The Workers Adjucant

A tomato sits and looks at a bottle of ketchup, ketchup looks back at the tomato, the tomato sees a potential future. the ketchup sees its forgotten past. are they not the same? yet at the same time are they not different? there is a dialectic at play here, a negation of identity through an interpretation of the transition of one thing to its opposite.

at the same this challenges the mediation of our perception through the capitalist production process, through the medium of the process of the mechanical creation and commercial distribution of the ketchup, the history of its creation is hidden away, as we associate it with the bottle, the shelf, the market, but through the defiant act of thinking through the movements of its history one unmasks the hidden transformation and the relations involved to show us the truth within the falsity. what is the true essence of ketchup? And what is the subjective factor that has created this new object from its previous forms? When we answer these questions we now are exposed to the event of the ketchups creation, the real origin, history, and reality of the ketchup itself and in that process we are exposed to our own alienation from our labor/being/history/essence.

"...the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself... becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object... the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien" -Karl Marx (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)      Cash rules everything around me, the hook from one of Wu-Tang clan's most popular songs reflects a common ideological phenomenon rooted in the social relations of capitalist production. Many slogans throughout history in popular culture have repeated these particular personifications of inanimate objects, especially currency: money makes the world go round, Money is the root of all evil. Does money have these properties? Can it consciously create the inequality and greed which we attribute to it? Does it rule over society as cold unfeeling despot, or are these misconceptions rooted in an obfuscation of  real social relations between human beings? My answer and the answer provided by Marx is the latter, it is not money which rules society but a specific class of people based on their relations to the forces of production. 

     The illusions which lead one to attribute human properties to the objects produced through these relations between human beings are attributed by Marx to a process he refers to as alienation rooted in what he refers to in capital chapter one section four as the fetishization of commodities. This fetishization is the result of the form of capitalist production where the worker, who is not in control of the means of production (for example machines in a factory) is forced to sell their power to produce (labor) to a capitalist (the owners of the machines, who rather than selling their productive abilities live off of the buying and selling of the labor of the workers), in order to gain the necessities which they need to survive and reproduce themselves (food, shelter, clothing, etc).

     The capitalists monopoly on the means of production puts the individual worker is in a very weak position to bargain the means through which this exchange will occur. This fact results in the capitalist extracting the largest amount of the product of the labor done by the worker possible while returning only what little portion of the value created by this worker is necessary for them to maintain their ability to continue to sell their labor, while keeping the majority of the value of the production (what Marx refers to as surplus value) for themselves as profit. Through this process the worker is divorced from the products of their labor, and receive only an impersonal commodity (currency), through which to secure products for use in their reproduction and subsistence 

     Due to the impersonal nature of the relations of work under capitalism the individual workers see as the interface of this exchange the machines and the commodities more than the individual capitalists whom they are working for, Paul D'amato explains that "because the aim of production is profit rather than human need, the products of past labor--the machinery and materials, controlled by the capitalists--completely dominate living labor. Workers are literally slaves to the machine and the work process. It controls them, rather than the other way around."(D'amato 2003). Since the product the worker receives for their labor is not a product for use (as it was in earlier forms of barter and exchange), but for exchange alone (modern currency) this mystifies the relation even more than in previous systems, D'amato explains "In a modern capitalist society, where everything can be and is bought and sold, money's historical origins are invisible. Its existence appears to be a power independent of human will."(D'amato, 2005) From the perspective of the worker money divorces the process of labor and social relations between workers and capitalist from the realization of value. This process paints the determination of value as a relation between objects. Marx describe this process saying that, "The character of having value,when once impressed upon products, obtains [stability] only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the [workers]. To [the workers], their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.." (Marx, Capital Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 4)

    Since the labor seems to be mediated by commodities (products created primarily for exchange) for which value seems to the worker to be dictates as relations between objects rather than relations between workers and capitalists in the production of said objects, the worker sees these objects as having a power of their own. The real source of this power, of the realization of value lies not within the objects but the greater social relations involved in their creation. Cash does not rule everything around us, A class of people rule everything around us, and the role of commodities as an intermediary in the relations of the workers and this class of capitalists hides from the workers their role in the creation of value and reproduction of their own conditions of exploitation. In order to free ourselves themselves from domination they need to recognize rulers not as impersonal objects but the class that, through their ownership of the means of production and subsistence, hold the power to extract surplus labor as profits and use it to reinforce conditions of servitude. To break the cycle of alienation and exploitation D'amato and Marx agree that workers must come together collectively to "abolish their separation from ownership and control of the means of production, and to use that control to abolish the market and replace it with conscious planning for human need." (D'amato, 2003) Individually we have little power to break through the alienation and ideological haze created by our conditions but as a conscious mass, organized and disciplined, we can overcome. Workers are the foundation on which this exploitative system rests, together we have the power to bring it to a halt.