AK Gov. (r) Mike “Drink-Your-Milkshake” Dunleavy Tanker Teacher Oil Guy My month-long stint on the Last Frontier winds down. Nightfall casts its dim mantle over daylight hours with heightened resolve. It engulfs faraway volcanic silhouettes with relish before gobbling up the chicken coup outside. Around mid-November, the state’s North Pole will undergo complete darkness for two consecutive months. But not in Homer. The daylight swings here aren’t as pronounced. So much for romantic geographic extremities. Still, the floodlight outside the guesthouse died and walking to the bathhouse for a midnight piss is a chilling journey even Virgil would…
Nothing [but us] is sacred
From Neoliberalism
from the books: Capital, vol. 1, 1867, Ch. 3, Karl Marx and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 2010, David Harvey
Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 3 1. The Measure of Values Gold acts as a universal measure of value, and only through performing this function does gold, the specific equivalent commodity, become money Money as the measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value inherent to commodities: labor-time (189) The expression of the value of a commodity in gold looks like this: x commodity a = y money commodity This is its money-form, or price This kind of equation (with gold as the equivalent form)…
from the books: Capital, vol. 1, 1867, Ch. 2, Karl Marx and A Companion to Marx’s Capital, 2010, David Harvey
Key: (page numbers for Penguin Classics edition of Capital), [page numbers for David Harvey’s Companion to Capital] Chapter 2 [47] Marx’s purpose: define socially necessary conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and create a firmer ground to consider the money-form in chapter 3 (178) The “guardians” of commodities must place themselves in relation to each other as persons whose will resides in those objects in order for those objects to enter into relations as commodities The guardians must therefore recognize each other as owners of private property (a juridical relation) The content of this juridical relation (or relation of two wills) is determined…
from the airwaves: Entitled Opinions, Quinn Slobodian on “Neoliberalism”
Neoliberalism Term is used in different contexts for different purposes: A period of global capitalism; beginning in 1970s with oil crisis and break down of Bretton Woods system Move from manufacturing to services, and especially the rise of finance as a dominant force in the “global North” the introduction of deregulation, privatization, and liberalization in policy in both the “North” and global “South” after the debt crisis in 1982 Finally, a general move to a post-Fordist, or immaterial rather than material economy Policy package: (e.g. deregulation, privatization) replace preexisting principles of the welfare state and redistribution with principles of constant risk Emphasize importance of…
from film: HyperNormalisation, 2016, Adam Curtis
1975. Setting: NY and Damascus; Both see change in power from politics to something… else NY Politicians for 30 years had been borrowing money from banks to pay for growing services and welfare Early ’70s, middle class flees city, their taxes disappear too Banks lend city even more; worried about whether city could pay back its debt 1975: lending stops; city holds regular meeting to issue bonds in return for the loans, overseen by city’s financial controller Banks don’t show up; don’t want bonds This day marks radical shift in power Banks insist that, to protect their loans, they should be allowed to take control of the city…
theorem serum 