A critical examination of Kevin Carson’s Mutualism (Part Five)
“…an ingredient in someone’s soup.” –Rod Serling
According to Carson the arguments of the Anarcho-Capitalist and Marxist variants of critical communist theory identify a movement of large-scale, organized capital to obtain its profits through state intervention into the economy, although the regulations entailed in this project are usually sold to the public as progressive restraints on big business, which creates, “a system of industrial serfdom in which politically connected capitalist interests exploit workers and consumers through the agency of the state.”
It should have been obvious to Carson at the outset that this argument by Anarcho-Capitalism and Marxism was always suspect, since it is just a simplistic inversion of the argument of “mainline ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’” that the Fascist State acts to restrain “the power of big business” by means of “Progressive and New Deal programs forced on corporate interests from outside, and against their will.” It doesn’t take any particular genius to see that the social class most advantaged by existing political relations might find it in their interest to portray these relations, not as advantages, but as limitations or constraints on their social power. That, this realization should be seen as an analytical accomplishment in the 21st Century is not just curious on its face, it is a commentary on the pathetic state of critical communist theory.
The simplistic mirror imaged world view of the conservative and liberal pundits is mirrored again in the simplistic conclusions of its Anarcho-Capitalist and Marxist critics, and the superficial analysis of the critical camp as a whole is itself merely the mirror image of the superficial analysis of the mainstream camp. The common conclusion of both critics and the mainstream is that the State is the autonomous author of political-economy, and economic players merely act out a script that emerged full blown from the central plan of society’s general manager. All agree — to one extent or another — that the role of the Fascist State has nothing at all to do with the relation between capitalists and the wage laborers as antagonistic poles of Capital and absolutely dependent for their existence as opposing classes on this relation. On this basis, Carson argues there is no antithesis between property and labor as such — that wage labor can coexist with property, if the State, which dominates both in the interest of monopoly, is abolished.
Kevin Carson’s attempt to synthesize the arguments of Anarcho-Capitalism and Marxism was always a fool’s errand. He produces a mash up of a critique of Capital from the viewpoint of the capitalist and from the viewpoint of the laborer, when what was really called for from him is a critique of capitalist labor itself — of the relation between these two classes and the implications this relationship has on the emergence and development of the Fascist State. We are led to believe that the relation between property and wage labor is entirely innocuous save for Fascist State intervention. Thus, Carson makes the assertion that wage labor can exist in a non-exploitative society without ever investigating the nature of wage labor itself as a historical social form. He essentially treats the worker as a self-owned commodity and applies to the labor market the same analysis he applies to the market in shoes.
Is this possible? Marx, who before he even begins to consider the commodity in circulation, and before he considers it as an essential element of the capitalist mode of production, takes the time to consider the commodity in its own right as an object. He begins by noting that every commodity has a two-fold character — that, for the producer, it satisfies no need for her and exists for her only as an object to be exchanged, a social use value. Without these two together, it is not a commodity:
A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.) Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.
Understand what is going on here in Marx’s analysis: the commodity has no usefulness to the individual producer, but it must have a usefulness for others. This appears altogether benign in relation to object like a sack of potatoes or shoes (although, as I will show, even here Marx argues it is surprisingly malignant) but, in relation to the human capacity to labor, it implies her productive capacities are entirely useless to her. Her own body is not her self, but a detachable object that exists only to be exchanged for money. Before he even begins to consider this object in the context of the capitalist mode of production, and its vital role in this mode, Marx has already demonstrated how for the laborer her own qualities as a human being no longer exists for her except as means. And, to be absolutely clear on this point, throughout all of Capital, labor power is the only commodity Marx is discussing — even when he uses quantities of coats and tons of iron as his practical examples. In his dry sarcastic academic style Marx is painstakingly describing precisely what it means to reduce a human being to a commodity.
He is discussing the capitalist mode of production and he is only speaking of the inherent qualities of the commodity that is specific to this mode of production — qualities it shares with other commodities, but which have quite unique results when applied to this one in particular. The pathetic abortion that passes for Marxism has no inkling of this fact. And, Carson, because he uncritically accepts the assumptions of the Marxist and Anarcho-Capitalist analyses of the capitalist mode of production, never ventures into an analysis of labor power on his own. As a result he offers nothing new in this regard, and fails to address the critical objection raised by Marx to the very idea that human capacities can simply be treated as another commodity for sale. Instead we get from Carson only that the value of this commodity consists in what it can be compelled to produce:
“[T]he natural wage of labor in a free market is its full product…”
The only thing differentiating one set of human capacities from another are not the uniquely human desires and wants of the individuals concerned, nor how these unique desires and wants are expressed in their activities, but the impersonal exchange value contained in each as expressed in so many ounces of gold. Thus, human beings can be compared to each other as one might compare linen and coats. This corrosive force, introduced into our very concept of what it means to be a human being by the capitalist mode of production and exchange, is never examined by Carson — as it is never examined by the Anarcho-Capitalist or the Marxist, nor by mainstream political-economy — but generally accepted among both apologists and critics of capitalist society as a fact.
This brings us to the refutation of Eugen Duhring by Frederick Engels — and to Carson’s objection to the views expressed by Engels in this debate:
Engels, to render the Marxian theory consistent (and to deflect the strategic threat from the market socialists mentioned above), was forced to retreat on the role of force in primitive accumulation. (And if we take his word on the importance of Marx’s input and approval during his writing of Anti-Dühring, Marx himself was guilty of similar backpedalling). In Anti-Dühring, Engels vehemently denied that force was necessary at any stage of the process; indeed, that it did little even to further the process significantly.
Every socialist worker [like every British schoolboy?]… knows quite well that force only protects exploitation, but does not cause it; that the relation between capital and wage labour is the basis of his exploitation, and that this arose by purely economic causes and not at all by means of force [emphasis added].
This raises the question of to what extent the legal system is presupposed in even “purely economic” relations, and whether more than one “purely economic” state of affairs is possible, depending on the degree of such state involvement. For example, are combination laws, laws of settlement, and laws on the issuance of credit without specie backing essential to the process of free exchange itself, or only to the capitalist character of such exchange?
Engels stated the case in even more absolute terms later on, denying that force was necessary (or even especially helpful, apparently) at any stage of the process.
…even if we exclude all possibility of robbery, force and fraud, even if we assume that all private property was originally based on the owner’s own labour, and that throughout the whole subsequent process there was only exchange of equal values for equal values, the progressive development of production and exchange nevertheless brings us of necessity to the present capitalist mode of production, to the monpolization of the means of production and the means of subsistence in the hands of a numerically small class, to the degradation into propertyless proletarians of the other class, constituting the immense majority, to the periodic alternation of speculative production booms and commercial crises and to the whole of the present anarchy of production. The whole process can be explained by purely economic causes; at no point whatever are robbery, force, the state or political interference of any kind necessary.
You can see Carson’s brain smoking here. How can exploitation occur when obviously the value of wages must be equal to the value of its product — yet, as a practical matter it does not? Indeed these are Engels words, and, moreover, they are fully consistent with the conclusions reached by Marx in his analysis — indeed Marx himself contributed an entire section to Engels polemic against Duhring. But, even if Marx had not made such a contribution, Engels words stand on their own as an exemplary piece of historical materialist argument. So let’s parse Engels argument.
Is Engels denying the role of force in history? Obviously not. He explicitly states force has been employed to enforce existing social relations throughout history, and that the capitalist mode of production was no exception to this role. So, although differing on a lot of fundamentals with Kevin Carson, Marx and Engels did not differ much with him on the historical record of the State; which is what makes the points on which they differ both significant, yet entirely beside the point: Kevin Carson believes exploitation cannot happen without the State; however, Marx and Engels are discussing an altogether different subject!
To do this, they document a number of then known instances where pre-capitalist forms of private property emerges without State action directly out of communal ownership. Engels shows how, in documented cases, the commons themselves were dissolved through the emergence of commodity production. Private property emerges spontaneously, and without any action by the State — gradually the commons is converted into a community of small-holders because the members see a material advantage to the dissolution of the commons:
Private property by no means makes its appearance in history as the result of robbery or force. On the contrary. It already existed, though limited to certain objects, in the ancient primitive communities of all civilised peoples. It developed into the form of commodities within these communities, at first through barter with foreigners. The more the products of the community assumed the commodity form, that is, the less they were produced for their producers’ own use and the more for the purpose of exchange, and the more the original spontaneously evolved division of labour was superseded by exchange also within the community, the more did inequality develop in the property owned by the individual members of the community, the more deeply was the ancient common ownership of the land undermined, and the more rapidly did the commune develop towards its dissolution and transformation into a village of smallholding peasants. For thousands of years Oriental despotism and the changing rule of conquering nomad peoples were unable to injure these old communities; the gradual destruction of their primitive home industry by the competition of products of large-scale industry brought these communities nearer and nearer to dissolution. Force was as little involved in this process as in the dividing up, still taking place now, of the land held in common by the village communities [Gehöferschaften] on the Mosel and in the Hochwald; the peasants simply find it to their advantage that the private ownership of land should take the place of common ownership. Even the formation of a primitive aristocracy, as in the case of the Celts, the Germans and the Indian Punjab, took place on the basis of common ownership of the land, and at first was not based in any way on force, but on voluntariness and custom. Wherever private property evolved it was the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the interest of increased production and in furtherance of intercourse—hence as a result of economic causes. Force plays no part in this at all. Indeed, it is clear that the institution of private property must already be in existence for a robber to be able to appropriate another person’s property, and that therefore force may be able to change the possession of, but cannot create, private property as such.
Engels is not here discussing hypothetical scenarios of exploitation; rather he is discussing actual evidence from documented research of contemporary scientists into historical and contemporary communities. Moreover, he was an acknowledged expert in his on right on the subject he is discussing. In this research, he notes, there is compelling evidence to support the hypothesis that pre-capitalist private property spontaneously emerged from communal ownership, disintegrating this ownership, not due to force and violence, but due to the material advantages it offered over communal ownership. To what in this argument can Carson possibly object? Is Engels distorting or fabricating the research of these scientists? Is he spinning this evidence in a way that throws the best light on his own hypothesis? Is he concealing other exculpatory evidence that proves these communities broke, not on their own volition, as Engels states, but due to the force and violence of previously undisclosed players? This is a pure and simple presentation of the historical record, which cannot be refuted simply by dismissing it out of hand — as Duhring does — but must be met with equally persuasive evidence to the contrary, or with evidence Engels is making an erroneous interpretation of the facts.
Nowhere does Carson offer any such evidence.
The separation of the laborer from the objective conditions of labor is by no means accomplished all in one leap as Carson would have us believe, but is a process lasting thousands of years, beginning with the dissolution of the early human communities founded on common ownership. The emergence of commodity production and exchange, and private property with it, directly out of the commonly held property of the community was the initial step by mankind on the long road leading to the complete separation of the laborer from the means of production — an act only finally completed with Capital, when the laborer herself is turned into a commodity. True, in its earliest moment of development, this separation is only rudimentary; however, in a community founded on common ownership of the means of production, all members had access to all of these commonly owned means. The separation of the producer from the means of production begins exactly with the division of this common property into private hands, when the individual’s access to the now privately held property of the community can only take place on the basis of exchange. The individual is now in possession of his own individual means of production, but he is, by the same token, severed from the greater portion of the total communal means of production which now are the property of other members of the community. On the one hand, with the disintegration of the community, the total communal means of production is now divided into privately held properties, and, on the other hand, the producers are themselves divided from the mass of total communal means. This world historical separation, of course, is simply the outcome of a process that begins with the producer’s own act of commodity exchange — an act which is nothing less than a separation of the individual act of labor from satisfaction of the needs of the producer.
Engels is not discussing exploitation; he is discussing how society itself, and our conception of ourselves as human beings, is being transformed by the way we go about our productive lives. A transformation that, as I will discuss in the final part of this series, culminates in the emergence of a completely unique circumstance: exploitation based entirely on equal exchange of value within the world market.
12:05 am
Understand what is going on here in Marx’s analysis: the commodity
has no usefulness to the individual producer, but it must have a
usefulness for others. This appears altogether benign in relation to
object like a sack of potatoes or shoes (although, as I will show, even
here Marx argues it is surprisingly malignant) but, in relation to the
human capacity to labor, it implies her productive capacities are
entirely useless to her. Her own body is not her self, but a detachable
object that exists only to be exchanged for money.
I’m not sure I understand this. Let’s take an example.
Suppose I am a research scientist working for BigPharmaCo, and I
exchange my labor developing a new drug for a pay and benefits package. I
figure out some new chemical compound that is not directly useful to me
at this time, nor is it even directly useful to BigPharmaCo management.
BigPharmaCo will sell it to people to whom it is extremely useful a
life-saving treatment.
Now is this passage above saying that I have somehow devalued myself by
pioneering a lifesaving drug for others simply because I can’t use it
myself at this time and chose to accept pay and benefits in exchange for
the usefulness that I passed along to others?
4:10 am
No, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that you were not you
at the time of the discovery, but a form of capital. Before you began
working, you had already sold yourself, i.e., transferred ownership of
your capacities to your employer. If you had developed the discovery on
your own, you would not have become a commodity, but your discovery
would have when you sought to sell it. We normally think this is of no
consequence, but, in fact, it is of great consequence — the full impact
of which does not appear relevant because our concept of who we are as a
human being has undergone a profound alteration. This concept now
assumes we are still “free” even though we have, in fact, sold ourselves
into slavery. So, what is being sold here: you or your discovery? In
your example, you are being sold, and, later, the company sells its drug
— to which discovery you may have or may not have contributed.
On the other hand, the drug itself is a commodity because it was not
developed by you for your own use. It was developed to be sold. The
intention from the beginning was that it would be sold, not used by you.
Of course, a farmer might eat his own lettuce, but he is not in the
business of farming to grow food for himself, he is in the business of
growing lettuce to sell to others. An group of auto workers are not
building a car for their own use, but building it to be sold. They may
very well buy one, but the company is not building cars for them in
particular, but for the automobile market. Whether or not the farmer
eats a head of his lettuce or an auto worker buys one of the cars she
helped build does not alter the fact they are not the intended customers
of their activity — they are producing their products to be sold.
4:32 am
Do you consider the farmer to have sold himself into slavery to the lettuce consumer? I ask because I guess I’m trying to figure out what kind of livelihood you consider acceptable for the human condition, and how that is different from nonacceptable ones.
I never considered myself sold into slavery when I worked in Dilbertland as Alice, the engineer. I did it for as long as I felt the benefits outweighed the negative aspects, and then I quit when I decided that changed. Nobody tracked me down and dragged me back to force me to continue working. There were things I was instructed to do while I worked there which I felt were wrong, and I refused to do them without any major consequences. I was on very rare occasions the target of unwanted behavior from coworkers, and I put a stop to it quickly by making clear that it was unacceptable.
So I am not clear on how I was a slave to begin with, but beyond that, I’m not clear how I was any more a slave than the lettuce farmer who sells me a head of lettuce is a slave to me.
4:20 pm
Okay, let me try to address this. If I get it wrong, it is because I am absorbing this stuff only a little ahead of describing what I have absorbed to you:
So, let’s take the farmer out of the discussion altogether — he smells of manure and is only confusing things.
Engels’ argument in the piece is that the road to wage slavery begins with the simple practice of making goods in order to exchange them for the goods of another person — as in barter between neighboring family groups. This is the first step, and there is more to it than is commonly imagined: Now, you are not working to fulfill your own needs and the needs of your family group, but working to fulfill the needs of another family group, provided they offer something in return.
So, in the beginning, you do not sell yourself directly, but only sell the result of your activity. This process ends, after many thousands of years, with you having been converted into the commodity that you now sell. But, and this is important, he is not viewing this pejoratively, i.e., he is only spelling out the process. This is because the other side of this process is your conception of yourself: “you” as a product of your activity is being developed by this. “You” in the ancient community is defined by the family group and the immediate surroundings; by the end of this process, “you” has been converted into a universal “you” — a being with global ties to a complete humanity.
This shift, because it happens subtly over a thousand or more generations, is not apparent to us, nor our conscious intent — it sneaks up on us, and is surrounded by superstition and myth-making regarding the process taking place — we are nomads, then rulers, then the conquered, then peasants, slaves etc., then citizens, and so forth. Each of these identities appear not only consecutively, but also have a cumulative impact — so older forms of identities get imposed on newer modes of life; and newer modes of life appear as the necessary result of older forms of identity. All this historical stew gets quite jumbled.
In any case, “who we are” at any point can only be determined by unsorting all this overlapping levels of historical crap. It is not so simple as accepting our received knowledge, since this received knowledge is itself a product of historical development.
So, we begin with unfettered ties within the family group, in which everything is freely available to us, but what is available is very limited — a primitive communism. As history progresses, our access to what is available is progressively less free, but, at the same time, more things are available to us and the community to which we have ties solely through the exchange of products gets more and more extensive.
On the one hand, the range within which we operate freely and have free access to what is available is reduced; on the other hand, the world of things we can access only on the basis of reciprocal exchange greatly increases, both geographically (I guess that is the right word) and in terms of the available wealth. We are simultaneously individually impoverished AND presented with a world of wealth in quantities unimaginable in former times.
In the model Marx and Engels are using, eventually this must give rise to a new communism: this time not founded on limited means and local geography, but on the basis of greatly enhanced means, and global range. The historical task of completing this process, surprisingly, falls not to the working class, but to Capital. The working class’ role in their model is only to acquire a consciousness of this new possibility and realize it in practice.
6:22 pm
Let’s focus on this for a minute, which is where I start to lose you.
So, in the beginning, you do not sell yourself directly, but only
sell the result of your activity. This process ends, after many
thousands of years, with you having been converted into the commodity
that you now sell. But, and this is important, he is not viewing this
pejoratively, i.e., he is only spelling out the process. This is because
the other side of this process is your conception of yourself: “you” as
a product of your activity is being developed by this. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by this, but I feel like I have a vague sense. Does this have something to do with how people at cocktail parties ask each other when introduced, “So, what do you do?” as if you are your job?
“You” in the ancient community is defined by the family group and the immediate surroundings; by the end of this process, “you” has been converted into a universal “you” — a being with global ties to a complete humanity.
I don’t understand this part, maybe because I don’t quite get what you mean by “you”. I guess I take more of a Virginia Satir-like view in that I believe I own myself and that I engineer (her term) or define (your term) myself. I think I am influenced to some extent- sometimes more than others- by outside people and circumstances, but I don’t feel defined by them.
And I have over the years purposely tried to develop myself more in the direction of becoming a being with global ties to a complete humanity. I see that as a good thing, but I get the impression here that the suggestion is that this is a bad thing? I don’t quite get that.
8:12 pm
The individual in Marx’s model is determined by her connection to other individuals — not in the direct (or vulgar) sense of who we directly associate with, but in the sense we become this vast array of interrelationships on which we depend for our lives — even when we don’t know we depend on them — we are a networked community of individuals.
We do not make ourselves, but are made by others. We do not “engineer” ourselves, others engineer us; this process is not conscious. So, no — you do not “own” yourself, but are “owned” by the community. You implicitly recognize this collective enslavement by earning a living with a job. If, despite this, we imagine ourselves to be self-owners, it is only because we have some limited choice on how to be enslaved — a janitor versus an engineer. And where: McDonald’s or Wal-Mart. And, within obvious limits, for what compensation. While we can choose how or where to be be slaves, we cannot opt out of the slave relationship altogether except as a society. We are utterly dependent on each other to end this collective self-enslavement.
If this appears to be untrue, of course, it is untrue only because you can individually “decide” to withdraw and live a crude life off the grid. So, to that extent it is not true, until you need toilet paper. What keeps us in the system of collective slavery is that it beats the alternative — wiping our butts with leaves.
10:17 pm
We do not make ourselves, but are made by others. We do not
“engineer” ourselves, others engineer us; this process is not
conscious.I think that at most I would agree that we engineer ourselves and others, to varying degrees, engineer us. The above statement seems to take individual free will off the table altogether. Is that an accurate reading?
11:46 am
When you “engineer” yourself, you only use the materials made available to you by the existing state of society. So, for instance, you educate yourself, form associations, heal yourself, using those materials already in existence. Beyond this, who you are is also the end result of conditions surrounding your upbringing. This does not in any way deny free will; it simply says this will is historically determined. It actually proposes ever increasing freedom of individual choice, since the options available to her increase with the development of society itself. To arrive at truly free will, however, these conditions, which are the objective material of the individual’s own self-development, must themselves be subject to her own will. This latter condition can only be achieved, according to Marx’s theory, in free voluntary association with other producers. So, in Marx’s theory, communism is not the aim, but the means for individual self-development.
7:26 pm
He is not concerned with “knowing” the answer, but with changing
Even when, as now, ending your
historical circumstances.If Marx is not concerned with knowing what is and is not ethical, how does he know how (or to what circumstances) he wants to change historical circumstances? I mean, when I am consciously doing something or trying to make some change, ethics are part of the basis for what I am trying to do or change. If I didn’t take ethics into account in making those decisions, I would make a lot different decisions. I’d probably take a lot more 2 by 4s to people’s heads, for example.
self-enslavement depends on a change in concsci0ousness on a mass scale,
how is this to be achieved? By waiting for this change, or becoming
part of it?I agree that consciousness-raising is usually necessary in bringing about change, but it doesn’t seem sufficient alone. Let us say that I accept the idea that I am self-enslaved. Okay, now what? Because in my view, I’m less concerned about the label we put on whatever condition I’m in right now because I think this is basically right:They will generally do what offers a material advantage for them.It may not matter much what I allegedly am now, if for completely unrelated reasons I’m interested in going wherever it is that you’re pointing. Now, if I DIDN’T want to go where you’re pointing, then you might need to convince me that what I am now makes it desirable to go in that direction. But either way, I do need to know where you’re pointing in order to go there.For example, if you want me to eat spinach, you can convince me that I’m spinach-deficient and therefore need to eat spinach. But if I do not believe that I am spinach-deficient, you could also convince me that spinach is delicious and entice me to eat spinach that way. Either way, I’d be eating spinach. If the desired end result is for me to eat spinach, it doesn’t matter that I never bought into the idea that I was spinach-deficient to begin with.
2:04 pm
Unfortunately, you are making individual arguments, while Marx is making an argument regarding society as a whole. We have fallacy of composition here. What is true for each individual does not necessarily hold for all of us together. As a society we need not have an ethics since it is only a historically developed category in which whatever now exists appears ethical. However, society obviously does not arrive at a given ethics and stop developing. Taken as a mass, society has no ethics — for philosophers, ethics is arrived at by observing relations in society. The philosopher is only seeing what exists and saying “this is ethical.”
That fact is, no one takes ethics into account when they act; they merely appeal to an ethics to justify or rationalize their behavior. We act empirically — in response to our environment. You are correct to imply accepting that you are self-enslaved does not have any impact on your slavery. Whatever the conditions under which you have to operate, you first must satisfy basic biological needs. Only after this can this discovery that you are a slave concern you. The existing social relations thus tend toward a level of existence where your only concern is satisfaction of these basic biological needs.
Finally, the point here is not that you go where someone else is pointing, nor what they have to do to convince you to go there, but where you would go if you were entirely free of social and natural encumbrances and able to choose where to go. Marx did not offer any blueprint, he only tried to explain the dynamics that made the current society unsustainable and headed toward its inevitable demise. A lot of people miss this essential element of his works.
From Marx’s standpoint, if someone is elaborating a model of a new society, most likely they are wrong.
2:14 am
That fact is, no one takes ethics into account when they act; they merely appeal to an ethics to justify or rationalize their behavior. We
act empirically — in response to our environment.
I agree that we do act empirically. I do not agree that nobody takes ethics into account when they act. Ethics are part of our “environment” so if we are acting in response to our environment, that does not rule out that we are, in part, taking ethics into account.
6:32 pm
I study him because he provokes such interesting questions as I bring to light in the last piece here: namely, why are workers absolutely complicit in their own exploitation. Every activist tries to avoid this question because, in the end, it appears to doom their activity. In it is the explanation of everything from wars of aggression to the Tea Party and Obama supporter. And, it is not pretty.
7:41 pm
namely, why are workers absolutely complicit in their own exploitation.
I get a sort of fatalist vibe from all of our discussions with regard to the answer to that question. You seem to be saying that we have no choice or ability to do anything but be used by those around us and in turn use them without consideration to ethics or anything much beyond other than increased material benefit to ourselves. Is that a reasonably accurate reading of what you’re trying to convey, or no?
12:20 am
There is no reason to feel fatalist about this. We now know what we are up against, at least from Marx’s viewpoint. What is frustrating is fighting the beast and not understanding why the beast gets stronger the more society descends in the cesspool and filth of exploitation.
3:54 am
Interesting perspective. It sounds like you take comfort from the idea that we can’t fix things because, through no fault of our own, this is the only way they could go.
I, on the other hand, find that a truly depressing thought.
Assuming things like death and lawsuits don’t result, when something goes wrong, I usually hope it was something I mucked up rather than someone else. My theory is that if I screwed it up, and I figure out that I screwed it up, I can most likely fix it. If someone else screwed it up, they will probably have to be involved in fixing it if not do it entirely themselves which means I am at their mercy and their ability and willingness to do so is suspect! 
5:30 pm
Kirsten,
I am saying the exact opposite of what you are taking away from the conversation: Change is possible, but we first must acknowledge and identify the material advantage provided by existing relations. As Kevin points out, this material advantage need not be identical with the exploitation that occurs with it. Success consists of making a clear distinction between the two.
8:17 pm
Me, not Marx: Since this situation is clearly so offensive that it is the source of all conflict on the planet. It should not be tolerated any more than it is absolutely necessary. The Fascist State consists entirely of an attempt to extend this awful situation beyond it natural limit.
4:46 am
And thinking about this a little bit more:
We normally think this is of no consequence, but, in fact, it is of
great consequence — the full impact of which does not appear relevant
because our concept of who we are as a human being has undergone a
profound alteration.I have a totally undefined sense that this resonates with me on some level, but I’m not sure why. Specifically how do you see our concept of who we are as a human being having been altered? In other words, what it was, what it is, and how you think it went from point A to point B?
11:14 pm
No, I am not saying that. What I am saying is that you were not you at the time of the discovery, but a form of capital. Before you began working, you had already sold yourself, i.e., transferred ownership of your capacities to your employer. If you had developed the discovery on your own, you would not have become a commodity, but your discovery would have when you sought to sell it. We normally think this is of no consequence, but, in fact, it is of great consequence — the full impact of which does not appear relevant because our concept of who we are as a human being has undergone a profound alteration. This concept now assumes we are still “free” even though we have, in fact, sold ourselves into slavery. So, what is being sold here: you or your discovery? In your example, you are being sold, and, later, the company sells its drug — to which discovery you may have or may not have contributed.
On the other hand, the drug itself is a commodity because it was not developed by you for your own use. It was developed to be sold. The intention from the beginning was that it would be sold, not used by you. Of course, a farmer might eat his own lettuce, but he is not in the business of farming to grow food for himself, he is in the business of growing lettuce to sell to others. An group of auto workers are not building a car for their own use, but building it to be sold. They may very well buy one, but the company is not building cars for them in particular, but for the automobile market. Whether or not the farmer eats a head of his lettuce or an auto worker buys one of the cars she helped build does not alter the fact they are not the intended customers of their activity — they are producing their products to be sold.