The False Semblance: An Interpretation of Parts 5 & 6 of Marx’s Capital, Vol. I
“I sat in the Sanctuary of the Immaculate Conception
on a hill above Santiago. Many signs said SILENCE. Also,
CAREFUL OF THE PLANTS. I sat on a bench reading
The Revolution of 1936-1939 by the poet Kanafani.
It is 54 years since he wrote the book, brief but shaped
like Black Reconstruction, beginning with chapters called
The Workers, The Peasants, and The Intellectuals, before
the one called Revolution. In Santiago it is four years since
the estaillido social. There is still smoke everywhere and downtown
spontaneous goth style. I sat there with the history and I
sat there with the book like everybody does. The book’s
introduction refers matter of factly to the most advanced form
of political struggle (the armed struggle). The revolution
in Palestine is not over. It is twelve years since the Port of Oakland
which is not over. It is eight years since Standing Rock
which is not over. It is three years since the George Floyd Uprising
which is not over. If you look down from this hillside you can see
that Santiago is a vast city, vaster than you imagined. You can see
there will not be enough water soon. You can see the stadium
where many people were tortured and killed, some of whom were
Victor Jara. It is 50 years and 15 days since the coup
which is not over. Nothing is over, that is the only certainty.
The other certainty is that everything ends, even this.”
— Joshua Clover, “Poem (SEPT 26, 2023)”
There is a parable, for those who have ears to hear it. A landowner goes out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agrees to pay them for the day, and sends them to work. Throughout the day, the landowner continues to go out, finding people in the marketplace doing nothing, for no one has hired them. Each time, the landowner tells them to go to work in his vineyard, and he will pay them what is right. At the end of the day, he calls his foreman and instructs him to pay the workers the agreed upon wages, beginning with the last ones hired. Each worker receives the same pay. A protest emerges, as the workers point out that those who have borne the greater burden of a day’s labor have been made equal to those hired in its twilight. The landowner answers, and defends his right. Did the workers not agree to the compensation beforehand? Does the landowner not have the right to do with his money what he will? May he not be so generous as he desires?
If the Kingdom of Heaven is like the landowner that goes forth, it is the Commune that speaks back to us the translation of his generosity: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” The equality promised by the wage has brought about a new need. If labor is to be recognized as a value, it cannot be its own means of valuation. The one who possesses money has set these workers in motion; they live at his mercy. Yet, that he has recognized their labors as of equal value for inequivalent durations and conditions of work, he has but appropriated the mercy of social labor as his own. When this owner declares his right at the end of the agreed upon time, it has been for the free disposal of the time of each worker according to his will, his benefit. In the work of their own collective body, the workers identify the source of the free time that allows the owner to wander all day, setting more of them into motion with promises of a wage. The new need posed in this moment of collective self-recognition is of the overturning of that very system in which labor’s activity cannot be that of its own. The owner’s right is extinguished in the realization of that very interdependency that brings the vineyard to life.
The promise of a true resurrection lives within the material shell of a crude reanimation. We have come to this point following the dispossessive force of capitalist machinery’s objectification of alienated labor’s production of surplus value. What was once united in the movements of the individual worker is separated into distinct functions, the work of muscle and brain now only united in the labor process. The development of this separation into a hostile antagonism animates a new body coming into being, that of the Collective Worker, comprised of that potential immanent to abstract labor as the social substance of value, the freedom of labor’s creative self-activity in the Totally-Developed Individual created by machinic production’s superfluity of labor. Yet this ceaseless drive in the production of surplus labor-time is enacted in a form that renders the means to its production as an immanent drive to exterminate labor in its excess in relation to capital. Free time is the exclusive property of a class formed by its collective appropriation of it, conditioned by the constant expansion of this Proletariat in its dispossession. The temporality of capitalist production is recognized by the wound of a common loss, the only exclusive property of the Proletariat’s collective body.
This loss is of a time that cannot be regained, the realization of life that cannot be lived that is materialized into a world that affords it no redemption. The science that pursues this potential to be redeemed against the prohibition of its realization has followed time into this point of culmination as the capitalist mode of production’s historical development of a battle that has raged for centuries, and now rages on as the rhythm of daily life. In their ubiquity, capitalist relations of production appear eternal, for what is immortality but ubiquity in time? To unveil these relations, the temporal axes of their objectivity, the production of surplus value had to be investigated. Time is divided, recombined, in order to be transformed, the necessary labor-time for the worker’s reproduction of their labor-power always arrested or reduced for the expansion of their time spent working into surplus labor-time. Yet this time produced with no equivalent is not limitless, though it appears as an infinite opening within definite constraints. In the apparent freedom of labor’s self-activity lies a false promise of eternal life, a living death that enchants and mystifies the surroundings of those walking within it. Though false, we are nevertheless bound to its reality. How may capitalist production’s mutilation of time lived lead us to the recognition of our need to repair the collective body?
We may begin with how surplus value, while expanding the breadth of surplus labor-time, narrows the concept of productive labor. Productivity here has a basis distinct from the mere meeting of hand and object, or being just any moment of the collective worker. It is no longer sufficient when assessing the contributions of each individual worker, for the essence of capitalist production is the production of surplus value, and the productive worker is the one who contributes towards the self-valorization of capital, a specifically social relation of production with a historical origin that stamps the worker as capital’s direct means of valorization. To be a productive worker is a misfortune, a sentence to act out one’s own self-degradation for the enrichment of the capitalist.
This historical origin is reconstructed from surplus value itself. We now know how surplus value can be produced absolutely, through the prolongation of the Working Day, and relatively, through the reduction of necessary labor-time and extension of surplus labor-time within a fixed duration of the Working Day by revolutionizing the relations and conditions of production. The latter presupposes the former, and that the Working Day is already divided into these two parts. While absolute surplus value is capital working upon time as it encounters it, relative surplus value is capital working upon time as an object of production through the organization of the labor processes relations and technical conditions. For the former to arise, only a formal subsumption of the labor process to the dictates and compulsions of capital is required. The usurer or the merchant may exact overwork without changing the form of the relations of the production process. Surplus value emerges before the proper birth of the capitalist mode of production, the real subsumption of labor to capital that begins to spread, proselytizing its revolution with the historical speed of a prairie fire.
Given the reciprocity of their rhythmic presupposition, a semblance of identity seems to form between these two forms of surplus value. While relative surplus value requires and provides the means to prolong the Working Day, absolute surplus value requires and provides the means for the development of labor’s productivity such that surplus labor-time is a consistently present potential. Their difference, however, makes itself known when it comes to the practical question of raising the rate of surplus value, of heightening the degree and intensity of labor-power’s exploitation. With the establishment of the capitalist mode of production, certain conditions will compel definite methods of reducing necessary labor-time or expanding the scope of surplus labor-time. This antagonistic constitution of temporality is present at all times in the capitalist mode of production, for the materiality of time is the social relations of class struggle. It is a condition that spans thousands of years, in different parts of the globe, at varying intensities, and unites the possibility of capitalists, slave-owners, feudal barons, all classes of large-scale landed proprietors alike–that without surplus labor, there can be no free time.
The fetishistic view of the permanence of class begins here, for surplus value appears to have a basis in nature and material need, yet it is in a negative expression: there is no natural obstacle that prevents any one person from lifting the burden of labor from their shoulders and imposing it upon another. A degree of socialization is thus required for surplus labor to arise, the practice at work in which one person recognizes that they have become the condition of existence of an other. The process of confronting the satisfaction of need in the material of nature gives way to the formation of an interdependence of human labor, and it is this that has learned to make a material of nature. The basis of the capital-relation, however, is not that of a gift of nature, but the long history in the development of the social productive powers of labor, the economic soil fo species-being’s encounters with necessity and the available forms of wealth, the forms of production and appropriation that arose from such grounds.
The initial appearance of an exigency for surplus labor arises from the interwoven moments of need’s satisfaction, from nature-bound necessities of material subsistence, to the overcoming of this need by social means, to the creation of new needs in the fulfillment of this procession. There is constancy to the transformation of social forms, a quality that appears inherent to human labor, but loses its semblance of this intrinsic movement of progression in the relief of historical time. It is not labor in-itself, but the form of labor, the self-conscious materiality of social praxis. It makes no sense to say that the most fertile soil is the most conducive to the growth of capitalist production, for this merely presupposes Man’s domination over Nature. Capital is born not in the tropics, but in the temperate zones, in the need to mediate the difference of conditions, and the potential exploitation that emerges within that kind of interdependency of social labor, an inborn vulnerability in the economy of survival. That there be a surplus is not an automatic or natural destiny for production, but a need to produce free-time that emerges from a definite history of social development. Natural conditions only account for the possibility of social labor, not its reality. This reality is the history of the development of its compulsion, a history that remains invisible to Political Economy for what it threatens to reveal of the transience of bourgeois existence.
The compulsion that triggers the recognition of this historical development of labor’s continuity-in-transformation is the determination of value’s magnitudes, the pulse of socially necessary labor-time, one formed of the many heartbeats of individual workers as the Collective Worker. The fragmented sociality of commodity production shapes this pulse into the rhythm of capital’s valorization in labor’s process as one of a union with conditions and means of production from which it has been formally separated. In this form, socially necessary labor-time takes the appearance of an alien force, hidden from the conscious recognition by its producers and exploiters. From within the fetishized appearance of surplus value’s movements, how may those forming its dynamics of social necessity realize their own freedom as the creators of need?
In attending to the changes in the magnitudes of the price of labor-power and in surplus value, Marx takes up a further deconstruction of the axes of capitalist production’s temporality. As the productive worker for capital is defined by their work in relation to the production of surplus value, this worker’s labor is evaluated according to the relation between the value of this labor-power, and the value that this labor-power, when set in motion, will produce. The sale and purchase of labor-power that initiates this process encounters the value of labor-power in its price form, a crystallized moment of the worker’s reproduction that captures a value of the means of subsistence that is habitually required by the average worker of a particular time and place. The variation of this magnitude in relation to surplus value is determined by three circumstances in the temporal constitution of the production process: the length of the Working Day, or the extensive magnitude of labor; the normal intensity of labor, or its intensive magnitude; and the productivity of labor, in which the same quantity of labor yields, in a given time, a greater or lesser quantity of the product, depending on the degree of development and conditions of production.
Marx sets these axes of determination in motion, assessing and naming the laws of motion that emerge from the various combinations of constancy and variability between them all in the constitution of any given process of capitalist production. That the magnitudes of all these temporal determinations are variable brings us closer to what Marx is trying to establish here, which is the primacy of the value of labor-power in the determination of surplus value, that it is ultimately the living conditions and costs of maintaining the worker’s capacity for self-activity from which the capitalist creates their own conditions of existence. The antagonistic constitution of temporality by class struggle satisfies need according to the balance of forces engaged. The ultimate social necessity of surplus value as but a historical, thus transient, form of the product poses a difference of needs in these relations. The reduction of the Working Day to necessary labor-time, i.e. strictly the need of the direct producer, would abolish the capitalist mode of production itself. Yet labor’s emancipatory potential in self-activity is not restricted to this end. While surplus labor-time forms the need of the capitalist class, their claim to free time as the property of bourgeois existence forms a vanishing necessity to the working class, their own need for free time felt in the common condition of its production in their self-activity.
The outrageous squandering of human labor-power that is begotten by the capitalist mode of production is lived as the expanding abyss between life-situations of the worker and the capitalist. The alienated representation of value relations in price pose the possibility of constant falls in labor-power’s relative value, while producing a constant growth in the means of subsistence, all while paling in comparison to the surplus value generated for capital. The augmented survival of the contented worker conceals the degeneracy of their condition. The political economic “science” of the bourgeois is even less capable of apprehending the nature of surplus value, given that it will not penetrate into the temporality of the production process. Where the working class lives the relation between its reproduction and the production of surplus value, political economy considers surplus labor in relation to a working day of a fixed length, insulated as the thought is from the immediate knowledge of overwork. To the capitalist, surplus labor is only understood as an aliquot part of the Working Day, and surplus value only an aliquot part of the value-product. This inability to recognize the temporal variability that constitutes the real degree of the extent of labor’s exploitation arises from the relations of production themselves, as the capitalist is formed in a relation that presupposes the inevitability of the worker’s exclusion from the product. The fact that variable capital is exchanged for living labor-power is concealed by the false semblance of a relation of association, as if the worker and capitalist divide the product in proportion to their different and respective contributions.
The worker, however, lives behind the curtain, below the stage, of this drama of liberal reciprocity. In the claims made to free association, the compulsion to sell their labor-power brings the worker to a declaration of smelling a rat, though they may not yet know where, or how. In the recognition of the capitalist’s profits at their expense, the worker learns how to express the non-reciprocity of this reciprocal antagonism on the terms of its own language of justice. The deferral of their need’s fulfillment by the transformation of necessary labor-time into surplus labor-time finds a popular expression in the declaration that what the capitalist appropriates is the unpaid labor of the worker. The sense of it is found in the fact that the use of labor-power produces a value for the capitalist that costs them nothing in return, setting labor-power in motion without paying for it. Capital is then essentially the command over unpaid labor, all surplus value crystallized formations of unpaid labor-time.
If this is the case, one may begin to wonder: what about the possibility of redress, what form would it take? Better yet, one wonders that if it is so plainly obvious to the workers, then what stands in the way of a more equitable distribution? We are getting closer to the matter, but haven’t yet grasped the full horror of a life sentenced to being a worker. For in selling their labor-power, the worker continually makes a commodity of not only their self, but their capacities, their relations. The praxis of labor’s self-activity engages creation as the incorporation of surplus labor-time into the world it externalizes in its acts, in turn taking within itself the negation of free-time it creates, but cannot live as its own. In forging itself as a commodity, the worker’s need is satisfied only as a definite duration of labor-power, and in exchange the capitalist receives the right to dispose of the capacity as they will. The legal fiction of the contract poses the equivalence of these relations, reflecting the equivalence of time mediated by the monetary appearance of the form of value. No distinction between necessary and surplus labor-time is apparent, standing before each other as these relations are, equal in their difference.
Yet this power of the capitalist to dispose of time disturbs this semblance, and the nature of capital’s freedom can be questioned. If the capitalist only purchases labor-power because they receive in turn a value that is not paid for, then it is realized that this value, if it is to remain capital, cannot be paid. Surplus value is a possibility of definite relations of activity bounded within time, the production of free time through the consumption and disposability of the time of others. For what the capitalist needs of the constant suppression and conversion of the worker’s need into their own, the vanishing necessity of the capitalist can begin to be seen by the worker, for they recognize the perpetuation of their need in the incompleteness of their condition of separation. As a worker, they are to live a life never to be made whole. This recognition alone, however, is common, and very far from being revolutionary. It is a discontent that can inspire cynical and violent reaction just as easily as it can lead us towards a notion of class solidarity. What blockage remains to a revolutionary activity of critique from within these very relations?
This stages the confrontation with the form of the wage, from the form of commodity value’s substance of magnitude in socially necessary abstract labor-time, to this transformation of the value of labor-power into wages. It is the very mystifying language representing our practical forms of being that establishes the starting-point of this moment of investigation. Because the worker’s wages appear as the price of labor, as if a certain amount of money is paid for a certain quantity of labor, people are conditioned to speak of the “value of labor.” Yet the notion of a direct exchange of money, of objectified labor, with living labor would supersede the law of value and capitalist production itself, for an equivalent exchange between labor and the value of the product it produces brings no surplus value, thus no capital. Yet likewise, the worker cannot receive less than what a certain amount of labor-time from them is worth, for equating unequal quantities in this could never practically form a determination that could find expression in a law. This self-destructive contradiction is only resolved in the recognition that we are not dealing here with labor in-itself, but labor in its commodity form, labor-power, for the value of a commodity is not determined by the labor actually objectified in it, but the quantity of living labor necessary to produce it. It is a determination given by social and historical conditions of production, the collective needs mediated in that process of objectification. The variability of its magnitude is the key to the potential to transform its constituent relations.
For it is not labor that directly confronts the capitalist with money on the market, but the worker, the social form of that labor’s appearance, the person of living flesh that must mediate the fulfillment of need in their alienations from the means of its satisfaction. In this form, labor ceases to be the possession of the worker as soon as it begins, and can no longer be sold again, until the end of the duration of its work, and that labor-power is replenished in order to be sold again. Abstract labor is the social substance and immanent measure of value, but does not itself possess a value. To speak of the “value of labor” is to invert the concept of value, to naturalize the relation of the worker, who is not a natural reality, but a social and historical product, a result of a history of struggle over the conditions and organization of social labor’s interdependence in the collective project of satisfying need, itself a nexus of a complex social history of species-being in the milieu of scarcity in which we only live on through the confrontation with our finitude. To be a value is not the destiny of labor, but a moment of capture in time in which the capacity for creative self-activity may yet decide its own fate.
Such an imaginary expression as the “value of labor” arises, however, from the relations of production themselves. As variable capital, the sociality of the worker’s need, the subsistence that is the material determination of their labor-power’s value, is not a fixed quantity. Just as labor’s capacity to simultaneously preserve and transform what it acts upon makes it the decisive element of capital’s process of valorization, so too is this capacity weaponized against it, in the contingency of its subsistence needs in this state of dispossession. The decisive importance of the wage can begin to be understood here, as a function of this relation. The capitalist always makes labor-power work longer than is necessary for the reproduction of its value. In the form of the wage, the distinction between the necessary labor-time of the worker and the surplus labor-time for the capitalist disappears. All labor appears as paid labor. The unpaid labor that the worker can intuit then occasions a more disturbing realization. Perhaps it is the case that this credit that the worker extends to their conditions cannot be redeemed as it is, that they cannot be made whole as they are.
It is in the many different forms of the wage that we develop a notion of the wage-form that does not allow us any escape from this recognition. Marx breaks these down into two general categories for investigation, those of time-wages and piece-wages. Only the attention to the wage-form in its differences of form reveal to us the essence of wage labor. Where time-wages present the sale of labor-power’s duration in the converted form of a daily, weekly, etc. value, piece-wages appear to compensate the worker for the labor expended in the production of a given number of pieces of the product. Between these two forms of appearance is an identity in their differentiation as respective moments in the conversion of labor-time to the value of labor-power, to the price of that commodity that finds expression in the wage. In these forms of appearance, we see how social relations of production organize the exigency of a temporal inertia in the material worked by this labor set in motion.
In the case of time-wages, the social form of abstract labor, in the alienation of its conditions of existence that recognize its social validity in its sale of labor-power, the variability in the constituent axes of surplus value’s temporality see a potential malleability in the price of labor-power: it can be lowered without any appearance of reduction in the daily or weekly wage. Social labor’s interdependence, organized in the geography of the commodity, always reproducing itself and relating as self-valorizing value, means that the cost of reproducing labor-power is perpetually offset by the cheapening of the workers in the production of other workers’ needs. Socially necessary labor-time’s rhythm of valuation treats the value of the commodity labor-power as it does all others, subjecting it to the competitive grinding down of its conditions into a persistent degradation. This is seen in what the fixing of the hourly wage affords the capitalist, as this gives capital the capacity to only pay the worker for the hours in which the boss chooses to employ them. The annihilation of the regularity of employment complements the terror of overwork with the implicit violence of the cessation of work, giving the capitalist the capacity to wring from the worker surplus labor, without allowing them the labor-time necessary for their own subsistence.
The entrepreneurial bent of piece-wages is no more promising to the worker, despite the appearance of being so. While in this case it seems as if the worker is paid for labor already objectified in the product, according to the capacity, ability, and merit of that worker, it is still rather only the quantity of products in which the labor has become embodied during a given time. In the end, the value of a day of labor remains the daily value of labor-power. We have here merely encountered a modified form of the time-wage that still permits the pervasive fraud of capitalists against the working class. The incentive for workers to intensify their own labor and compete against each other in this form renders superintendence superfluous, opening up the doors for middlemen and contracting agencies that take their own share from this hierarchically organized system of exploitation and oppression that emerges from the social relations of the labor market itself. This form, the one most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production, binds the worker’s interest to the conditions of surplus labor-time’s growth, fostering the sense of that worker’s individuality in this, capital’s own form of liberty, one that bases its freedom on a constant war against all to whom one is interdependent upon for the production and maintenance of their conditions of existence.
In that moment of concretization, from labor-time to the wage, from time-wages to piece-wages, capital’s specific relations of temporality cohere into the objectification of the materiality of labor’s praxis. The organized separation of the worker’s moments of reproduction takes shape as a social objectivity of disparate fragments, the exigency of time oriented towards this breaking-apart of the life of the worker. The life of the worker is a life that is never guaranteed. Every sale of labor-power is a risk that even the legal attempt to reproduce labor-power could be denied the satisfaction of this need. The proletarianized worker lives at the mercy of alien forces forged by their own hands and the hands of many others so very like their own. Their subsistence is only granted to them in the form of a threat, coercing the worker’s self-activity to produce an ordering of the world that every day wields the right to kill them. The reciprocity of class struggle’s antagonism is forged by a non-reciprocity of time’s appropriation, as the wage-form enlists the worker to the ranks of their own murderers.
How seldom it is that we notice, then, the cruelty of the notion of a “livable wage.” Its pursuit is a sentence passed down upon the dispossessed, a condemnation to live in the production of time to be lost, and can never be lived again. Even for those that benefit greatly from this submission to surviving within the perpetuation of their exploitation, the happy lives of such better-paid members of the working class will not escape the disgrace of imposing the greater burden of loss onto lesser paid workers, and the humiliation of a life that serves a social stratum who rewards them with nothing that cannot be taken away. The loss is a constitutive moment of the wage, borne within the temporality of practice, as the very reason we are to be valued as we are. It is only a question of whose capacity for surplus labor-time is more cheaply afforded in relation to the potential surplus value they are capable of generating. And the merit of any wage worker’s efforts, no matter how much it costs them of their life, is up for review, can be discarded by the capitalist, after any given cycle of production. The greater share of life is afforded to those workers who most miserably cling to their degradation.
This struggle internal to the Proletariat plays out acutely in the competitive dynamics of labor markets and differentiations in the wages of distinct national populations. Here, the State as a juridical entity appears very directly as emanating from the proprietary social relations of commodity production, consolidating the organization of the form of capital’s valorization. PArticular intensities of social labor cohere into organized averages of social labor’s productivity, intensity, and values of labor-power. The integration of the World Market is a movement comprised of such valuations of social need of pools of labor-time, and the Border a geography formed of this division in the materiality of species-being, a relation of production over who is afforded the right to live a life, their place within the market to which they may claim shares of a life. Imperialism may appear as a grand design of warring states, but its movement is at its core the security of surplus labor-time, the perpetual balance of loyal labor-power at home, and pliant networks of flexible labor markets abroad, enlisting it s domestic sources of exploitation to the fight to convert the lifetimes of foreign workers to labor-time. May they always be so cheaply bought, or may there yet be a hope for redemption within that condition of a life that works to produce unredeemable time?
The wound of this common loss reverberates throughout the practices of the wage as a form of social recognition that only addresses the violence of its origination and organization by rejecting the recognition of what it cannot repair. Though these relations may understand the fact of their exploitation, neither worker nor capitalist may immediately recognize that every possible price of labor contains a definite quantity of unpaid labor. Left to the capitalist mode of production’s terms of freedom and justice as the mediation of Right, the capitalist only grows more monstrous, as the worker gives more of themselves away. The wage is a reproduction with no promise of life’s continuity, a temporal fragmentation of the worker’s life as so many moments of commodified labor-time, incorporating and negating labor’s own negation of separation in praxis as a moment of capital. The worker is broken and scattered, the Collective Working Body so many shattered pieces across time and space. Yet immanent to this individuation is a socialization to be realized, for the tension in the unity of the Totally-Developed Individual’s creative self-activity in the body of the Collective Worker unsettles commodity-individuality from within its own mode of praxis. In the universality of labor, those expelled from the Collective Working Body as surplus to the needs of capital are bound as a common fate forged by those still holding fast to the wage. Only in their unification as the Proletariat will they begin to meet the determination of their need.
Its life at the mercy of a class that forms the freedom of its self-development on the conversion of its lifetime into material for exploitation, the Proletariat forms a mercy of its own in the struggle to abolish the system of wages. In the reduction of the share of the Working Day that is labor-time necessary to their own reproduction is the vanishing necessity of overwork, the potential of time’s liberation as the condition of a free communality of social development, the conscious mediation and satisfaction of the many-sided needs of our species-being, shorn of the excess mass of capacity devoted only to the production of surplus value. The wage system’s generalization is itself an emergent product of labor’s universality, a practical mediation that captures the productive force of class struggle as the deferral of labor’s emancipatory horizon. The socialization of production becomes an imperative of survival, an immanent prospect to be realized against a sociality that conscripts the exploited into their own execution. As the class struggle becomes a conscious revolt against the wage, the essence of capitalist relations of production come to the fore, as the capitalist becomes a murderer, and the Proletarian branded a criminal.
The worker interiorizes this degradation in the externalization of their life’s continuity into broken, disconnected moments, taken apart as if by their own hands. Pride will not often allow us a chance to recognize the futility of what appears to be our only choice of survival. If the Proletariat cannot embrace the necessity of or see the path to its own self-abolition, all manners of illusion will abound of the dignity of its toil. False promises of eternal life run rampant in the pursuit of alleviation from a life sentenced to work, yet these are as ephemeral as the position of temporal coordinates in surplus value’s production. Conditions of social mobility for wage-laborers in one territory of capitalist production will only be afforded by the despoliation of the lives of others in another, more distant territory, and even the well-compensated worker will never rest secure in their conditions of maintained deprivation.
An ethics of resistance thus emerges from the oppression animated by the contradictory movement of capital’s apparent legal reciprocity of freedoms that is afforded only by a non-reciprocity of free time’s appropriation. It is the interdependence of labor’s creation of these conditions of free time that makes necessary a liberation from its alienation, the reconstruction of species-being in the transformation from homo economicus. The Proletariat may yet perform a true resurrection, raising the dead for the freedom we know in the gifts that those lost in struggle made of themselves, a gift that cannot be remunerated by value, but only by the commitment to the emancipation of all as our own. The only wage to demand is that struggle be waged. Let us walk together into the vineyard as our own.