organiser @socialistfed, former @grassroots_left, author: Shock Doctrine of the Left, other book Red Enlightenment under boycott for 🇵🇸 new substack at link.
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ALT the words "ANTI-SELF-HELPLINE" are capitalized in red. they are layered over a screenshot from the film Thomas Müntzer (1956). The scene in the film depicts a crowd of peasants (from the German Peasant revolt) chanting "omnia sunt communia!" (all things held in common)
ALT Marx does not appear to use the term “system” in this multivalent sense, and most instances of “system” in Capital refer to social systems only. But he does have a rough equivalent: body. He uses this term to refer not merely to the human body but to systems more widely, and it is applied to numerous scales and domains. In his earlier writing, the “organic body” of the human is entwined with the “inorganic body” of the wider world, depicting a kind of extended embodiment that draws the human out into their environment. In the “Commodities” chapter of Capital, Marx refers to commodities in their concrete form such as coats, iron and sugar as bodies. Later, and most frequently in the “Machinery and Modern Industry” chapter, he refers to “the whole body of capitalists”, “the body of the factory”, the “social body of labour”, “the body of the machine”, “a body of men” and “their union into one single productive body”.
ALT Today these embodied approaches to cognition are sometimes placed within the broad category of “4E” cognition: embodied, embedded, extended and enactive. This framework refers to how: i) cognition is dependent upon characteristics of the whole body, and cannot be reduced to the brain; ii) cognition is always embedded in larger sociocultural contexts, with actions made meaningful through that external history; iii) cognition is extended through tools, whether these are hammers, phones, even language; and iv) cognition is enactive in that we are always learning through doing things and interacting with the world, not simply through sitting and thinking. Other terms like affective cognition or distributed cognition are sometimes used to supplement these four Es, but the... [page ends]
ALT Marx does not appear to use the term “system” in this multivalent sense, and most instances of “system” in Capital refer to social systems only. But he does have a rough equivalent: body. He uses this term to refer not merely to the human body but to systems more widely, and it is applied to numerous scales and domains. In his earlier writing, the “organic body” of the human is entwined with the “inorganic body” of the wider world, depicting a kind of extended embodiment that draws the human out into their environment. In the “Commodities” chapter of Capital, Marx refers to commodities in their concrete form such as coats, iron and sugar as bodies. Later, and most frequently in the “Machinery and Modern Industry” chapter, he refers to “the whole body of capitalists”, “the body of the factory”, the “social body of labour”, “the body of the machine”, “a body of men” and “their union into one single productive body”.