[lbo-talk] Zombie anti-imperialists...

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Thu Sep 9 07:31:07 PDT 2004


James Heartfield wrote:


> I don't see this as depressing as Travis does. That people should
> enjoy some well being does not seem so awful. I don't think there is a
> need to invent problems when there are real ones in the here and now
> to address - such as the war in Iraq, or the assault on civil
> liberties, or the promotion of personal insecurity by states.

In fact, and in contrast to what Marx claims, enjoyment of "some well being" is a prerequisite for the development of the kind of "subject" the transition in question would require. The relation of subjectivity to conditions of life isn't a matter about which nothing is known. The conditions envisaged by Marx as the outcome of the working of the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation" couldn't create the required kind of subjectivity either directly or by producing a revolution whose praxis would do so. Here is one summary statement by Marx of those conditions:


> within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social
> productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the
> individual labourer; all means for the development of production
> transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation
> of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a
> man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy
> every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they
> estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the
> labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it
> as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he
> works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more
> hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into
> working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the
> Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of
> surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every
> extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of
> those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital
> accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must
> grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative
> surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and
> energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more
> firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It
> establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation
> of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the
> same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance,
> brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side
> of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm>

Ted



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list