The Rate of Exploitation: The Case of the iPhone

“Our second Notebook analyses the contemporary production process that results in Apple’s iPhone. We move from a look at the iPhone’s production to the inner workings of profit and exploitation. We are interested not only in Apple and the iPhone, but more particularly in the Marxist analysis of the rate of exploitation at play in the production of such sophisticated electronic devices. It is necessary, we believe, to learn how to measure the rate of exploitation so that we know precisely how much workers deliver into the total social wealth produced each year.”

Quote of the Day – March 25

“Because it not just in one place or in one way that capitalism oppresses. It oppresses you if you’re a woman. It oppresses you if you’re a white-collar worker. It oppresses if you’re a blue-collar worker. It oppresses if you’re a campesino. It oppresses if you if you’re a young person. It oppresses you if you are a child. It oppresses you if you’re a teacher. It oppresses you if you’re a student. It oppresses you if you’re an artist. It oppresses you if you think. It oppresses you if you are human, or plant, or water, or earth or air or animal.”

Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés

“From the mountains of the Mexican southeast.”

“In the name of the EZLN, the men, women, children and elders of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation.”

Mexico, April-May of 2015.

US Congress Admits Nazi Role in Ukraine (2015)

“I am grateful that the House of Representatives unanimously passed my amendments last night to ensure that our military does not train members of the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, along with my measures to keep the dangerous and easily trafficked MANPADs out of these unstable regions,” said Conyers

Quote of the Day – March 24

“The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. A bridge which connects the spiritual and the political is formed by the erotic. The sensual, those physical, emotional, psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each one of us, being shared. The passions of love in its deepest meanings. The considerate phrase, “it feels right to me,” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge. For what that phrase means and feels is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And I ask that you remember always, understanding is a handmaiden. A handmaiden which can only wait upon or clarify that knowledge deeply-born. And the erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of our deepest knowledge.” – Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic

Quote of the Day – March 23

“The use of words, the way words are used, the way language is used and turned around so that he (Reagan) can go on national television and say, ‘well I’ve decided we won’t call it an invasion anymore, we’ll call it a rescue.’ Right? And smile and wait for…and the newspapers begin to pick this up, some of them. The ways in which language is used against us, the ways in which silence is used against us.” – Audre Lorde