Gewerke

Gray, obtuse, dangerous, they want to impose their scale on the world: gray, obtuse, dangerous.  The totalitarian society of capital lives on the monotonous repetition of the exilant. It serves the owners, the cops, the judges. None of them are indispensable to the structure they serve.  They make a life of shit the only model of life possible.  But communism is young and beautiful.

 Too put it simply, function and mechanism of this domination - appearence of the capital as “natural laws of production” - is similar to what we can see in religion - holyness, sacralization, apperance of the capitalist relations as something not not only natural, but also holy and sacred.   The analogy between the dominance of the economy and the religious inversion of subject and object is drawn by Marx himself, not only in his early writings, but also in manuscripts from the 1860s: “As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand”. This analogy is really Feuerbachian and takes a lot from his definition of religion as “Selbstentfremdung”/ “ self-estrangement” - a power that duplicates the current reality “into a religious, imaginary world, and a secular [weltliche] one.”  The power of value is thus understood as the sacralization of social structures, leading to the transformation of the latter into an ‘alien power’ confronting the members of society. The power of capital is accordingly not to be understood as the domination of one class by another, but as “the self-domination of labour”. As Postone put it in his “Time, Labor and Social Domination”: “domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute. Marx sought to grasp this form of abstract, structural domination – which encompasses, and extends beyond, class domination – with his categories of the commodity and capital. (…) the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by capitalists of the surplus product and the means of production; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself”  The form of power implied by the value form is characterised as abstract, thing-like,impersonal and structural. It is abstract because capital is the self-referential movement of materialised real abstractions like the money and commodities. It is “impersonal” because this power does subject people to a specific person or a specific group of people, but to capital as ‘the automatic subject’. Concrete people are only the personifications of social functions. It is thing-like in the sense that it is the movement of things – commodities and money – on the market that rule over people. It is structural, because this power is a consequence of the basic social structure of production in capitalism, i.e. the fact that production takes place privately and independently and is mediated through the market.  This is opposed to the predominant forms of power in pre-capitalist modes of production, which primarily took the form of direct, ‘extra-economic’ coercion and relations of personal dependence. The slave or the feudal peasant was entangled in networks of personal dependence upheld by (the threat of) violence, whereas the ‘free labourer’ in capitalism is ruled by a system of economic abstractions.