1910 – Objects and Values of Labor in Socialist Hungary (podcast 2020)

https://soundcloud.com/srbpodcast/srbs02

This week’s podcast is “Objects and Values of Labor in Socialist Hungary,” the second in REEES Fall Series Socialism: Past, Present, and Future.

Guest:

Martha Lampland is a Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She’s the author of two books The Object of Labor. Commodification in Socialist Hungary and The Value of Labor. The Science of Commodification in Hungary, 1920-1956 both published by the University of Chicago Press.

In short, i found extremely valuable this granular analysis of ways to calculate, measure and valorize labor in Hungary, altough I do not agree on all accounts, I consider this anthropological study of longue duree agrarian trends very enlightening. Thanks to the anonymous suggestion of DS for their generous link sharing. Beside her field work in and around the transitional period towards market economy from planned economy in Hungary, her emphasis on the processual as different from merely historical approach I found fundamental. Answering the Why by How and finding out not just how things come to pass, but how things transform into something else. She links two very different transition points – the move towards Stalinism in late 40s Hungary and the transition towards market economy after 1989. None where quick, none where clean brakes and she makes them part of a larger modernist project of rationalization and efficiency that crosses ideological barriers or theories of labour. She traces such increasing commodification to the early big landowners, their increasing entry into world markets where they had to start measuring closer and closer how could be optimized in order to stay competitive. These developments get hauled during collectivization and scientific management technics that ironically are easier to study in the former East than West. Socialism is still an integral part of the modernist project. She also talks about ‘caloric money’, or food intake that is payed during the war in relation to the calculated amount of labour. The factories dossiers in Chicago or Detroit are much harder to research since they are private institutions, so the way scientific management was implemented remains opaque.

Value and labour theory of value (Marxist ltv) are separate things that I am wrapping my head around. Value theory or importance is central to William James, as well as Whitehead if I get that, although they have a different, more naturalistic, situational (with cosmological implications) understanding of value that does not get resumed under human economic systems. Yet value inside the organismic thought is deeply relational, is a result of webs of interactions happening in time like in Marxism (what Marx called socially necessary labor time). The two cultural and social necessary labor time should be separated and usually social turns out to be cultural on certain accounts. The radical empiricism of James, his contribution to philosophy entails a very different value theory, a non-calculative value, where entire organisms (think of leaves, flowers etc) are expressions of valuation or expressions of processes of valorization, of what is of importance for that plant, mushroom, bug, of what is important for that particular organism at that particular moment in time, without necessarily accounting or closing in on it. In fact Whitehead’s theory of value (he as a professional mathematician) is situational it depends and is part and partial to the concreteness of an unfolding situation. In his metaphysics value occupies a central place – both in ethics and aesthetics (of which ethics is just a small subset). For him ‘intensity’ is most probably the only one variable that we can gauge experience with.

Martha Lampland also mentions a book – about labor value in different European schools of thought (see below). In fact she traces the genealogy of LTV to a specific German strain and further to Betriebswissenschaftlehre a particular culturally defined way in which labour was valorized in German speaking countries as opposed to the English or American school of commodifying or measuring labour. In fact this cultural analysis of conceptual context traces Marx’s understanding to the German way of understanding or measuring labour in terms of energy, of thermodynamics which brings me to the Natural Philosophers and the way dynamic powers are foregrounded. Inversely in other traditions of valorizing labor such as the Anglo-American, labour is a product, it is focused on the finite product, the finite objects. Even if they had the same technologies or competed in the same markets, these two departures show how important various (national) cultural context are in shaping economic concepts or the very categories of economic life.

additional books mentioned:

The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914

1807 – The Bayesian Trap (Veritasium 2017)

Useful references: The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

“I didn’t say it explicitly in the video, but in my view the Bayesian trap is interpreting events that happen repeatedly as events that happen inevitably. They may be inevitable OR they may simply be the outcome of a series of steps, which likely depend on our behaviour. Yet our expectation of a certain outcome often leads us to behave just as we always have which only ensures that outcome. To escape the Bayesian trap, we must be willing to experiment.”

Incidentally Thomas Bayes gets mentioned in Adam Curtis last series of documentaries.

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Bayes’ theorem

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1504 – UFOria (1985)

Director: John Binder

An incredible comedy movie that is available online, even if in a trashy VHS rip version – the medium perfectly fits the content. With some great actors such as late great Harry Dean Stanton, a phenomenal Cindy Williams and and incredibly likable macho-drifter Fred Ward.

Don’t know about you but I find this trashy cult movie a revelation in many senses. First it depicts the whole playa of fringe culture, high weirdness and faith hybridization, after the whole 1970s drift of the counterculture waking up in the midst of Reagan era (movie was finished in 1981 but released in 1985). Take it as a goofy, zany heart felt retro comedy, and it is still ok. It also combines the most unlikely bed fellows in an alternate reality US, almost as if the local mid west hicks would finally join the Rajneesh commune. The line is so blurry thats we can see all the shifts, radical possibilities & liabilities of charisma. Or it makes one consider an even more radical possibility, that an agnostic even cynical car smuggling atheist might lend himself to a mad and bumpy vision quest. By the 70s various subcultures, be it activist or hippie Fists or Heads had been intermingling or fusing as thr the term ‘freak’ started being used both by anti-drug Jesus Freaks or by hybrid experimenting /performative eco-technical living such as the Synergia commune and its later outpost Biosphere 2 (also in asemi desert setting).

What I like most is how the whole phenomenology of faith healers, quacks, abductee, miracle peddlers of the worst kind is being tackled. In a comic, parodic, screwball comedy, utterly unsophisticated way it gives credence to the whole Ufological transcendent drive. Ufo cults are easy to dismiss or to ridicule, but this movie takes it into another plane. It shows what is the genuine core behind it, its modern importance and the way it has incorporated so many other, older and more orthodox apparently outlooks (Jesus is an Alien) abducting them into outer space. They are basically a living phenomenon mapping out a new territory of contact and extra planetary revelation out of a very terrestrial setting. It has abducted & taken common feelings into a different dimension, while becoming such a waste basket hodge podge of bizarre witnessings from the most unexpected quarters, age groups and backgrounds. It also almost shows the glimpses of a rich quantum foam and sleeze that gave birth to the Burning Man and all the other desert happenings. To be sure the 2012 Mayan calendar was on, Terence and Dennis McKenna already launched their eschatological visions into the 80s America.

It is also a great example of James Williams approach on faith, and his experiential, interior lived contact, his still valuable take on extreme religious vision quests and nearly psychotic episodes. While non-dissmissive, it is one of the most irreverent movies in regard to all sorts of beliefs, even the most sincere one while it keeps an open mind, it never shows any preferences and always regards traditions as multiform and shape-shifting, often hype oriented and capital driven in the form of revivals and charismatic churches that pick on the newest trend or the most outrageous message. It also shows how much one is not in control, but under the spell or open to an outside that is mediated by the most unlikely messengers, hitchhiking the most bland or unspectacular of carriers & transmitters, even if that outside is constantly being subsumed into capitalism, circuits of profit and consumption, always fragile & liable to became the next attraction and the next way to bring a quick buck on the back of gullible congregations that are always never quite so lost or gullible. It shows what it might mean to be stranded in the universe’s backyard, washed out on the cosmic shore.

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