A reader was kind enough to inquire how my studies are going. Right now I've turned down 3 separate social engagements, to sit in the library and write a paper. My eyes feel like cardboard; I get dizzy if I stand up too quickly, cos I forgot to bring snacks with me; the pores and lines on my hands stand out distinctly. I'm dehydrated, woozy and my shoulder tendons feel like they've got a dozen clothes pegs attached to them. In short, I'm doing pretty standard for this time of year.

Anti-capitalist literature I'd rather be reading - the 'universal equivalent' comes to the village, in Obelix & Co.

The paper is a huge, amorphous, jelly-like blob, stretching incoherently through a dozen pages. I'm writing - supposedly - on value-form. It's one of the most important debates in Marxism: why is value - abstracted human labour, the 'stuff' that is common to all commodities - expressed in value-form - exchange value i.e. money? It's also one of the most obscure questions, and the weight of academese - both from Marx and his intellectual descendants - is pushing me into the ground, such that I can only write a few sentences, and then I have read The Onion or google the Hampster Dance.

The point is that bourgeois economists never ask the question. They treat the value-form as eternal. Therefore they don't understand money, and how it's different in capitalist society. They don't understand the dual nature of commodities: they treat everything as if it had a use-value, when that's not the basis on which things exchange (i.e. just because you can use a glass of water, doesn't mean you have the cash to get one.) They don't understand the history of the commodity-form, and thus they don't understand how our own, capitalist society, is historically limited, transitional, and doomed to failure by the revolution (that Marx only devotes a page to, at the end of Capital vol. 1, grrr.) The bourgeois understand nothing. And right now, I'm feeling pretty bourgeois.

If you'd just kept quiet, Marx wouldn't have gotten all worked up

I can't argue with Marx; I'm still grasping the complex history he writes of the commodity-form. I can go through Capital and find the bits he writes about value, and repeat them. That hardly seems like writing a paper - I asked my students numerous times, "Where's your argument?" I don't have one yet. Other than repeating the arguments that value-formers have made; and I certainly don't get those. So instead I'm finding quotes, writing wry little comments after them, and hoping it coheres magically into something tangible (much like commodity exchange itself.)

I feel like I'm wading through sticky molasses. And it doesn't even taste very good. Molasses... sweet, dark, syrup... I think I need pancakes.