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Q: No ACK recieved in Gun.js I am using Gun.js and on load I am putting a value in.
This is for a new website, and I have already tried making everything when the page loads instead of just in a script tag.
        var mid = Date.now().toString() + "and" + (Math.round(Math.random()) + Math.round(Math.random())).toString();
        var gun = Gun('https://gunjs.herokuapp.com/gun');
        gun.get(`tictac/toe${mid}`).put({
            "type": "test"
        });

I expect it not to produce an error, but it is producing an error:
{err: "Error: No ACK received yet.", lack: true}
I don't know what to do.

A: @Mikey ,
No ACK received yet lack: true means that GUN has not received an acknowledgement that the data was correctly saved. This means your data may not be backed up.
Often times this happens because on other peers someone is running GUN as require('gun/gun') which does NOT include default storage adapters. On other (non-browser) peers, you should include GUN as require('gun') which DOES include default adapters (transport, storage, etc.).
In this case, it looks like you are connected to a testing peer (gunjs.herokuapp), please note that this is not for production use cases, and could be part of the problem.
For us to figure out what is going wrong, I highly encourage you to join our super friendly community ( https://gitter.im/amark/gun ) to help you out.


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Even Before the Sexual Assault allegations
Attorneys And Ex-Cops Discuss Police Miscondu
GOVERNOR CUOMO SAYS METRO-NORTH HUDSON LINE
Franchising: Small Business Success Recipe?
Public Advocate Williams Joins Demands For Investigation of Linda Fairstein Prosecutor in 1989 "Central Park Five" case
Special To The ...June 05,2019
Jumaane D. Williams joined by others demanding accountability in Central Park 5 Prosecution.
Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams was joined by a coalition of elected officials and activists today to call for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., to investigate former assistant district attorney Linda Fairstein's alleged misconduct during the so-called Central Park Five case. The case is drawing new attention following the release of the miniseries "When They See Us," which documents the stories of the young men wrongfully convicted in the rape of Trisha Meili in 1989.
During a press conference outside the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building and in a letter sent to Vance, Williams asked that the district attorney investigate all past cases overseen by Fairstein to determine whether there are additional victims of her alleged misconduct. He further called for Elizabeth Lederer, also involved in the prosecution, to be removed from her current position with the Manhattan district attorney's office.
Williams called for Fairstein to be disbarred and removed from her role as an adjunct Professor at Columbia University, and for Penguin to stop selling her book. Together with the other advocates for justice, he linked the injustice against the five young men in 1989 --who were all later exonerated-- to the ongoing trial a few hundred yards away at 1 Police Plaza, where Officer Daniel Pantaleo faced a departmental disciplinary trial five years after the death of Eric Garner, from a chokehold.
The five young men were: Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise. At the time of the attack and the arrests of the young man, Donald Trump purchased full-page ads in New York's major newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty so the boys could be executed. Up to this date, the man continues to slander the five by insisting that they are guilty.
Williams' letter to Vance in part reads, "This is a new opportunity to seek justice, which is why I write you today. Those involved in the prosecution of the 'Central Park Five' must be held accountable for the wrongdoing they committed while working on the case. It is even more clear today than it was before that former District Attorney Linda Fairstein, prosecutor in the case, engaged in immoral, unethical, and illegal conduct. She took advantage of vulnerable, young, Black and Latino youth by orchestrating false confessions from the teenagers. Fairstein's actions were not only unjust, but possibly criminal, which many believe could be reason for disbarment.
Williams added, "Lederer's involvement in the case cannot be ignored, and she too must be held accountable for her actions. She should be removed from her position immediately."
He concluded, "We cannot bring back what was taken from these five young men. We also can not bring back Trisha Meili, or the other victims of the man who went free while these boys were incarcerated. We were not the people in power back then, but we have the power now. I implore you to exercise the authority you now possess to help right the wrongs of the past, to bend the arc toward justice."
Jumaane D. Williams
Central Park Five
Laurie Cumbo
Vanessa Gibson
I. Daneek Miller
Inez Barron; Tamika Mallory
Linda Sarsour; Monique Chandler-Waterman
Linda Fairstein
Trisha Meili
Elizabeth Lederer
Zimmerman Verdict: Justice Denied
"President" Steven Bannon: The Grey Eminence
Trump: Is there such a thing as a "Good" Racist?
Report: Black and Latino Wealth Plummets With Down Homeownership
Trump-Russiagate -- Attorney General Barr "not a neutral observer" Schumer and Pelosi Say

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Q: Looking for a well-behaved distance/similarity measure of how close a matrix B is to the (pseudo-) inverse of a matrix A. I have a two matrices, $A$ and $B$ with dimensions ($m$, $n$) and ($n$, $m$), respectively. I have an iterative machine learning algorithm (similar to a restricted Boltzmann machine) that changes the values of $A$ and $B$ over time. I have good reasons to suspect that due to these changes, $B$ becomes similar to the inverse of $A$ (i.e. $A'$) over time / with training (aside: I have some data samples, where each data point is some vector $v$ with length $m$; transforming $v$ using $A$ gives me a new vector $u$ of length $n$ with
$u = Av$; applying $B$ to $u$ gives me $w = Bu$, which over time becomes similar to the original $v$, i.e., the sum of squared errors between $v$ and $w$ decreases).
I would like to characterize the degree to which $B$ becomes the inverse of $A$ over time, and I am looking for a well-behaved similarity measure to do so.
The best that I have come up with so far is based on the identity $I = AA'$: I define a $J = AB$ and compute the ratio $Tr(J) / |J|$, i.e. the sum of values on the diagonal of  $J$ compared to the sum of all values of $J$ (if $B$ is the pseudo-inverse, then there should be no off-diagonal terms). The measure is nice as if $B = A'$ then the measure is 1; however, it is unclear to me what values lower than 1 mean, and if a change in the measure from 0.1 to 0.2 is comparable in some way to a change from 0.4 to 0.5.
I am hence looking for either
a) a more principled similarity measure, or
b) some insight into how $Tr(AB) / |AB|$ behaves as B becomes less and less like the pseudo-inverse of A.
As you can probably tell, I am not a mathematician by training so any comments or suggestions on how to improve the question are more than welcome.

A: Since you are dealing with rectangular matrices, you might get $(AA^+\ne I)$, even using the exact pseudoinverse. Instead you should use the  Penrose condition $$AA^+A=A$$ to test how well $B$ approximates $A^+$.
You could use this condition in a ratio test to compare the initial iteration to the $k^{th}$ iteration, e.g.
$$\rho_k = \frac{\|A_kB_kA_k-A_k\|}{\|A_0B_0A_0-A_0\|}$$
Obviously, $\rho_0=1\,$ and if your hunch is correct then $$\lim_{k\to\infty}\rho_k = 0$$

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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The battle for the NHL western conference final begins on Sunday May 15th, featuring two teams who have struggled over the years to get to this point.
The San Jose Sharks will be on the road playing against the St. Louis Blues. Both teams have achieved milestones during this post season. The San Jose Sharks have silenced their critics by eliminating their arch-enemies the LA. Kings in round one and eliminating the Predators in round 2. While the St. Louis Blues have had to battle it out to the bitter end in both rounds winning in 7 games each time.
The Blues have not made it to the Stanley Cup finals in 46 years, that's right the last time they were Championship contenders it was 1970, they are due. On the other hand, the Sharks have never managed to make it to the Championship Finals in their franchise history; they have participated in 3 conference finals in the last 12 years but never advanced.
The playing styles of these teams are very different, the Sharks are fast and have demonstrated they have a power play and that seems to be a problem for the Blues sometimes, however the Blues have a more structured game that has been very effective especially in long series.
For game one of this conference final series, the things that would normally give a clear advantage to one team are not necessarily true in this instance. St. Louis has the home field advantage and this is normally a big plus for any team, problem is St. Louis just came out of a second 7 game series and are bound to be a little tired, while the Sharks have what can be considered one the of the worst home record of the regular season so clearly they perform better when on the road.
When push comes to shove I believe the St. Louis Blues will end up winning game one. In my opinion their structured and detailed game play that has been their weapon in this postseason will wear and frustrate the Sharks enough as to where they simply lose control of the game. Do I think this tactic will work in subsequent games, no. I'm sure San Jose will rebound quickly and adjust their mentality but it won't be in time for them to take game 1 in this series.
If you care to check the latest lines in NHL post season visit AceSportsbook.com, they offer a wide variety of betting options and props.


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PlayStation 4 » Action » Fighting » 3D
All Review Articles
Cubed3 05/06/19 7 out of 10 70.00%
GameCritics 01/22/19 6 out of 10 60.00%
Playstation Official Magazine UK 12/07/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
The Escapist 12/05/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
ImpulseGamer 11/12/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
The Gamers Temple 11/12/18 89 out of 100 89.00%
Easy Allies 11/09/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
New Game Network 11/06/18 80 out of 100 80.00%
GamingTrend 10/29/18 75 out of 100 75.00%
Gaming Age 10/29/18 A- 90.00%
Hardcore Gamer 10/26/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
Digital Chumps 10/24/18 9 out of 10 90.00%
Gameplanet 10/23/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
DarkStation 10/23/18 4 out of 5 80.00%
PlayStation LifeStyle 10/22/18 8.5 out of 10 85.00%
Worthplaying 10/22/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
CGMagazine 10/22/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
WeGotThisCovered 10/22/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
EGM 10/21/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
Twinfinite 10/19/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
Shacknews 10/19/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
GameSpot 10/19/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
Game Informer 10/18/18 8.75 out of 10 87.50%
Playstation Universe 10/18/18 8.5 out of 10 85.00%
The Koalition 10/18/18 90 out of 100 90.00%
Push Square 10/18/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
Wccftech 10/17/18 8.8 out of 10 88.00%
TheSixthAxis 10/17/18 7 out of 10 70.00%
Cheat Code Central 10/17/18 4.7 out of 5 94.00%
Metro GameCentral 10/17/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
Digitally Downloaded 10/17/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
The Digital Fix 10/16/18 8 out of 10 80.00%
IGN 10/16/18 8.9 out of 10 89.00%
God is a Geek 10/16/18 8.5 out of 10 85.00%
Gaming Nexus 10/16/18 8.5 out of 10 85.00%
Game Revolution 10/16/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
AttackoftheFanboy 10/16/18 4.5 out of 5 90.00%
Destructoid 10/16/18 8.5 out of 10 85.00%
Reviews with an asterisk (*) do not count toward the average ratio for a game.
More SoulCalibur VI
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The PS4, Xbox One, And Switch Games That Are 50% Off Right Now
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Effective management of developed and undeveloped watersheds and stormwater runoff by public and private entities is a complex task that requires proper planning, design, and implementation of stormwater and other pollution controls. Geosyntec ensures that such controls are cost-effective, achieve desired benefits for the community, and comply with evolving local, state, and federal regulations.
Many of our clients face new regulations or policies in their communities that are not tailored to site-specific conditions, rely on overly conservative assumptions, or they may choose to undertake more sustainable practices voluntarily. Collecting the correct data to make informed decisions is critical to avoid unnecessary expense.
Securing the funding needed to implement innovative watershed and stormwater management programs can be difficult. Our practitioners assist in defining and communicating the environmental and economic benefits of proposed controls, as well as their uncertainties, as it can be critical to gaining acceptance from elected officials, government agencies, and community stakeholders.
Geosyntec practitioners frequently consult with clients at local, state, regional, and federal levels to integrate watershed and stormwater planning into their short- and long-term planning. Our clients include developers, municipalities, utilities, non-governmental organizations, and state and federal agencies. Many of our projects involve planning efforts ranging from the site-level to entire watersheds, often in partnership with key stakeholders in the community.
Geosyntec's practitioners aid in shaping the state of the practice through joint research and project work with numerous academic institutions and are involved in innovative research, development, and application of emerging techniques and technologies. Our practitioners frequently present training sessions and workshops on stormwater management and introduce new NPDES regulatory program requirements, erosion and sediment (E&S) control technologies, and BMP performance and design to various audiences.
As a result, we are recognized for facilitating the transfer of technologies from research to commercial and public use quickly. Our professionals have been a critical and ongoing part of an award-winning team maintaining the International Database on Urban Stormwater BMP Design and Performance for the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Our practitioners are also key contributors to the new Agricultural BMP Database, a resource developed with the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF).


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Q: Wordpress can't seem to handle tens of thousands of scheduled posts? Cron Breaks I have a website listing doctors in the us. I'm spreading out the posts over 2 years, but I have about 2.8 million doctors to list. Right now I'm adding the post automatically via a custom script, and selecting a random time between now and 2 years from now.
This seems to have broken my cron. There are about 40k scheduled posts, and the cron cell in the database was about 6mb when I exported the single cell for cron.
My cron is now broke, and it may be due to google xml sitemaps plugin. But that's a side effect I believe of the cron table getting too large.
What's the best way to do what I'm trying to accomplish?


English: variant spelling of Dilley. French: habitational name, with the preposition d(e), for someone from Illy, a place in the Ardennes. German: from a pet form of the female personal name Ottilie.
Where is the Dilly family from?
You can see how Dilly families moved over time by selecting different census years. The Dilly family name was found in the USA, the UK, Canada, and Scotland between 1840 and 1920. The most Dilly families were found in the USA in 1880. In 1911 there were 7 Dilly families living in Quebec. This was about 35% of all the recorded Dilly's in Canada. Quebec had the highest population of Dilly families in 1911.
Use census records and voter lists to see where families with the Dilly surname lived. Within census records, you can often find information like name of household members, ages, birthplaces, residences, and occupations.
What did your Dilly ancestors do for a living?
In 1880, Farmer, Carpenter and Works On Farm were the top 3 reported jobs worked by Dilly. A less common occupation for the Dilly family was Farming. The most common Dilly occupation in the USA was Farmer. 50% of Dilly's were Farmers.
Census records can tell you a lot of little known facts about your Dilly ancestors, such as occupation. Occupation can tell you about your ancestor's social and economic status.
What Dilly family records will you find?
There are 3,000 census records available for the last name Dilly. Like a window into their day-to-day life, Dilly census records can tell you where and how your ancestors worked, their level of education, veteran status, and more.
There are 642 immigration records available for the last name Dilly. Passenger lists are your ticket to knowing when your ancestors arrived in Canada, and how they made the journey - from the ship name to ports of arrival and departure.
There are 1,000 military records available for the last name Dilly. For the veterans among your Dilly ancestors, military collections provide insights into where and when they served, and even physical descriptions.
You've only scratched the surface of Dilly family history.
What is the average Dilly lifespan?
Between 1946 and 2004, in the United States, Dilly life expectancy was at its lowest point in 1946, and highest in 1994. The average life expectancy for Dilly in 1946 was 35, and 76 in 2004.
An unusually short lifespan might indicate that your Dilly ancestors lived in harsh conditions. A short lifespan might also indicate health problems that were once prevalent in your family. The SSDI is a searchable database of more than 70 million names. You can find birthdates, death dates, addresses and more.


Tateni Community Centre Celebrated Heritage Day on Friday, 29 September 2017. The event took place at Sediba Sa Thuto Primary School, in Mamelodi East.
The centre prepared a meal for the children in one of their Drop-In Centres. care workers of the drop-in centre were also attending the event. The event was well organized with music and food included. The event on Friday started at 11 and lasted until 4:30.
Children prepared their cultural dances, specifically Xangani to perform that day. The event was supposed to take place on the 26th of October but the centre decided to celebrate on the 29th since it was convenient for everyone including children.
Other children at the Drop-in centres celebrated birthdays that same day. Care workers where there to support the party and spend time with children.


Happy Father's Day from Hearth Music! In honor of fathers, we're reposting a Hearth Music blog about fathers and sons.
Poet Gary Snyder represents the heart and soul of the beat movement. While Kerouac was the passion, and Ginsburg was the madness, Snyder was the anchored saint who guided the others. Read The Dharma Bums and you'll see how much Kerouac respected Snyder and tried (and failed) to follow his example of a calming, soulful presence. Snyder's poems are always intimately tied to the earth and to family. Here's "Axe Handles", a poem about his son Kai, from the poetry book of the same name. Please buy Axe Handles and learn more about Gary Snyder. Or better yet, buy his beautiful new collection of poems, Danger On Peaks, then find an old, tattered copy of Axe Handles at your nearest used bookstore. Read it with the highlighting, notes and fingerprints of others who came before you to remind you of how closely connected we all are.


Here's the feed for you, playa.
You're cool. And you probably have some of those "Q-Tip" headphones to let everybody know it, too.
Here's the Apple Podcasts link, so you can make good use of them.
Think Different? Forget that. You don't just "think" differently, you actually went against the iPhone grain and purchased an Android.
Here's the Google Podcasts link.


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Articles Posted in the " Christian Bale " Category
By Harry Harris on December 18, 2013 0 comment
David O. Russell directs movies like he's just snorted a big line of cocaine and been told the camera is a Grand Theft Auto controller – the actors in his scenes spend most of their time trying not to get run over. Intensity. That's what Russell has in spades, and it's again on show in…
Top 5 movie stars who are worse than Nigella Lawson
By John Underwood on November 27, 2013 1 comment
Britain's famously drug-addled press has gone mental at the recent suggestion that Nigella Lawson may have developed a bit of a taste for Charlie over the last few years; apparently the fact that this charge is being levelled at her by her insane ex-husband / some ex-employees who she's suing isn't at all relevant. Go Daily Mail! We really like Nigella and we couldn't care less what she puts in her face, so here's some perspective.
MTV Movie Awards 2013 – the winners
By JLSB Sirisena on April 15, 2013 0 comment
Your short-cut to the important stuff.
Matthew McConaughey for Christopher Nolan's Interstellar
By Sarah Deen on April 04, 2013 0 comment
Matthew McConaughey is on the come up.
Christian Bale may play Moses!
By Nina Scott on March 18, 2013 0 comment
Dear God.
Christopher Nolan: master of the DC Universe?
By JLSB Sirisena on March 04, 2013 0 comment
Nolan's rise to cinematic power!
Jennifer Lawrence for 'Ends Of The Earth'
By Kayleigh Dray on February 20, 2013 0 comment
Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence just LOVES working with David O Russell, doesn't she?
Christopher Nolan in talks to direct Interstellar
By f.topping on January 10, 2013 0 comment
Christopher Nolan is in talks to direct a sci-fi film written by his brother, Jonathan Nolan, about time travel through a wormhole.
12 Days of Christmas #8 – BFF's Top 8 Milking Maids
Can you believe that there's only 6 days until Christmas!? Let us commiserate at the implacable march of time by considering our top 8 maids a-milking. There's a lot of fertile subject matter here, but it's become a little tribute to some of the most important themes of Christmas – family, togetherness, the sacrifices of a loving mother, baby Jesus and… um… Joe Pesci? Whatever. Milky maids. Let's do it.
Top 10 Potential Actors for Justice League Batman
By Vincent Kenny on November 27, 2012 1 comment
With the Justice League set to battle against The Avengers 2 in 2015, there has been much speculation about what form the new Batman will take. As we all know by now, Joseph Gordon Levitt is the most likely candidate, considering the end of The Dark Knight Rises, but that's soooo obvious. Disregarding the hearsay on our boyo Joseph Gordon Levitt, we at BFF Towers have opted for outright guesswork, based on a solid foundation of lunacy. Here are our choices for the new Batman!


Chloralodol (Chlorhexadol) is a hypnotic/sedative. It is a Schedule III drug in the USA; however, it is not currently marketed in the United States so it is no longer prescribed.
This page was last edited on 21 February 2018, at 23:35 (UTC).


Cal Poly's Student Leadership Institute is a two-day event focused on empowering students through providing educational experiences that support and challenge students to build and apply leadership skills to effect social change. The theme for is "This is What a Leader Looks Like" and we will be highlighting all types of leaders across campus with a focus on expanding the notion of leadership while helping each student see the leader they have inside them. The Student Leadership Institute (SLI) is an open and free opportunity for all Cal Poly students to engage in leadership development opportunities and learn from and with their peers.
Cal Poly's Student Leadership Institute is made possible by collaborations with Cross Cultural Centers, Fraternity & Sorority Life, University Housing, New Student & Transition Programs, and the Center for Leadership.
Friday, day one, of the Student Leadership Institute is an open access student leadership conference -- where faculty, staff, alumni, students, and community partners present on an array of leadership topics. Past topics include conflict management, identity development, inclusive language, teambuilding, mentorship, and more. Additional some breakout sessions are focused around sharing space and have discussion about leadership with individuals who share similar experiences, identities, or passions. Student are provided breakfast and lunch and will get to hear from an inspiring keynote speaker. The conference will allow emerging leaders to build essential skills while also allowing more engaged student leaders to network and develop skills to foster leadership in others. We want to challenge and inspire students with engaging sessions.
Saturday, day two, of the Student Leadership Institute is an application-only student leaders retreat. Students from across campus will come together to tackle issues around campus climate. Students are provided breakfast and lunch and get the opportunity to learn from diversity leaders on campus. Students collaborate in small groups during the day to create and then present action plans.
Saturday is an all day event. Once you've applied for Saturday you will receive additional scheduling information.


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Why a Theory of Value? II – Value and Economic History
21st February 2013 by Matthijs Krul
This is the transcript of a paper held at Brunel University, London, UK, at 07.02.2013.
The world is a vampire. That is to say: the world as it appears today, the capitalist world, is a kind of society uniquely oriented towards the accumulation of labor time for its own sake, and the production and exchange of commodities is the means through which this is achieved. In the classical economics of the 19th century and even more so in the neoclassical economics of today, much effort has been expended on naturalizing this type of society, that is, on making it seem like the inevitable structure of human society once a certain level of technological advance or social sophistication has been reached. Economic history has often been derivative of this view, that it is mankind's lot, in Adam Smith's words, to "truck, barter and exchange". The transformation of all goods into commodities produced for and sold in the market appears then as a natural outcome of the progress of society, and history of the economic in turn appears as merely a casting off of those restrictions on natural liberty which prevent the full flourishing of the market pur sang.
Now it is well-known that this view was strongly contested in the thought of Karl Marx, whose critique of political economy was devoted to the denaturalization of capitalist society. For Marx, it was of the utmost importance to show that capitalist society had its own logic, with a historical origin, and therefore also, at least potentially, a historical end. That which has originated at a definite point in history as the result of conscious and unconscious political and economic transformations is something which can also end by such means. Marx's theory of value, often called the 'labor theory of value' (although Marx did not call it that), is often and rightly understood to have served the purpose of describing the logic of capitalism as its own unique system in this light. Although the classical economists had theories of value, at least for capitalism, and although arguably neoclassical economics has a hidden value theory as well, the idea is most generally associated with Marxist thought. For this reason I will start there, with its historical and ontological status. Then I will talk about the possible meaning of this concept of value for precapitalist societies, how we could define it, and what this might mean for our understanding of economic history as a discipline.
Now there is much to Marx's theory of value, his theory of crisis and so forth, but these I do not want to go into – my purpose here is not to elucidate what Marx's theory of value is, nor to defend it as correct. It has often been criticized and from many different political angles, and while I personally think it stands up very well in the latest economic theory literature, that is not what this lecture is about. For many, Marx's theory of value often seems to be the sticking point keeping them from accepting his general analysis: people just can't wrap their heads around what it is supposed to be, what purpose it is supposed to serve. It is clear Marx found it important, and tried to make political points with it, but it seems too elaborate and abstract a system to be merely a cover for a number of moral and political criticisms of capitalism – after all, many have been formulated that had no need to refer to a theory of value. In the Marxist economic literature, there is an extensive amount written on defending, elucidating, improving, and applying his theory of value. However, my feeling is that this literature is lacking in one significant dimension: there is very little explanation or defense of the theory of value itself. By this I mean, not even just Marx's theory of value, but the need for any theory of value at all: what kind of thing a theory of value is, and why economic historians, in particular, might need one. This is what I want to analyze today. My remarks on this are preliminary, and should be taken as such: I am merely attempting to explore some, to my mind, fairly unexamined ground here.
So what kind of beast is a theory of value? Is it really merely a rhetorical device, a mere metaphysics, as so many critics from the economic mainstream have suggested throughout the years? To my mind, if Marx's theory of value is to work as a theory, it should not just have a certain explanatory or political value right now, but it should also be understandable and applicable in a historical context. At the same time, this requires a careful examination of what aspects of economic history should be taken as specific to capitalism, and which as transhistorical, and therefore also a necessary part of the logic of other economic formations.
It was highly important for Marx to differentiate capitalism from pre-capitalist societies. The theory of value of capitalism he outlines in his famous work Capital applies to capitalism only, for this reason, and takes as premise the development of, in Marx's terminology, "generalized commodity production" as well as the predominance of "free wage labour". The resulting universal commensurability of commodities, and of the labour power which makes them, is where Marx starts his analysis of capitalism in Capital. This is what makes capitalism what it is. The expression of this universal commensurability is the all-pervasiveness of money in the process of exchange. It is this attribute of money that makes 'the economy' seem a separate thing, operating on its own strength entirely separate from the 'thick' substance of the rest of society – the clearest example of this being the ability of financial capital to induce crises in the whole of society by its activities. It was for this reason that Karl Polanyi and other economic historians have suggested that capitalism is unique precisely in having the economic logic be divorced, or disembedded, from wider society.
But what could this practically mean? We know now that Polanyi was wrong to think markets and money exchange were nonexistent in precapitalist societies. It is not as simple as that. We must seek something more fundamental to all forms of production and exchange in our recorded history. Marx himself attempted to do so: in the Communist Manifesto as well as in later works, capitalism itself as a mode of production is placed in a larger economic history context, as succeeding other economic formations such as feudalism, slavery, the so-called Asiatic mode of production, and so forth. What characterizes all these modes of production? It is that all these were societies in their own way producing and distributing goods in order to reproduce their existing social relations. To cite the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, this means that society exists as "an articulated ensemble of relations and functions, all of which are simultaneously necessary for its existence as such, but whose importance for its reproduction is variable. (…) There exists a hierarchy of social relations depending on the function each assumes in this process." Moreover, each of these societies in its reproduction is capable of generating a surplus sufficient to allow the existence of a state and their own ruling classes, whatever they were.
We need not accept all Marx and Engels' precise classifications today to understand that the significance of this is to suggest that precapitalist societies were sufficiently different from the capitalist one to have their own logic, their own social relations reproducing that kind of society through the production of material goods, and what's more, that we can understand this logic through the lens of reproduction. It has been said that Marxism inaugurated the discipline of economic history by this idea, and indeed, the very premise of economic history must be that the material reproduction of past societies, in whatever way they worked, must be intelligible to us today. I want to argue then that from a historical comparative perspective, a theory of value such as Marx developed for capitalism appears as a way to describe the logics of present and past economic formations in a way that makes intelligible to us how they reproduce themselves materially, that is to say, according to what logic a given society produces and distributes the goods necessary not just to reproduce that society in its existing form, but also to permit, where applicable, the surplus that allows the existence of people who do not work, of leisure, of war, of arts and culture, and so forth.
This approach to the ontological question of what a theory of value is suggests to me strong commonalities with the methodologies of anthropology, in particular the subdiscipline known as economic anthropology. Whereas Marxists and non-Marxist economic historians have made great contributions to our understanding of the empirical details of the historical production and exchange of particular goods, of the economic institutions and organizations of the past, and so forth, few have put this in the context of the need to understand the value logics of these societies. Even the Marxist debates about the transition from one 'mode of production' to another have by and large focused on at what point and in what historical societies we're allowed to use the word 'capitalism'; but this is not what I mean. What I intend is to suggest an economic anthropological approach to the value question. It is, or should be, I believe, no coincidence that the word value (wert) was chosen by Marx as the core term for the thing that capitalist society eternally seeks to accumulate and that organizes its reproduction. Many people have found this, too, confusing: after all, doesn't value suggest a moral judgement? Aren't values things more similar to judgements about virtues, priorities , and what a society is about socially and culturally, rather than economically? Using a term like that in what purports to be an objective, scientific analysis of capitalism seems fallacious, or a way to smuggle in moral judgement through the back door. But for me, this makes sense when understood in an anthropological manner (and I must admit here, I am not a trained anthropologist).
What thinking about present and past social formations in terms of value helps us do is to overcome precisely this separation between 'the economic' and 'the social', or in the economic history literature, 'the cultural'; where the latter tends to function as the remainder category for everything that could not be explained in terms of the former. As I have mentioned before, this division is itself a product of the appearance of our own society, and therefore risks anachronism as well as superficiality. Both Marxist and non-Marxist economists and economic historians have often been accused of economic reductionism, of wishing to explain and reduce everything to terms of material production and gain. This may be unfair to some extent, but this division between the economic and the sociocultural in economic history lends reason to this criticism, especially as the division is always made in favor, in scientific terms, of the 'economic dimension of life'. I think if we are to understand economic history properly, we cannot so easily divorce whatever elements the discipline has determined as its own terrain from the wider societies they are and were part of, as is too commonly the practice now.
What this requires is a level of abstraction that can accommodate, when analyzing the social relations of past economic formations, both the processes of production and distribution of goods themselves, as well as the ideas that people have about these processes and these goods that are constitutive of the relations themselves. Put in clearer terms, what this means is that when people make or distribute certain goods, they have a view of themselves, their role in society, and the role of other people and goods in that society, which determine which goods are made, who obtains them, whether and under what conditions they are exchanged, and so forth. As Maurice Godelier has emphasized in his underappreciated work of economic anthropology, The Mental and the Material, the mistake has hitherto often been to see the processes of production and distribution as one thing and their mental representation and content as another, similar to Marx's so abused metaphor of the 'base' and the 'superstructure'. Both in Marxist and non-Marxist economic history, it has tended to be production and distribution themselves that count, through analyses of guilds, price lists, trading depots, land markets, and so forth, and the question of people's values, beliefs, and representations of society are left to the cultural and social historians. Or where they are examined, they are examined precisely as a superstructure – they are not understood as constituting part of the way a society organizes its production and distribution itself, except as a mere reflection.
But in the real experience of society, these two domains cannot be separated. The mental perception of society (what Godelier calls 'idéel'), at least insofar as it concerns the processes of production and distribution of goods (the matériel), is an integral part of these processes themselves. They are what allows these societies to exist as they do. Without this understanding, even if we can explain in purely technical terms how exchange and production worked in a particular society, we cannot explain why it worked like that and no other way, and more importantly still, why people put up with it. As Godelier wrote: "What we need to be able to explain… is how social groups and individuals can in some measure co-operate in the production and reproduction of their own subordination, even exploitation. (…) We must therefore seek to use our theoretical imagination to penetrate the black box of those mechanisms which goven the distribution of the same representations among social groups with partially or profoundly opposed interests."
If we want to take such an analysis beyond a Voltairian 'bad priests' sort of explanation, where ideology is simply a layer imposed on top of society by a ruling class to deceive everyone to their own benefit, we must see such representations as constitutive of people's self-perception in the reproduction of society. In other words, the question is not just what goods people make and who gets them, but what these goods mean to them, and why certain people are considered entitled to them. This cannot be separated from the processes themselves. As Godelier emphasizes: "There exists in every social relation a mental part that is both one of the actual conditions for the birth and reproduction of this relation, and at the same time its internal organizational schema." This goes beyond Marx's own theory of value itself, and into areas I think generally left unexamined by approaches relying entirely on it.
Economic anthropology furnishes us with a great number of different systems of production and exchange, both with and without money, with or without commodity production, using gifts, potlatches, hereditary and ancestral power, magic and taboo of all sorts; unfortunately I simply do not have the time to go into these in detail, so I must speak in fairly abstract terms. What is decisive here is to understand that societies are rarely, if ever, constituted explicitly in terms of the 'economic'. As Durkheim and others have observed, the imaginary constitution of society is usually in terms of some divine order and dispensation, something justified and constituted by the gods and requiring the constant placating of the gods to maintain; but even in modern societies, the elaborate apparatus of political theory and philosophy has served to find justification for society in terms often not immediately economic, such as in the work of the social contract theorists, old and new. The Athenian polis was, despite its advanced and almost modern-seeming political and economic activities, first and foremost a covenant with the gods for the perpetuation of society on the basis of a complicated system of heredity, obligations towards the gods as well as their institutions, and the relations to other Greek city-states.
In ancient Egypt, the rule of the Pharaoh was based on his ability to control the Nile floods (by communicating with the gods) and thereby make possible the harvest, for which in return he was to be placated with tribute in the form of goods or labor, and so on. An economic historian might reduce this to speaking merely of a geographically encaged peasantry captured by a "hydraulic state", as Karl Wittfogel did, but this is to miss the significance of the view of the Pharaoh. This was not merely a ruling class legitimation of the extortion of the Egyptian peasants, but for the Egyptian peasants, the reproduction of Egyptian society actually did depend on distributing a certain amount of surplus goods and labor to the Pharaoh and his retainers; without this, the very logic of Egyptian society would not have been possible, and therefore there would not have been an Egyptian society in the first place. This is not a conservative argument to justify all forms of class rule, but it is to understand the significance of the particular social relations of Egyptian society – social relations which, as Godelier says, "dominate when they function simultaneously as social relations of production, as the social framework and support for the material process of the appropriation of nature."
What I want to suggest then is that this is the first aspect of value that is essential for comparative economic history: value in the sense of the values people hold about society, their representation of their society's purpose and their role within it, and the obligations and debts this places upon them. As David Graeber has described at length in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, relations of exchange have throughout history often taken the form of a debt relation, not least the eternal and irreducable debt owed to the gods and/or divine rulers for the constitution and perpetuation of society itself. Debt, as we know, is in and of itself merely a claim on distribution of goods; but if it comes to dominate the value system and representation of a society in the minds of those producing goods, it becomes part of the system of production and exchange itself. It is what the production and distribution of goods is seen as being ultimately for, and it is this, not the mere day-to-day political needs of a ruling class or the technical requirements of factories and markets, that determines the form and nature of the processes of production and exchange. As Graeber suggests in Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, it is this ability of value theory to (I paraphrase) "suggest the possibility of overcoming the difference between theories that start from social structure and theories that start from individual motivation" that constitutes what economic anthropology could be seen as contributing as a discipline. Certainly within economic history this seems of enormous importance.
The second aspect I want to suggest is a closely related one, which I have alluded to before: commensurability. I think an important part of Marx's need to explain capitalism as a historically unique social logic is his observation, not understood by the classical economists, that capitalism is a society in which there is a generalized commensurability of goods and labor. In the vast majority of historically existing societies, various goods and various kinds of labor have been sometimes commensurable, sometimes not. Often certain objects are sacred, or hereditary, and cannot be traded for or compared with other objects; certain kinds of production are intrinsic to themselves for their ritual meaning or their political purpose; and divisions of gender, caste, age, and so forth can be so strong as to make any comparison not just impossible to express in market terms, but in fact altogether inconceivable. Moreover, there are always a number of goods that are commonplace and for common purposes, and do not have any higher social or cultural status, and these are for that reason often interchangeable in a market sense, allowing measurements of simple accumulation in that sense. Such mental, representational systems create or oppose commensurability between goods, which in turn determines the nature and processes of production and exchange; they are an essential part of the value logic of a given society's economy.
Yet every society needs to reproduce itself and its social relations, and therefore must have a yardstick, or perhaps multiple, by which it measures its success or failure at doing so – a yardstick that is expressed within these mental representations of what society is about. These could conceivably be expressed in terms of divine favor, political success, territorial expansion, or other things, but there must be some way in which this yardstick relates to the material production and exchange of goods by whatever means – for example whether the size of the chief's potlatch is sufficient to feed the tribe and more impressive than that of the rival people. I would venture that it is only in this sense that it makes sense for Marx to say that the social relations, including their mental content, can come into conflict with the development of technology. This yardstick (and of course there can be more than one, and more or less conscious) is what I would call value in the analysis of that society.
Having made these two observations about the significance of value for economic history, I want to draw this argument to a close. As I have said, a theory of value like that of Marx has often been discussed purely in terms of its significance in economic theory or in politics, but it has not often been asked what value itself could mean and what kind of historical-ontological status it has. My argument is that the idea of theories of value, applied to past societies, is or could be a tremendously useful concept for economic historians. It allows us to talk about mental representations, ideas, and religious and cultural logics if and when they become a functional part of the social relations of production. By this I mean that these mental conceptions become material and part of economic history when they, at least in part, determine the nature of the production of goods and their distribution in a given society. From economic anthropology we can learn not just a great deal about the different ways in which precapitalist societies have organized these processes, but we can also fruitfully apply the rich body of theory on social facts, obligation and debt, and commensurability to economic history itself. This, in turn, I hope will allow economic historians more generally, whether Marxist or otherwise, to overcome the dichotomy between the economic and the sociocultural in examining past and present societies, and thereby remove some major obstacles for a more holistic and integrated understanding of how societies actually work.
Categories: Economics, History, TheoryTagged: Anthropology, Economic History, Marxism, Value Theory
Pingback: Why a Theory of Value?
John Garvey says:
Two other very interesting thinkers who approach Marx with an anthroplogical sensibility are Nicole Pepperell and Paul Mattick, Jr. In case you're not familiar with them, here are two links:
http://roughtheory.org/2011/06/28/capital-against-capitalism/
http://libcom.org/library/social-knowledge-essay-limits-social-science-paul-mattick-jr
Ross Wolfe says:
An interesting note on this. I remember a while back in the Aesthetics, Theory, and Philosophy Facebook group, Douglas Lain, Daniel Lee Eisenberg Jacobs, and others raised the question of whether or not one could "prove" the legitimacy of Marx's (and Ricardo's, and to a lesser extent Smith's) labor theory of value, the idea of a real and material substrate of quantifiable labor-time embodied in a given commodity. Daniel and I contended that it is not absolutely imperative or even desirable that one demonstrate a sort of one-to-one correspondence with reality and thereby convince others of its reliability. CLR James had a great line on this, and on Marx's (and Hegel's) dialectical method as a whole, in his brilliant 1947 piece on "Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity":
We here meet one of the most important principles of the dialectical logic, and one that has been consistently misunderstood, vilified, or lied about. Dialectic for Hegel was a strictly scientific method. He might speak of inevitable laws, but he insists from the beginning that the proof of dialectic as scientific method is that the laws prove their correspondence with reality. Marx's dialectic is of the same character. Thus he excluded what later became The Critique of Political Economy from Capital because it took for granted what only the detailed argument and logical development of Capital could prove. Still more specifically, in his famous letter to Kugelmann on the theory of value, he ridiculed the idea of having to "prove" the labour theory of value. If the labour theory of value proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory. Neither Hegel nor Marx understood any other scientific proof.
That is to say, and this is a point Marx made in his Theses on Feuerbach and elsewhere, that the truth of a theory cannot be demonstrated anywhere except in revolutionary praxis. A theoretical claim is not simply "true" because it lines up with objective reality, but because human activity transforms the objective order of things and historical existence in such a way that it brings them into alignment with theory. The truth of the labor theory of value consists in our ability to overcome bourgeois social relations. Until then it merely remains a means by which we can make sense of the contradictions of a society that persists in its untruth.


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Buddhism & western psychology: Fundamentals of integration
William Mikulas
Journal of Consciousness Studies 14 (4):4-49 (2007)
Essential Buddhism, the fundamental teachings of the historical Buddha and the core of all major branches of Buddhism, is psychology, not religion or philosophy. Essential Buddhism is described from a psychological perspective and interrelated with Western psychology in general, and cognitive science, behaviour modification, psychoanalysis, and transpersonal psychology, in specific. Integrating Buddhist psychology and Western psychology yields a more comprehensive psychology and more powerful therapies.
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Buddhism in Philosophy of Religion
Science of Consciousness in Philosophy of Cognitive Science
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