On Capital (1867), Ch. 1, "The Commodity."

What makes something we buy or sell valuable? Marx says it's ultimately the labor that goes into it, though there are some wrinkles in formulating this accurately, and the commodities and surrounding marketplace activity blind us to labor's role and its ethical import.

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Mark and Wes read through and discuss Karl Marx's The German Ideology (1846), delving deep into the middle of his critique of Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own.

Marx articulates and criticizes Stirner's attempt to distinguish the mere common egoism of an unthinking person from the enlightened egoism that Stirner is recommending.

Read along with us, starting on p. 259 (PDF p. 255).

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We continue on the introduction to Marx's Grundrisse, going through his criticisms of prior economists who were too ahistorical and didn't understand how production, consumption, distribution and exchange hang together as a single system.

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Randy is a literature guy who has written a couple of books about improv and here joins Mark and Bill to talk about WINGING IT: Improv's Power and Peril in the Age of Trump, wherein he basically blames improv for giving us the orange man. Our scenes are about Trumpers hustling a fast food joint and improv for dogs.

Mark and Bill stick around for some post-game bringing in yet another metaphor: music and its stylistic development.

Watch this as unedited video, if you so choose.

On the intro to Marx's Grundrisse (1857) and "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845). Why economics, and why do it the way Marx does? We see Marx argues that Feuerbach's materialism was not materialistic enough, start looking at production, consumption, distribution, and exchange as moments within a single process, and talk about why anyone would want to read a historical economic text.

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In light of Robert Eggers' film Nosferatu and the end of What We Do in Shadows, Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn, and Al discuss the many vampire shows and films all the way back to Bram Stoker's 1897 novel.

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Continuing on The Ego and Its Own, focusing now on the sections "The Owner" and "My Power." Stirner lets us know that his egoism ("ownness") is not compatible with liberal egalitarianism, which he sees as just a continuation of the Christian project of perfecting humanity.

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On The Ego and its Own (1844), another big influence on Karl Marx and a precursor of Nietzsche, or perhaps an early Ayn Rand.

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