progression from coins of gold/silver/etc. To paper money that represents only the circulating portion of exchange (the infinite chain of buying things), until finally we get the novel money (currency) issued by "the state" as an abstract representation of bullion. That fiat currency only exists inside the state itself for the obvious reason that anyone outside that state has no understanding of these funny coins and papers as representations of money. There is still a universal form of money at the highest level, but inside a particular community we can use technically worthless representations without any problem, so long as the amount of currency in circulation represents the sum cost of all commodities. 

And now, on page 169, we get to hoarding. I don't want to drag this out, so hoarding money is simply not buying things you want. There are good reasons to do it and bad reasons to do it, but what follows for the rest of chapter 3 is a description of the growth of local hoards (think of banks in general), and the growth of credit and debt to such an extent that the whole system becomes unstable and wildly unpredictable save for the fact that when banks have way more money than normal it is obvious that the exchange of commodities is stagnating. 

Hold on Bottle. This is all starting to sound like what the people who are somehow vehemently against Marxism are saying. 

Well, you know, we're only on page 200 something of a 2,000 page multi-volume work. He could make a u-turn. He could dive into the empty swimming pool head first and not prove me right. I don't get the sense that the first 3 chapters are written in the form of sarcasm, but i'm also not opposed to the idea that i'm the one who has it all backward. He hasn't told us we're wrong for participating in common sense economic activity, but maybe i'm missing something. Maybe this is just a faulty bizarro copy of Capital and Marx really thought that manipulating currency streams to generate new forms of economic slavery was super awesome. Look at those schmucks making stuff and trading it for other stuff, what a bunch of losers. 

Now, i'm not going to make any real predictions, i'm just commenting on reading the book. I am reading the book, and so far he has outlined classical economics, elaborated on the ways that people attempt to manipulate that system for unfair advantage, and given us clear examples of how that historically played out. It appears to be backward from what everyone claims Marxist theory to be, and actually coincides with what explicitly anti-Marxist talking points say we should be doing instead. He could be trolling us, and i'll have a nice hearty belly laugh if he is. 

I'm going to take a break and give you all the chance to digest both the book and what i've said so far. I'll also find somewhere to compile it so you don't have to work as hard. If you're just now joining us, we're reading Capital by Karl Marx and i welcome you to read it too. Go find a copy, or scroll through my previous posts to find a link to it (just go to my feed and scroll down a ways). The only real danger is that we might learn something in the process.....

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Today is kind of a refresher course. I just want to outline what happens in the first 3 chapters of Capital. At a fundamental level, we humans barter, that is face to face exchange of commodities. Obviously, bartering can only work in a highly localized community, and it is an explicitly social activity. On top of this barter system, we superimpose the concept of a universal equivalent, aka money. Money is an intricate concept, both a commodity in its own right and an external measurement of comparative value, but we all understand it as a useful way to facilitate exchange over longer distances, between very different communities, in exactly the same social exchanges of commodities that constitute barter. 

But, this is only one side of economic activity. There is a mirror image, so to speak. While one person trades a commodity for money then trades that money for other commodities, his counterpart trades money for a commodity then trades those commodities for money. We can use whatever terms we want for these two people, but "worker" and "merchant" seem the easiest to my mind. The really important part is that we distinguish between the two frames of reference: C-M-C and M-C-M. We might be participating in one or the other for any particular exchange, so we have to understand which one is taking place. 

Similarly, there is a difference between the regulating of money as a commodity in its own right and using that money for its intended universal equivalence. For now though, we simply assume that a person is engaged in one or the other at any particular time. 

You will also notice that Marx has a shall we say Bottle of Beef quality to his writing. You can tell there are things that make him mad, and ideas he thinks are stupid. I gloss over that stuff because it doesn't really change the theoretical model he is describing. He's mad about certain ways this system has been manipulated and our task is to understand why he thinks those things are terrible. 

I've given you an example of how it might apply to my own life in a limited context. Though remedial, i think most of you can see how the C-M-C side of this model describes some basic principles we all accept. It may not represent your actual day to day life very well, but we are reading a book from the 19th century here in the 21st century. Maybe the closest modern day phenomenon is a theoretical "garage sale" based economy. People sell their unwanted stuff, take that money, and buy your unwanted stuff; old records, clothes, cookware, chicken waterers, toys, useful things being exchanged through the universal equivalent of our modern form of money. The overall prices are extremely small (much smaller than buying these items new) because the amount of work spent acquiring them is miniscule compared to making them in the first place. Swap meets and pawn shops might also be reasonable examples of finite commodity markets; the more useful or desirable an item, the more money we all expect to spend. Furthermore, if we all stop participating, then the pawn shop will go out of business. 

Everybody happy so far? Questions? Things about the model that don't make sense, or things you completely disagree with? As i've said before, i think i understand it, he hasn't said anything illogical or false, it's a reasonable basic foundation for economic activity distilled from studying the history of Western civilizations. Still though, we should leave some time for it to percolate in our minds before going on to chapter 4.

Part 2

Definitely don't read this

Some part of this will offend you. I'm curious which part that is. Antifa is not a thing. It's just a word that some people use to generalize a wide variety of groups that very generically "are against fascism." It's super helpful to those people because it means you don't know the name of that particular group of people. They don't have a mask like Anonymous, or a badge like police officers, or any of that. I personally don't care that a few city blocks of Seattle look like a war zone because i don't like whatever terrible thing that city does to its coffee. I'm the one with BPD, but i'm watching the whole world act like everyone has it. People murder each other in fort dodge every other day, but the murderer always ends up being "not competent to stand trial," when two or three years ago the state decided it couldn't afford to run its mental health facilities.

I'm the paranoid egotistical maniac who struggles to find center. Dear 'merica, have some ice cream or masturbate or pet a dog or take different drugs or something. I don't know about you, but i have to go to work tomorrow looking like the poster child for PTSD. That sucks, in case you missed the memo.