post #19: bouncing about ideas re: productivity and capitalism

      motivating this is: ember green video on (do we still need autism activism ; i think it's that one). she talks about how sometimes marxists and leftists overgeneralize the concept of productivity as relating to capitalism in saying that it shouldn't be a primary concern (i.e., the concern shouldn't be that people be maximally productive). Ember talks about how, for them, the question of productivity more pressingly relates to disability, for them, than it does capitalism. Ember describes that her experiences with chronic pain were debilitating to the point of being unproductive -- of being chronically unable to do things -- despite her wanting to do things (such as write essays or engage in activism, etc.). I think this complication is important.

      On a walk earlier today, I was thinking about these discourses of productivity again. I'm currently out of school owing to the fact that I'm taking a medical leave of absence for at least the semester. Motivating my decision to take the leave was that I had become unhealthy to the point that I couldn't take care of myself, do work for classes, or leave my room. This escalation was drawn about by several things, such as my being autistic and ADHD and being currently in a prolonged state of burnout. While things are better, in a sense, now that I'm home, I'm still often in pain or otherwise unable to do the things I'd like to do. Aside from physical pain, other intervening forces are executive dysfunction and general bodily dysregulation. Somedays I think about starting doing something for the whole day, but all I can do is watch YouTube and eventually crash out. This executive dysfunction-motivated pattern is generally the situation that motivates my internal discourses of productivity. I want to make things, but I can't, I want to do something other than lie in stupor, but I can't. A recent hyperfixation of mine has been FNAF. On one hand, watching a 24 hour long fnaf video might not be productive. on the other, i have come to instrumentalize the watching of fnaf things I've been doing. That said, I'm not at the point of doing research where I actively seek things out (that is always a hurdle for me ; to do with demand avoidance, i fear). i reflect on the things that are relavent to me when i come into the thing -- how i'm feeling now. I think, generally, that this is fine, but i had a class once last week where this was strictly outlawed -- all your wounds had to be cauterized when you came into class (or all of mine did, anyways), nothing could bleed over.

      questions: instrumentalize? capitalize ... taylor swift and everything is copy. being an artist or someone like that and being able to turn your trauma and life and all that ugliness into something. is there ever an extent to which you exhaust yourself or you warp something about the world if your tool is to lead your life as a story and your body as a vessel to take in instrumentality?

      ... capitalize,,, i'm not well read enough on economic theory -- and not currently able to fix that -- to know how people generally understand "capitalize" to mean (when not talking about letters). my mental image is something like: to turn lemons into lemonade -- to exploit a resource for capital (such as through unpaid labor or an extractive relation to the land). how much does this intersect with the self? the self, which is not a physical resource in the same way that cobalt is -- there seems to be something different at stake when you exploit your personal stories from when you exploit cobalt from the earth. ... does the time aspect matter? and how much? --> one thing ember green emphasizes for why productivity is right to discuss is that we are all going to die one day, and so there will be an amount of things we accomplish in our lives;; might the relation to time become a resource?

      basically: maybe, is there a way to disentangle productivity from capitalism? what is it that capitalism defines as productive (or, more pressingly, as unproductive)? i feel it's probably likely that there are productive actions which are written as unproductive by capitalism, for example, art(?) if capitalists are those who own capital, then are discourses of the productivity of a capitalist and a worker the same? (and from whom is what written as productive?). how important is it to disentangle the two? I don't know much about the etymology of productivity, but i assume that discourses of production and product would relate to it somehow -- does the relation of these to capital matter in the reading/writing of capitalism?

      the stakes for this is that unproductive is written as a moral evil under certain systems of capitalism :: unlearning this is good, yes, but maybe it's also necessary to unlearn what capitalism SAYS is unproductive (that it really is productive all along). then again, though, returns the question of: does everything NEED to be productive? if no (which I want to believe), then what shouldn't people do? when should people act?

      the stakes are also that there are strategies in life which may be more effective than others. In organizing against capital, it would be expedient to organize productively -- to take meaningful actions. Boycotting when you just decide to stop shopping somewhere doesn't really do anything -- it has to be organized to even begin to matter (and then maybe even then...). But is there a BEST way to organize? and how important is it to find that way? probably it's better to take more exacerbating action -- but it's probably also not so useful to mire in executive dysfunction trying to minmax these things. Where are the goal posts? (It doesn't even have to be specific, can just be general and the like).