Try Reading The Book

From the comments on a Guardian article by Kathryn Hughes about Wuthering Heights:

Strange how Heart of Darkness and Conrad doesn't get the same verbal contempt and disdain from humanists as Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte.
It might be because that Conrad darkness was over there - in Africa.

That the heart of darkness is over here, in London or Brussels, not in the Belgian Congo, is clearly one of the points of the story. Clearly, that is, if you read it.

But then, to judge from the article, Kathryn Hughes has not read Wuthering Heights: as in actually turned the pages, conned the words and so forth.

Would suggesting that Guardianistas try reading a book or two, just so's they know what it's like to and all, be..?

Guardianistas: That's nazi TRUMPY talk, now you're barred from Twitter la la la la la not listening la la la la la.

Birthday

Three years ago today I was sitting in the Dog'n'Duck in Mitcham with eight hours drinking done, six more to do and a bottle of famous in my bag for home time.

By a miracle (yes indeedy) that bottle was the last alcohol I drank, and today I am grateful to God as I understand Him and to AA, for my deliverance.

More On Commodities

Having magically discarded unwanted use-value and done the cookery to homogenise, congeal and crystallise labour into a commodity, Marx sets up a nice straw man:

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialised in it. How then is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the 'value-forming substance', the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration [in] hours, days etc.

Cue an internet meme about, who wants to live under a system where the value of something is greater the slower and dumber the producer?

The straw man is duly knocked down, making Karl appear entirely reasonable:

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it

sounds like Britain in the 70s... but it

only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society [...] The individual commodity counts here only as an average sample of its kind.

Marx goes on to ponder, in the first real-world example cited in the book, that:

The same quantity of labour provides more metal in rich mines than in poor. Diamonds are of very rare occurence on the earth's surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time [... William] Jacob questions whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value [...] The total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years ending in 1823 still did not amount to the price of 1½ years' average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds represented much more labour, therefore more value.

Karl Marx "Capital Volume I" (1990) pp129-30

Could the explanation be that the theory is a hopeless hack that has fallen at the first fence?

Or is this a Conspiracy Theory in the making? I will read on with my expectations raised as high as my hackles.

Revision

Pictured: Homo neanderthalensis confronts humans with shirts.

In my young days the Neanderthals were primitives without language or culture who radiated into Europe before being overrun and wiped out by our ancestors; unsurprisingly as they were nasty, brutish and short, and no good to be said for them.

No language because they had no hyoid bones. True, only a few chunky pieces of skull and long bone had been found at the time, but no hyoids and therefore no language or anything that goes with that.

Humans definitely did not interbreed with them, no siree, fastidiousness in matters of mating being a characteristic of the Homo sapiens of course.

Today, after the discovery of a hyoid at Kebara in Israel, some apparent settlements and a few smeary bits of "art", they are pictured as a cross between Noble Savage and Eco Warrior, who would undoubtedly have opposed Brexit and Capitalism, re-nationalised the railways and so forth, given the option.

The few percent of Neanderthal genes found in Europeans, Western Russians and their descendants is cited as proof of local interbreeding and proposed as the likely cause of smoking, alcoholism and other such defects: it doesn't seem to sit well with us. This explains why alcoholism and chain-smoking are unknown in Asia or Africa.

Inspirational Again

St George's Day

Pictured: A typical happy Englishman. He possesses neither flat hat nor whippet, but the cheerfulness of the Englishman in a tight corner is legendary.

A happy St. George's Day to all my reader!



St. George battles the Dragon, medieval church graffito at Marsham, Norfolk. The "fringe" at the bottom of the Dragon may show it is a mummer's costume, or it may just be a bit badly drawn.

It is also probably Shakespeare's birthday (the baptism was recorded, not the birth date) but I have had enough for today of being happy or wishing happiness to others.

Persian Perplexity

Not sure the Microsoft Translator has quite got the point. But if the Trump crazy has indeed fucked your milk cow Bay mondem, there is surely yet another gripping Investigation in the offing. Stormy Daniels, move aside.