Short Marx Notes

Economics

If you read a biography of Karl Marx you have to wonder if he didn’t like capitalism simply because he was terrible at it—he lived his entire life in debt. Marx was descended from eminent lines of rabbis, but harsh anti-semitic laws convinced his father to convert, and all of Marx’s life his venomous tongue was quick to utter some horrifying maxims about Judaism.

Marx looked at history, discarded philosophy, religion, ethics, nationalism, and said to look at the people. Each of society’s movements from slavery to feudalism to capitalism can be traced to a ruling class extracting wealth from the people, be it a slave, serf, or factory worker. Even though all the ‘wealth’ was coming from the workers, they were still at the mercy of hte ruling class because they didn’t control any of the means of production. In Marx’s view religion (“opium of the people” ), patriotism, laws, culture, and morality all are merely means of keeping the worker in his place and support the production process. This superstructure ties everyone to material thinking and desires, therefore perpetuating the cycle of exploitation of the working class. Revolutions happen as a result of new technology, and a conflict of the classes occurs whenever society switches to new means of production, but the workers always end up at the bottom of the totem pole because they are in, by definition, a class society. Marx postulated that because capitalism rested on a class system, revolution and victory by the workers was inevitable, because only in a classless society could said revolution be avoided. Because capitalism produces so much, it is a necessary precursor for socialism to occur. Marx did not consider Russia or Germany for his revolution, because they didn’t have sufficient industrial resources, he thought Communism would take place in England and France first. Here’s what has to happen for the revolution to take place:

  1. Falling profit rates and accumulation of capital
  2. Increasing concentration of economic power
  3. deepening crises and depressions
  4. High unemployment (“industrial reserve army” )
  5. Increasing misery of the proletariat

(from Todd Buchholz). Marx’s biggest flaw comes from the assumption that all value comes from the worker, or labor. He ignores entrepreneurship, land, capitol. Profits that Marx dubbed exploitation are actually crucial in insuring future investment and growth. The revolution never came because, however bad this economic slowdown is or how slow gigs come in the summer, workers are orders of magnitude better off than they were before. The rich get richer and the poor get richer; productivity enables total output to rise and benefit everyone. Also the worker is no longer completely separated from th emeans of production, and through things like stocks and bonds can indirectly own means of production.

Before the Storm

Asides

Going through some of my stuff from the DC trip and found this, note the date:

I really should write something about that visit. WorldCom was one of the coolest places I’ve ever visited, and the optimism of the employees I talked to was amazing. I distinctly remember one telling me what a good buy WorldCom bonds were at the time.

Bath Tissue?

Uncategorized

Since when did they start calling toilet paper ‘bath tissue’ in the grocery store? Not to mention they moved everything around in the Randall’s I’ve been going to my entire life. It was strange, and unfamiliar. I’m starting to have second thoughts about staying in the dorms next year.

Breadcrumb Script

Uncategorized

I just hacked out this bit of PHP to make nice titles and header URLs throughout the site. It needs some customization specific to this site, but before I do that I wanted to post it just in case anyone wants to use it on their site:

Sorry, this code has been depreceated because it has a few known bugs and I don’t have time right now to go back and fix it up. Sorry!

Good Vibrations

Uncategorized

Inspired by Textism, I have decided to personally abandon all–capital acronyms and words. It really breaks up the flow of the line to have a word that stands above everything else and hinders readability, so through the beauty of CSS I have approximated SMALL CAPS, an underused typographical tool. I’m also taking this oppurtunity to make better use of the <acronym> tag, which I use occasionally but not nearly enough, this time inspired by Mark Pilgrim’s excellent series on accesibility. An acronym will look like this, HSPVA, and when you hold your mouse over it should tell you what the acronym stands for. Tonight I’ll go through client sites I’ve designed and apply these concepts there as well. I hope you appreciate it, and now you know what it is so you won’t be like Julie and think it’s “tiny shouting.” 🙂

In other meta–news a new toy review (first draft) is up, and an FAQ

Anchor Tag Demystified

Asides

I’m writing this mainly for my sister Charleen, who wanted to know this for something on Mullenweg.com, but hopefully it will be helpful to anyone wanting to learn a little HTML.

Most Basic

The purpose of the anchor, or <A> tag, is to reference someplace. Links are the very essence of the web, the hyper in hypertext. Let’s talk about the most most important attribute, href. A very basic link might look something like this:
<a href="http://www.photomatt.net">PhotoMatt</a>
To break it down, the <a at the front indicates the beginning of the anchor tag. After that we have the href attribute, which basically tells the browser where to go when you click on that link. You can have a fully qualified address or a relative address there, which we’ll discuss more in a minute. The place we want to send the browser to is equal to “http://www.photomatt.net”. The two biggest mistakes people make when making an anchor tag are forgetting the equal sign and forgetting to quote the attribute value, in this case “http://www.photomatt.net”. (Note: you can quote it either with double or single quotes, which can be useful when echoing out statements in PHP.) Then we close the first part of the A tag (don’t forget the endquote!) with >. Now we write the text which we want to appear linked, which in this case is PhotoMatt, then we close the anchor tag with </a> to indicate that the link is over. You can enclose multiple words or even an entire sentence. That’s it! You now have a link. Note that all the code should be lowercase, like in the example above. This is a good practice in every version of HTML, and is required in XHTML.

Getting Fancy

Now I know you’re thinking, what more could there be? Well to be honest, there isn’t that much else. One common technique, and one I like to use on this site, it to use the title attribute to give a little more information about the link. The title attribute works functionally just like href, but instead the content displays as a tooltip or popup in most browsers, and can be useful for telling additional information about the link. Here’s an example:
<a href="http://www.photomatt.net" title="Photos and thoughts from Matthew Mullenweg">PhotoMatt</a>
The end result is this: PhotoMatt. In the title attribute you can put a description of the link, warn that it’s a PDF or Word document, warn that it’s opening in a new window, whatever you want. Zeldman.com makes great use of the title attribute on almost all his links.

Another commonly used attribute is target, which tells the browser where to open the link. You should use it when you want to open a link someplace other than the current window or frame. In XHTML the target tag is depreciated (illegal, gone) unless you’re using frames and the corresponding DOCTYPE. The goal of this attribute is to facilitate linking in frames. A common use of the target attribute is to open a link in a new window, and to do that you set the attribute equal to “_blank”. If you’re using frames you can set it to “_top”,”_self”, or “_parent”, which will replace either the entire window, the same window/frame, or the parent framesetting document. If you’re not using frames you should’t have to mess with much other than “_blank”, so don’t worry about this too much. There is one neat trick you might use though: if you want to open new windows on certain links, but you don’t want to be too intrusive, you can have all your links open in one separate window. The target attribute can refer to windows by name, very useful in a framed setting. However if no window/frame with that frame exists, it will open a new one. So if you gave all your link targets the same name, say “dalink”, the first time someone clicks a link with that target it will open a new window. If they leave that window open, go back to your page, and click on another link with an identical target, instead of opening a brand new window it will reuse the window you’ve already opened. A good example of this (again) is Zeldman.com. Here’s a tricked out example of what we have so far:
<a href="http://www.photomatt.net" title="Photos and thoughts from Matthew Mullenweg" target="_blank">PhotoMatt</a>

Coming soon: Accessibility, It’s All Relative, and Style Notes! Keep your dials locked.