Origins of Bourgeois Individualism - Part 5

Workers against capital: Living labour totally separated or alienated from the means of production
owned by capitalists with the sole aim to extend the political command of the dead objectified
labour of workers through the expansion of the working population. The separation or alienation
of living labour from the means of production means that in order for it to reproduce itself it must
be rewarded with monetary wages, with abstract value so that living labour itself may be
reduced to abstract labour or labour power. This trans!mutation of living labour into abstract
labour is entirely fictitious, except in the politico!institutional terms made possible by the
separation of living labour from the means of production"
#t is because bourgeois economics refuses, as it must, to acknowledge the violence of the wage
relation that it must also deny the theoretical and institutional role of money in its scientific
analysis. $ourgeois economics is therefore met with a dilemma: on one hand, it needs to present
the capitalist economy as an objective process that can be observed and controlled
scientifically and that is subject to economic laws. %n the other hand, bourgeois economics
must leave the economic system, its mathematical and scientific necessity, open to the
possibility of free choice in the determination of market prices for the allocation of social
resources, to allow for the possibility of profits &for these would be impossible in a Walrasian
system of simultaneous exchange in pure competition', and for the undeniable disturbances or
crises to which the capitalist system falls regularly and cyclically victim through political
interference with the self!regulating free market mechanism.
$ourgeois economic theory models the &capitalist' economy in such a way that crises can
occur only as exogenous disturbances that cause dis!e(uilibria. )(ually, its ideology of pure
and free exchange through competitive behaviour makes it impossible for it to theorise the
existence of value and therefore of profits and thence, above all, of capitalist accumulation
and growth. *rowth is utterly incompatible with bourgeois economic analysis because its
ideology of e(uivalence all but prevents it. The (uestion arises then: how is it possible for
economic agents or market participants in such a mathematically!determined system to be and
act like individuals in the free market+ ,ow indeed are disturbances, crises, externalities
and profit and growth at all possible once the economic system has reached a position of
e(uilibrium+ #n short, how is economic science compatible or consistent with the existence of
economic decisions taken by free individuals+
$ourgeois economics must posit the freedom of the individual, even as an economic agent in a
system that is scientifically determined. -s we have seen, the freedom of the individual is a
necessary precondition for the fiction of wage labour, of living labour as separate from the
means of production and from the co!operative labour process or social labour that can then
be measured and paid with money wages as individual labour or abstract labour or labour
power. $ut the very social antagonism that the wage relation generates and foments between
living labour and capital means also that different capitals are in rivalry with one another over the
access to markets &social resources' and living labour. #t is this inter!capitalist rivalry that
re(uires political mediation by a collective capitalist that can act in the interests of capital as a
whole ! especially in regard to workers ! and therefore as social capital to ensure the
reproduction of its system and social relations of production.
#mportantly, just as capital brings together and concentrates workers in one place and in one
labour process of production, so does workers. antagonism to the wage relation induce the
concentration of capitals the better for these to contrast the attempt by living labour to retake
control over the means of production" There is therefore a concentration of &workers by' capital
and also a corresponding concentration of capitals by workers. #t is this antagonism between
workers and capital, for one, and also between capitalists that determines the various levels of
social conflict and antagonism in terms of profitability and therefore of the distribution of
income in capitalist societies and between capitalist nation!states. &/nderstanding this process
provides most answers to the current upheaval between bourgeois elites in the euro0one, and
between the /1 and export!dependent countries as well as emerging countries.'
2learly, then, one aspect of bourgeois individualism involves the need to rationalise and
measure politically the living labour of workers in the division of social labour so as to reduce
this to abstract labour. -nother aspect involves the camouflaging of the transmutation of living
labour into abstract labour through the wage relation by presenting the reward of living labour
with the exchange with money wages that stand for dead objectified labour into the free
choice of the individual consumer" -nd finally the third aspect of the bourgeois mystification of
the wage relation involves the individual investment or saving decision by the individual
capitalist in antagonistic conflict with living labour and with other capitalists. This last element is
important to underline the fact that the antagonism of the wage relation affects not just the
relation between workers and capital, but also between capitalists and, to some extent, also
between workers" #n other words, the wage relation ensures that capitalist societies are
ex(uisitely and ferociously antagonistic societies in which money capital tends to dissolve all
social bonds and all forms of human co!operation and solidarity. Worse still, as we shall see, the
wage relation and the need for capital to perpetuate it tends to transform capital into a barrier to
social production.