Worlding and the labour theory of value contents page
- part one -- Do it for the house.
- part two -- get rid of the sweorlfds
- part three -- art
- part four -- paranoia and cult
In part 1 or ‘Do it for the house' I discussed a narcissist who did really well out of a working bee or two, which he advertised as “doing it for the house". This improved the property before he sold the house, on the back of unpaid labour, other peoples' tools and skills. He just happened to own it when it was sold out from under them. The law was on his side and they had to take it to put it down to experience. Emotionally they subsidised the loss.
It’s here I invented the word sweorlfd for narcissists when we consider them in the frame of empathy and operating among us in the world, for them the self=world —or sweorlfd.
In part 2 I covered the term alienation, highlighting it’s use in Latin to refer to the active transfer of property, its title in effect, from from one person to another, perhaps on selling it for an agreed price. It’s here that I get to the Marxianist ‘labour theory of value’ which is based on the exploitation of labour by capital (as described by the Narcissist and the ‘do it for the house’ that he owned. (There are lots of hippie stories like this from the 70s &80s in Australia BTW).
This begins my criticism of critiques which rely on corecting systems to fix things when often we need to police bad behaviour, for I argue, then, perhaps, it does not matter which system we do or do not use, if we allow narcissists to get away with it.
In part 3 I looked at art, this is a bit of a sideshow to the main progress of thought here, and is basically a riff on what might be called ‘conspicuous labour’ in displays of wealth or other unvirtuous signalings of power. This is about the esteem or status of those who display art, which these days is often the brandname artist curating their own career, while other volunteer-serfs or wage-slaves actually make the art, for the house. Here ‘do it for the house’ and ‘art for art’s sake’ are basically the same thing. Both parasitise our worlding instincts.
This final part 4 is about the cultic practices of bad worlding such as cascades of self-fulfilling paranoia. But first we get a reprise of all of the above.