The anniversary of a national institution such as the NHS that performs 1 million procedures a day and is the biggest single employer in Europe, will not escape audacious claims. One comes from the Catholic Church, aimed at the parents of children attending their primary schools. It is that this church, through its tradition of caring for the sick and the poor, and through the beneficence and effulgence of the socially-aware Cardinal Manning in the 19th Century and Pope Leo XIII, produced the National Health Service. To these we also ‘owe’ the trade unions and decent pay for the poor (workers).

In the steam room it is common to hear disparaging and prejudiced remarks about the NHS, within a social vacuum, and about Brits who cannot organise a health system properly like they do in the rest of the world, but this is a new recuperation of social history.

Nicolas Holliman

The living hell that is inner city life for too many young kids is exposed in the Guardian today.

And Cameron’s nasty party put forward a pathetic million quid as a fix to do something about it.

Because these chinless wonders don’t have to live with the reality of inner city poverty they don’t give a damn. It doesn’t register on their radar.

The only glimmer of light in this whole sorry episode is that we can guarantee Cameron and his cronies are heaping up the fuel for their own funeral pyre with such wanton disregard for ordinary people.

The novelist Louis de Bernieres was on Broadcasting House today (20h Feb, 2012), at the end of the prog. he gave us his poxy thoughts on the current situation in Greece. He was playing on his old broken Correlli mandolin. The result did not bring anything critical to the table. Bernieres waffled about German nazis looting during the second world war and tried to find parallels with today. An easy way out, but not a very good one

Indeed, Bernieres was playing to the gallery. He is some kind of populist. But he did not try to understand the complexity of the problem. It seems Bernieres would do well to read more history, philosophy and critical theory. We cannot do for him. Bernieres’s agony is blatant, he cannot understand what is going on in Greece today, but then he is not alone…

written by a friend of Heraclitus, on the 20th of February 2012

Workers’ Liberty rescued!

Workers’ Liberty are a British ultra-left sect whose leader writes turgid ‘poetry’ and then arm locks young ‘comrades’ into buying it! Other than this, WL are famous for not having anyone in the org. (‘leading member’!)who is able to critique political economy with a recognisable ‘party line’ – they are pretty famous for turning up at conferences and not having a scooby-do about economics…but! We are pleased to announce this has changed! The forward march of the glorious proletariat’s eternal victory over the capitalist imperialist pig dog scum is back on track. It appears they have a ‘comrade’ in Australia blogging for them on economics! And so WL’s very own crocodile dundee managed to wrestle a copy of Costas Lapavitsa’s and Makoto Itoh’s Political Economy of Money and Finance to the ground and distilled some interesting ideas from it. We are sad to have to point out that Lacka-vistas is even more of a crank than we initially supposed. For example, we learn thay Lacka-vistas ‘believes that a sort of money, “s-money”, can (and implicitly should) exist in a socialist society. “Socialism must socialise money”.

Nice one Costas! Lets call it the rouble shall we!?

Crocodile Dundee also draws attention to Lacka-vistas’ underconsumptionist frame of reference. It appears the roots of all this scholarship can be traced back to the scholar Ben Fine, who comes out of the old British communist party tradition. The British communists didn’t like the first couple of chapters of Capital much – no wonder Lacka-vistas hankers after a new and improved rouble-drachma!

A desire for leading members is an eternal agony for the marxist sects!

Extract from a recent essay by Neil Larsen: Lukács sans Proletariat 2011:

‘Regarding those contemporary currents within Marxian critical theory that, without sacrificing the critique of reification, have already set about rethinking themselves ‘sans proletariat’. Here I have two sources in mind: (1) Moishe Postone’s seminal contribution to Marxian thought, as developed in his principal work, Time, Labor and Social Domination (1996); and (2) the closely allied, but more crisis-oriented and conjunctural critical-theoretical school known in Germanspeaking circles as Wertkritik (best translated as ‘value-form critique’), as represented chiefly by the journals Exit! and Krisis. Wertkritik’s most prominent theorists include the prolific Robert Kurz, along with Roswitha Scholz, Ernst Lohoff, Norbert Trenkle and increasingly numerous others. Because almost none of the latter work exists, as yet, in English translation and remains practically unknown in anglophone circles, as well as for the sake of brevity, I will focus mainly on Postone’s arguments, but will touch as well on a short essay by Trenkle which is representative of the general Wertkritik ‘line’: ‘Die metaphysischen Mucken des Klassenkampfs’ (‘The Metaphysical Subtleties of Class Struggle’).

(…)

The Lukácsian conception of reification as veil concealing a social totality mediated by a ‘labour’ presupposed as transhistorical, socially-constitutive ‘essence’. The fundamental difference between capitalist and communist society would thus in the end be merely that, in the latter, mediation by means of abstract labour would ‘take place consciously’. But ‘insofar as this is so’, reasons Trenkle,

the aim of liberating labor from reification turns into an impossible task. Labor is per se a reified activity and, as such, lies at the basis of modern commodity production. The ‘conscious recognition’ of labor as a social principle of mediation would be nothing other than the contradiction in terms of a ‘conscious recognition’ of commodity production and the ‘conscious’ selfsurrender to its constraints and imperatives.

Echoing an ongoing critical-theoretical project of Wertkritik generally, in which not only ‘labour’ but the ‘subject form’ itself as a category purportedly bequeathed by bourgeois Enlightenment thought becomes the target of critique, Trenkle here effectively takes a step beyond Postone’s claim to have discovered the demystified Subject of History in capital rather than a disalienated labour on the level of ‘species-being’. In effect, the Hegelian dialectical categories in terms of which Lukács had derived a theory of the dialectical negation of reification and reified consciousness – essence, historical Subject and totality as telos, all purportedly in statu nascendi in the form of a revolutionary, proletarian class consciousness – turn out here to be, along with labour, forms of reification themselves, abstract labour’s ‘metaphysical’ pseudo-negations…’

The London Wine and Cheese Society announce:

‘Since the financial crisis it seems there is a new interest emerging in reading Marx’ Capital. Yet, for many new readers this encounter is rather brief, since Capital is no easy book to read. Especially the first six chapters present a frustrating hurdle to many readers, such that Karl Marx suggested that some readers should simply skip these. We disagree. We hold that grasping the concepts of value, exchange and abstract labour presented at the beginning of Volume 1 are indeed crucial for making sense of those later concepts now on everybody’s mind such as credit and fictitious capital.

Thus, we are starting a new (bi-)weekly Capital Volume 1 reading group, to provide the opportunity for a thorough engagement with Capital. The point of which is not to admire Marx’s writing or to understand his method, but to use this text as a means to understand contemporary capitalism. Put differently, this is not meant as an academic exercise but as an attempt to inform our understanding of the world we live in. Consequently, being a Marxist of some sort is not a prerequisite for taking part. On the contrary, in the interest of understanding modern capitalism, we want to engage with Capital critically.

The aim of this reading group is not to cover as much material as possible per session, but to go as slow as necessary. Questions should be asked and answers, discussions should develop. Thus, we plan to read and discuss the first few chapters paragraph by paragraph together. For later chapters we propose to condense the material a bit (presentations, summaries, etc.)

We will be reading the Penguin edition which was translated by Ben Fowkes. If anyone is unable to secure a copy, let us know and we’ll see if we can arrange copies of the first chapter at least.

The reading group will start on 12 March, 2012, 7pm in the Red Lion (Upstairs) 41 Hoxton Street, London, N1 6NH www.redlionhoxtonst.com

No registration or anything is necessary, just stop by on the 12th. For the first 1-2 months we propose to meet weekly, every Monday evening. Afterwards, we propose to switch to a bi-weekly schedule, partly to make room for a Volume 2 Reading Group Starting from May, we plan to do a bi-weekly Volume 2 reading group as well. Also on Mondays, alternating with the Volume 1 reading group.

However, we would appreciate if people could register their interest with us such that we get a rough idea of how many people to expect. So drop us an e-mail, that’d be nice. We’ll then put you on the mailing list for the group.

Of course, everything (schedule, venue, pace, etc.) about this reading group is up to the group to decide. Hence, the above should be understood as our proposal which can be discussed at the first meeting or when the need arises.’

The Wine & Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater London junge-linke.org/en