In case people are wondering, I am currently working through this latest pod, and folks, you don't want to multitask. This episode is dethroning a lot of stuff that a lot of people really cherish. https://twitter.com/videotroph/status/1294104705954611200

OK. I've finished this. And yet, I regret not having my copy of capital handy to read alongside the critique of Marx, so I may listen again. I have some thoughts on the Marx critique, but let me start with some reactions to the effort to critique the island imaginary 1/n

I think that a lot of leftists have difficulty escaping agents in the *personal* conception. We still see ourselves as independent agents mediated by capital as this exo-force, and frame that challenge as one of purging this mediating effect. This is a classical dynamic. 2/n

Purging that away then allows our little islands to navigate social space in a more independent fashion, freeing us to pursue a more natural telos. After capital, we can float back to Rosseau's state of nature 3/n

This is misguided. People emerge into an extant set of institutions, technologies, and ecological circumstances and live out their lives as embedded persons. People have agency, but they are no more islands as they are parts of an abstract totality. Agency itself is contested4/n

Every person acts, which in turn affects the cumulative development of that set of *very real* institutions, but not in equal measure. When Chad Wolf acts, my city gets gassed and beaten. When I act, I listen to podcasts and forget to pay my water bill. 5/n

When actions are of an economic nature, they are conditioned by a set of values and beliefs. Economists call this a preference structure. Preferences are not innate - they are mutually constitutive of the interplay between actor and institutions. 6/n

Preferences are both cause and effect of economic activity. But, economic activity doesn't have meaning in any sense on an island. Economics is not base survival. Economics is not trophic activity. Rather, it is reproduction of a social provisioning process 7/n

From the political economy angle, I think this is what @agoingaccount and @MaxSeijo are getting after. There's much more to it than that, but I'm a rube who only knows economics, hot chip and lie. It's a necessary project to critique the island imaginary among leftists. 8/n

On Marx: My own reading has taken me to a different vantage with Marx, where I did not see the centrality of the social contract lineage born out in his ontology. And I don't read Marx as having a sort of individual level subjective theory of valuation. 9/n

Rather, on my reading the emphasis lies in establishing a firmer basis for understanding exchange value in relation to exploitation. I'm a "vol II Marxist" - and so I read Marx on reproduction, interdependence, and history. But, I am not a Marx scholar so I don't know 10/n

And I am an "18th Brumaire" and "Grundrisse" and "TSV" Marxist, so I raise my eyebrows when it is suggested that Marx takes a sovereign person conception. I didn't read that, but again - I am open to persuasion on where the coherent strain really lies in Marx. 11/n

What I think matters most is this: There's a much richer body of thought to construct a vision of the sort provisioning system we want than relying on a few old texts. No gods, no masters, right? 12/n

Some very bad economics emerges when people try to crudely apply capital, with its telos, to nuanced questions of growth, value and distribution. You simply cannot get far enough if you keep Marx on his island. 13/n

This leads to: a) chasing a sound finance rabbit down a hole, hoping to find some loose coins, b) embracing an accelerationist position where you get 40% unemployment hoping it doesn't go fash, or c) arguing that you need to make corporations more profitable -> SWF. 14/n

Again, I really appreciate the interdisciplinarity of this project and I always enjoy learning. I probably disagree with @MaxSeijo and @agoingaccount a bit on Marx, but not in a substantive sense and there's probably something I'm missing. 14/14