2 Triumphant Capitalism

2.1 In Search of a critique

Thus we have been chained more and more to capitalism. We were

fastening our chains to it, while we were filled with the feelings of
fighting it, aiming to overthrow it. A bitter reality. Capitalism has
swallowed its outside, Marxism with it, and digestion seems to be
completed by now. A triumphant Capitalism1 is in fronts of us and has
engulfed us. An unchallenged one? It is, as it stands now!
Is there any grounds left - or could open itself to us, for a renewed
critique of capital? Could any critique would be possible at all? By
whom? How? Why? On what grounds? This is the question. The
question which I've not fount any answer to it. It is a search, not a
search all on the familiar tracks, and with a danger in getting lost - or to
being lost? Needless to say, it is what, that make for me an assessment
of Marxism, or attempts in re-reading of Marx justified and interesting.
I'm not interested in that 'disinterested', or the 'objective' kind of
research-assessments, or the kind of scientific knowledge and views.
There is an Ideology of Science, I believe, which I do not accept and
I'm trying to avoid it, when possible and when it is discernible to me.
I'm not ashamed of speculative thoughts. The craft of the hypothesismonger is not a bad one. As far as this craft could shed some light ahead
of me. Even when it indicate that 'there is no way out' and all search for
a break is doomed to be in vain.
As I was running away from Marxism, or the ruins, the left barren and
deserted site of it, I found myself going back again and again to Marx. I
could not do without him. Every search will be in the shadow of the
Marx. My plan is to go back again to the 'site of ruins'- to assess the
theoretical foundation of Marxism, and then examine the kinds of
critiques which have become fashion after it and have occupied its
deserted space, now in the full. There are a twin pare of criticism, which
seems to hold sway. I can brand them, in advance, one as the priestly
1 See Notes of Revision, What is Capitalism?!

critic, probably the oldest type of criticism, the self-image and selfcriticism of power of itself, now reshaping itself in two branches the
Justice-Moralist view and the Objective-Scientific view. The other one,
the Equality and Freedom critic, as the self-image and self-criticism of
capitalism of itself, its Ideology- if one like to use Marxist terms. But,
before that, first I'd like to settle some accounts with some objections
which are, or which could be, raised against Marx, and in reading his
texts.
2.2 Objections to Marx
2.2.1 The Promised Land is Lost!, The Problem of Transformation

Marx in his perception of abolition of capital, the overthrowing of

capitalism, remain at a legal, juridical level, he fails to depict any social
transformation out of capitalism.
I feel being lost at the face of such an objection! First of all, I'm not sure
which Marx is here being criticized? Objection points to whom? Is it
not the Marx of Marxism? (The Jesus which Paul made out of him, not
Jesus himself?!) Is it not that modern prophet, which we were being
told about him, that he used science to reveal the secret of all history
and foresee the destiny of all mankind? The reincarnation of that
ancient fiery spirit of messianic Jewish prophet, pointing and warning
to the incoming Apocalypse? A Jewish prophet, which (following
Jesus?!) break with Moses tradition, left Jews to bring the promise of
the land of bread and honey to proletariat of all nations, the slaves of
modern Pharaohs, capitalists, the slaves which by the way of their act of
self-liberation, will liberate all the humanity out of slavery for ever? Is
it not all the critique of this prophet? The promised land you showed
us was on the paper! Mere legality! Just changing property titles and
leaving social relations beyond that, intact! Hopefully we have escaped
from the constrains of Marxism doctrine and away form it "revealing
false revelations" could be just another religious game.
We leave the prophet and his ex-believers to rest. Let us go back to
more serious part of this objection! It is probably right. I think, there is
an unresolved transformation problem, not so much in Marxism
2

doctrine, but with Marx himself too. He has texts which could amount
to a judicial view, or could be read and interpreted in this manner, if one
wants. He many times hints at the idea that capital turns all the
previously scattered and isolated means of production into connected
and concentrated social bodies, it makes them social means of
production in their function and character, and then it is for most part a
matter of socializing the ownership of them, turning the private
ownership of these socialized mean of production into direct public
property.2 Marx knew, probably better than anybody else, that forms of
2

There is another thorny theme involved here. Is social character of the vast
amount of 'productive forces' separable from their physical existence? Are them
transformable? Are these not, or has not become, the 'productive forces' of
capitalist society, mainly the productive forces of production and reproduction of
this special from of social relations itself? Are not most of them fixed to this form
of society? To the production of capitalism with all its internal working? Do these
forces have, or they could retain, any 'use value' without capitalism, beyond it?!
There is not any innocence 'mean of production', not anymore, I bet. At least not so
much at the present state of technology. The capitalist character is not seems to be
separable from the greatest extents of the present material means, or even forces,
of production, from their physical, institutional, informational and technological
and 'virtual' existence. Choose any industry you want. Car industry? Sex,
fashion, porn industry? Bank, credit, finance industry? Entertainment along
electronic industry? War, terror, crime or health industry?! Marketing, Law, PR,
affection industries?! I doubt if there could be so much salvageable in many of
these industries from their capitalist skins, veins and muscles. As soon as we put
aside the 'economy of subsistence"- and this economy has been on the road of an
ever diminishing size and volume form when capitalism took over- then, how
much of 'productive forces' and means of production in the other economy, which
to distinguish it from the 'economy of subsistence' I would call the 'economy of
social relations', would yield themselves to any changed social relations? Taking
over the productive forces, that battle cay of state-builder Marxists, is not any real
step in changing social relations. At least not anymore. I'd like to come back to this
distinction between 'economy of subsistence' and 'economy of social relations', a
distinction though artificial and very much make-shift kind of theoretic
observation, probably would be useful to shed some light in this thorny theme
which I just mentioned. It perhaps has something to do with the summary
treatment of 'use-value' in Marx analyses. Use-value is a bearer of exchangevalue. But how this relation changes the character of use-value itself? Does not the
form of exchange-value making a vast amount of use-values just the bearer of
exchange- values without any other use outside of this relation?! Money itself

property rights are and could only be the surface effects of much more
entrenched social relations. Here I'd like to give even to Marx the
Prophet some credit, which is really his own! He thought of changing
the property form, the transfer of ownership, as a first step which has to
be enforced by a political act and will. He also knew that legal verdicts,
rights and property titles, all have as their first, and last, resort, the
naked force as their source of validity, the way of their enactment!
Here, our prophet differ from Jesus! He called to arm, to use the
violence, to do revolution. He called for the Dictatorship of
Proletariat". This could not be put out of the Marx picture of social
transformation. Changing property forms, for him, is not judicial but
political. Not merely political either, the overthrowing and replacing the
power of capitalist class by proletariat one.
2.2.2 Two traits?! Agitator and Thinker!

Marxism officially presents itself as the righteous heir of "German

Philosophy, French Socialism, England Political Economy". The
notorious three components. It was the way Marxism looked at itself,
and liked to be looked at, having all its credentials at display. It all
maybe true as far as Marxism is concerned. I do not like to buy it for
looking at Marx himself! More than this famous three components and
three sources, my guess is that there are two currents in Marx thoughts
and personality which are much more telling than that. They are, at
some and probably more active level, class struggle and critic of
political economy- or could be named so. Did Marx ever managed to
bring these two traits together in a coherent way, or did he illustrate
their relations in any convincing way? Not, as I understand it. Was he a
system maker? Probably he was and he tried hard at it. But in this
matter the system is broken, apparently from the start to finish. There
is two traits in Marx and these two remains separate, competing with
each other to get upper hand, one at the expense of the other. In this
sense, there is a duality in Max, an unresolved one, exposing to irony
his endeavor in keeping to a unitary world view. This way, leaving
Marx the prophet to rest, there are, to me, two other Marx which one
stands for striking evidance.

could call to accounts for the problem of transformation. Marx, the

thinker which we meet mostly in the critique of political economy;
one that confine his thinking to the limits of this science, and
thoroughly examines the premises of it. And Marx, the agitator, one
who find the class struggle the driving force in changing the world.
The political Marx, if we want, bu the Marx which here, too, in his
political theories, fails to work out a theory of state, though he put a
great emphasize on the political power which state is and has been its
pinnacle and embodiment. There is a blind gap, or may one say an
abyss, between these two Marx. (Here, I'm going ahead of myself in
these points, which I intent to come back to them later). Now, let first to
follow the agitator, calling him to account for the transformation
problem.
For Marx, the agitator, as we said the transformation has to go
through, or to be mediated by, political power, through the Proletariat
Dictatorship. Transformation is to be imposed, to be forced on by
violence. Marx agitated for it, organized and theorized for it, did
endless polemics against those who were shy at counting for force or
preached marginal, new community type way of evasion of capitalism,
instead of aiming to its transformation. There was not any automatic
transformation in the pictures which he depicted. (The second
international and later flirtations with democracy, reformist and
peaceful transformation is another story). Transformation for Marx,
remained a practical matter which theory could only cast a very dim
light at it. For Marx, this act, proletarian revolution, goes pretty much
ahead of theory. (Remember his reaction to Paris Commune and his
praise for it, which in his view was pretty much ahead of theory,
showing the forms and possibility of proletarian dictatorship.) He called
on proletariat to act, to do the revolution, and told to him: believe in
yourself and just do it, everything else just follow suit if you adjust
yourself to your power. The whole world is there to conquer and only
chains to lose!
Was Marx right in his agitation?! How we can measure wright or wrong
of it?! I think he was. Why not? Really! If capitalism was imposing
itself with naked force all over the face of globe, if its hands was
5

imbued with blood, if violence is the decisive game in the town, why
not stand to force with an equally coherent and organized force, why
not imitate or use the capitalism ways of acting and enforcing?! I'm not
really sure if German uprising could succeed and instead of Nazi
Germany ww2 was fought by Germany of Workers, Socialist,
Communists (pick one you want), if Marxism fate was not totally
entangled with the fate of Russian and her catching up game with
modernity, what we had today was this unchallenged triumphant
capitalism! Probably not the promised socialism either, but I'll bet a
way of life differing somehow from both, and maybe as resilient one as
capitalism itself?! Very wild and an uneducated backward speculation
indeed! But my point, or my understanding, is that the instinct of force,
this deep rooted instinct of political animal3 was used by Marx
agitator to fill the great gap which left empty and open in his theoretical
thinking. (Was not Lenin the heir of this blind trait in Marx thought and
character?! Look, I have already too many parentheses which push me
out the subject!) History did not strike that course of actions, and I'm
left with my further questions.
2.2.3 Class Struggle

Was Marx, the agitator, betraying Marx the thinker? Did he put aside
his line of analyses and deeper insight for the sake of agitation, or
perhaps these insights came to him later in time, insights which we find
in a more mature form in Grundrisse and Capital?! The text which give
our agitator thoughts a free ride, free from later insights into political
economy is that grand recipe for action, the Communist Manifesto.
And this free ride thinking on the wave of class struggle, has its own
3

Instead of political animal, I'd like to use the term city-animal. I hope to better
distinguish and opposed him to other one: tribal animal, or herd animal. This
one has for his prevailing instinct the gregariousness of the herd. Instead of power
play among the citizens its is used to force out a head from the body of tribe, or
the head, and to follow this head, to become resentful and revengeful against the
head and himself! A Bio-power, genetic distinction between culture of Greek
city-states and Jewish, old testament, culture? Or for that matter between former
and the Chinese or Iranian one?! I'll have a better chance to delve in this theme
latter!

blind spots too! At the head of this text we read:

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.
It is the key sentence to whole body of this text, a key which become a
source of criticism, explanation and drawing conclusion from it
regarding the status and fate of bourgeois society. But, was this sentence
really a correct, not a selective, more or less an accurate outlining of
history? We had the history of hitherto existing societies and the
history of class struggles. Were these two, one and the same? Was it
an oversimplifications for the sake of argument, or a deliberate
omission of one whole line of histories for the benefit of the other line
of histories- the omission of societies in the benefit on class
struggles? Could we not say that the history of every existing
society, and at the middle of 19th century there were many of them
standing on their own, not as yet all being integrated into the world
market, was not the history of all those separate and independent
societies, at the same time, the history of their constant struggle for
power and survival against others, the struggle which some time driving
them to the brink of extinction in the hand of their competitors? Was
Enlightenment influence and it exaltation of humanity too strong to
making even Marx inclined to forget about, or cover up, animality in
history of humanity, or in constitution of its societies?! We know that
many societies could sustain their existence and many were perished.
Was not the mere fact of existence as much the outcome of this more
than often mutual savagery, violence, wars and blood baths? The
outcome of competing for territory, dominance and living or
empowerment at the expense of the other side?
Was not this outer, the exterior constrain and context of existence of
societies, playing as much an important role as the one which class
struggle played inside these societies? Was not the history of societies
at the same time, or more than class struggle, the history of non-ending
violence between societies, their territorial power game? Is not any
serious theory of political power, and a theory of state, obliged to take
into account this outer context, this bedrock of all history? Orthodox
Marxism Doctrine tends to call even the ancient wars the class wars, as
7

it did call the WWI and WWII capitalist wars. But this will not do in the
later cases, let alone the former. It will stretch the class, and the class
struggle too thin for covering everything, overriding nations, societies,
and states, entities which had more than often a more coherent
configuration, stronger cementation, and are more capable of act as a
body, compare with classes which are diffused in the bodies of states
and nations - and it seems to be even more true in later times. Class
struggle was one force among many others and not always that force
dominating, but most often under the constrain and dominance of the
others forces. Could not the passed history could be read more richly at
the level of states? This is the level at which the power functions of any
society derived form its interior relations as well as the constrains
imposed form its exterior, took shape and solidifies itself in it. I fall,
leaning towards this view of the passed, pre-capitalist history of
societies, then any class-struggle view!
Then, there is that related and thorny theoretical question itself: what is
a class?! Is not class something more connected to state than to
political economy, or lets say to the relations of production? Classes
had to be sustained by economy, by relations of production, but it
does not mean that they arose from it, or being equally involved in it.
Many classes stood outside the imminent sphere of production and its
internal relations and this fact was what that made them a class. In precapitalist modes of production, the dominant class, nobles, priests,
sultan, 'divan', are outside the proper sphere of production. When they
did engage themselves more directly in production process, it was when
they were consuming the surplus labor and surplus product of land, in
building their monuments, palaces, churches, mosques, castles, in doing
killings or produce killing equipment the war enterprises. Putting it in
my make-shift terms, the economy of subsistence and the economy
of social relations were separate from each other, often even in space,
and the force was what bridged them together. It was historical setting
and the state in its attempts in ordering social strata, which invented,
maintained and imposed classes. Political economy, or production of
material life, by itself could stay clear and innocent of classes.4
4 In Athens city-state there was heard many complains, among others from the

Putting it in a black and white color, class is a product of history and not
the economy. Class struggle too, could be considered as a sub-part of
violence which drove the general history along other forces.
Marx tries to strike a compromise with himself in order to assign to
class struggle the central stage. He has an eye on a basic trend in
capitalism which could and would bring down all territorial frontiers,
which could bring about a world society integrating all separate and
independent societies into its encompassing orbit. Exterior context and
constrains was vanishing, at least theoretically. In this picture, the inner
force, the class struggle, would be the dominant and determining one. It
is how Manifesto depict class struggle. Two problem lies here: Marx
in his analyses of capital, considers it in its developed state. When
capitalism is standing on its own feet, general rate of profit has been
formed and is in place, meaning all production is now mediated through
circulation, all surplus labor take the form surplus value, profit, interest,
wages, taxes, are all arouse from capitalist production itself and not
anymore from exploiting the others forms and sphere of production. It
is a modeling like any other so called scientific modeling, when one put
aside all which seems to be accidental, effects of other influences, and
try to reduce the whole thing to its own patterns of regularity. It could
work for political economy, where it can reveal at a theoretical level
all possibilities and limits of capital as objectified labor confronting
living one, on the track which already was paved by Smith and Ricardo.
But this kind of modeling, scientific or not, could be very risky and
could fail badly at the level of history or analyses of developing
bourgeoisie society. From mid 19th century, British Empire and its
effort to establish a world market and a world Empire on a capitalist
line, to a world society which would be the equivalent of capitalism
fully stand by itself, or capitalism fully realized, there is a very long
shot. In the path way there has been, territorial states, nations, and
nation-states, numerous power-weighing wars, Soviet Empire, two WW,
the collapse of British and up and down of American Empire and as yet
Plato's friends, that in agora it is not possible anymore to say who is free and who
is slave! The slaves and free citizens more than often shared the same condition of
life.

we could not say that mission is accomplished, that we are living in

the world society. Modeling could not replace or capture the reality in
the sphere of history and politics, which are at least event-driven and
are prey to chance and accident in the ever-shifting balance of powers.
Probably Marx himself taught us about these points, better than all
others when he was commenting on his own contemporary history and
its events. It was the first. The second problem is this: what will happen
to labor itself in the sphere of political economy? What is a class, which
with political economy now has become an economical class? First I'll
try to tackle the second question. And my best guess, or suspicion, for
an answer, is that it was Young Hegelian philosophical tricks which
could save Marx the agitator from Marx the thinker in these matters!
2.2.4 The class

The problem of transformation could also be reduced to this one: Was

not Marx, in his assessment of wage-laborers as class, its potential in
that capacity to bring about a social transformation, too much off? Off,
from his own analyses and insight? Was proletariat really a class,
capable of carrying on what the power agitators, or their philosophical
tricks, burden him with it? What really a class in capitalism was, and
how much wage-laborer could constitute a separate one, a class which
could be brought under its own and independent ceilings, a body
standing on its own? Was the class defined from the view-point of
political economy will be the same with the class which one can draw
from a historical setting?
What is expected of a class is this: she is capable to bring about, and
actually carry with himself, not in his inspirations, but in his distinctive
way of life, a specific form of society. Was not Marx which probably
more the anyone else, pointed us in look at a class this way?
Embodiment of a distinct way of social life. It was what bourgeoisie
was and proved to be. Was working class of the same mold?
Looking in this light, the working class seems to be one of the least
capable among all known and named classes. How can this class could
signify a separate form of society of its own, in an active and positive
manner and outside capitalism? Wage-labor is condition of capital, or is
10

capital itself, if looking at it from other side of capital relation. Even

peasants had a better shot at it! Peasants had a style of living which lord
could be exclude from it and their mode of life suffice to bring about
and define societies of their own. Is it not funny to demand form
workers to forge an independent class identity, solidify it, for the
purpose of annihilating it, for dissolving it in a classless society?! In
the face of it, it amounts to the worse of all Hegelian tricks! No, wagelaborers were not that class - merchant with sword, the pirate
merchant, which came out of blue with all its violence and cunning,
turned himself into merchant-banker and make the world after its own
image. New proletariat was not bourgeoisie, that class which against
and among other classes, fought for the bringing down all barrier to his
life style, commerce and trade, and sat down to out root all the classes,
orders, and ranks which could not find a solid foot-hold in commerce
and trade. Bourgeoisie was The Class. The last product of historical
setting if we like. He was all embracing class, bringing all, forcing all
population into its own mode of life. New proletariat was its creation
and not this, he too was created after its own image, from its own mold.
He too was man of trade and commerce, though a poor one, having
nothing else than its labor-power to trade.
Looking from this side, from the sphere of circulation in the economic
condition, working class is capitalist class!5 It was destined to become
5 I'm infected here by those images flying around in the Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari attractive work, Anit-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Could it be
a symptom of French influenza, or post-modern disease?! They- the authors,
have a picture of capitalism as the limit to all other forms of societies. The limit
other societies could reach. Here, casts, orders, classes and all previously given
social hierarchies are dissolved in the one unitary flow, the flow of money, one can
say. Authors refer to Pelekhanov which notes that the French School of the
nineteenth century, under the influence of Saint-Simon, should be credited with the
discovery of class struggle and its role in history -precisely the same men who
praise the struggle of the bourgeois class against the nobility and feudalism, and
who come to a halt before the proletariat and deny that there can be any difference
in class between the industrialist or banker and the worker, but only a fusion into
one and the same flow as with profits and wages p255. They add that looking into
history in terms of class struggle, could amount to insisting in a bourgeoisie
outlook. Their work is really attractive and full of new sights and insights. But for
me it suffer from the worst kind of anti Hegel, anti-dialectic which I think was

11

part and parcel of the class. If one insist, what has been called class
struggles could be seen as 'inter class struggle', the fierce competition
which is the condition of bourgeoisie's life.
2.2.5 Labor and Political Economy

Now we could turn to Marx the thinker for the subject of

transformation. Did he, out of critique of political economy and his
breathtaking analyses of capital, show or trace any necessary, selfmoving, autonomous kind of social transformation out of capitalism?
Does labor move in such a direction or pave the way for, carry and
inter-grow with such a transformation, just waiting for a midwife - in
shape of a political revolution, to give birth to it, or give it a last push
bringing it to its full power?!
At the very outset, let me put aside what could be considered, or could
be named, the preconditions, or the material foundation, of a possibility
for a social transformation out of slavery. Here the only line which
seems certain is this: capitalism put a decisive end to predominance of,
the French fashion of the day. The book is like depicting a stormy river by the way
of making a lot of snapshots of it, static pictures, from a lot of angles and
distances. You see those images, some of them very decisive and telling which
otherwise could not be seen. But the movement of the river always fails you, it
escape even from your strongest grip, it becomes beside you, not sizable, like
Kantian thing in itself, closed to you. You could know everything about thing
without knowing it. Thing remain for itself and will not become yours! Reading
their works, gave me a lot of trouble. A difficult work. One gets buried under
abundance of images they produce. In contrast, Hegelian style is like taking the
buffalo by its horns! It is a dive into the stormy river and moving with it. You are
not an observer, an image maker, at best you could have blurry images, but you
become prat of movement, your force and efforts too is part of it, you may be blind
to many, many of its moments, but there remain no things in itself, it is always
your relation to the thing, not thing itself, or you, which occupies the center- a
nice strategy from overcoming the subject-object division! As you see I pretty
much prefer this Hegelian style, when ever it is applicable, and as far as it give me
free ride! But it is a dangerous sport. The chances of a deadly crash to the banks of
river, the History, or being entangled with debris which the current assemble in
font of itself out of your sight, is very high! Kantian disinterest and objective
knowledge which leave things in themselves, is much safer bet! There is a reason
why everybody is afraid of Hegel! I plan to come back to this point in main text.

12

lets call it the economy of subsistence. This does not exclude that
other forms of society, like those found in pre-capitalist modes of life,
could not do it too! Capitalism, differ in that, that it give shocking
drives to the productivity of labor, blows productivity out of any
hitherto known or imagined proportions. According to Marx, along the
way of capitalism development, though the needs increase and
multiply, the needs which are either imposed by nature or just arise
from the complexity and improvements in social living, the needs
which have to be satisfied in order that society be able to sustain itself,
this necessary labor for satisfying needs, decrease and diminish in all
relative measurements. Relative to total available labor time which
could be at the disposal of society; relative to daily labor time which
every man can master reasonably in himself; relative to working lifespan which everyone is endowed wit it. That is all! That material
precondition for stepping out of slavery, or precondition of a
transformation to a non-slavery social relationships, if we could name it
so. Ancient Greek culture looked at toiling and laboring, the drudgery
of bringing out a life out the breast of land, as a shameful slavery,
deserve only for slaves, but unavoidable for free man too. Life of a freeman could not be drudgery, but being entertained or being educated by
Sophies in the art of pleasures and pains, knowing himself, mastering
his own life, cultivating his taste and emotions, playing philosophical or
athletics games, engaging in politics, exercising in the art of oratory and
social persuasion, hanging with fiends, arranging festivals, dancing and
drinking and playing with gods, contemplating at the sight of tragedies
or laughing at himself in the sight of comedies, pretty much what all life
is about or could give a worldly meaning and purpose to it. Capitalism
brought about this precondition, the possibility of stepping out of
shameful slave life. We know that there is a possibility open to us in a
very wide scale in and with capitalism. It is all that there is to it. Let's
forget about that now silly looking and miserable exercise which was in
fashion some times ago, the socialism of productive forces! That
game is out of the town, though its child, the full occupation is with
us and hunt us. The child now is an orphan, had grown into the worst
and most corrupted one, prostituting itself with the game of job
13

creations at every door, turning every politician into its fully occupied
pimp! All that is forgotten about is that the whole justification for
capitalism and its development, that justification which many socialist
with Marxist leaning or not bought it, was to make us and everybody
else pretty much jobless, having time to enjoy the life!
The point is that this possibility of stepping out of slavery, this
possibility of a social transformation, is the same the possibility, or the
potential of capitalism itself. Capitalism create it and rely on it. Driving
the productivity of labor to unimaginable heights and driving the
economy of subsistence to ever diminishing scale, it is the whole
story of capitalism, the source of all its power and its command. The
gap which is open, however and whenever it is wider, capitalism acts
stronger. It is the gap which M-M', money begetting money create,
defend and widen it. It is its home and its living place. Let's put it in
these words: pre-condition of transformation is the ever reproducing
of potential of capitalism itself. It tell us nothing. If there is a sea, it
does not mean one can or want to swim in it. Possibility is just over
there, not as a neutral ground, not as no-man's land. It is occupied by
capital.
The other point to make at outset is this: the theme of a Proletarian
Revolution, that forceful actor of historical setting, is not an actor in
the theater of political economy. Nothing in the sphere of political
economy calls for it. It is not part of conceptual analyses and can not
emerge from it. It is out of stage actor. One which Marx brings in in his
analyses for the sake of moral sensations, or dialectical dramatization.
In the course of analyses it can only comes in and acts like deus ex
machina (god from a machine) in the manner of ancient Greek theater!
It is not a player by itself. We leave the occupied territory of
transformation and our out of the stage explorer of it, aside and to rest
for now.
2.2.6 Labor Transformed ? Two Forms of Labor?

That out of our way, lets go ahead and consult the wisdom of political
economy. With political economy we leave behind the history. Classes,
here are striped down from their historical casting, they are unburdened
14

from their political and cultural heritage, stripped down to their mere
economical bare bones. In wisdom of political economy, as Marx have
it,capitalist is a personification of capital. Wage-laborer too is a
personification of living labor. Beside, in the course of Marx analyses,
or his critique of political economy, we have to leave the sphere of
circulation to meet the labor in its true existence. In that sphere of
circulation, capitalist and wage-laborer were from the same mold. They
both stood on an equal footing, as traders, and as free man in charge of
their own body and mind, and in the legal and actual command of
their belongings. This world of the sameness, equality and freedom is
behind us. We have entered into the sphere of production, where in
Marx account we could find all the covered up secrets of capital. It is
the central stage, the power house which keep other spheres running
around it and encompassing it. In this sphere capital and labor are not
same mold, there become opposite, or the live and dead form of the
same thing. They are not on equal foot either. The dead, objectified
labor, commands and consume the live labor. The objectified and living
labor, stand oppose to each others, in a relation of command and
obedience, eating and being eaten up.
Now I'll try to outline the story of this opposition as Marx worked it up,
in the most stretched and generalized sketch. Leaving aside all actual,
social and historical constrains and counter balancing tendencies, I'll be
only concern with the theoretical and conceptual limits, the utmost
reaches of all the possibilities of this relation, this opposition.
Fortunately I do not need to labor it, Marx did it himself and I'll just
going to quote him. To the astonishment of many Marxists, it probably
do not works in its predicted Hegelian track, do not give birth to a new
relations sublating its parents opposite ones! Let us see!
Another flashback is necessary. Every imaginable production could be
seen as coming together, the confronting of the passed, objectified labor
and living labor. Even the hunter brought his stick or stone tool, his
passed work, at the service of his live activity, catching the prey. This is
a fact of life and not one which is only special to its capitalist form.
Though, in capitalist form this relation seem to have been somehow
reversed. Instead of dead serving the live, it is the living activity that
15

serve the dead one. All this, because capitalist production is not any
productions, it is value production. Living labor is not using passed
labor for producing some use value in order to entertain oneself, or to
satisfy some need, desire, whim, or arousing them whatsoever. Living
labor is used and consumed by dead labor for maintaining and adding to
its own value. We have to go back to value relation and keep in mind
that the production and labor process, is subsumed in value-relation,
and is only one phase of reproduction of value-relation itself.
The whole body of political economy was being built around the
labor theory of value. Consistency in elaborating it and explaining
different phenomenons at the surface of circulation in terms of this
theory, was a criterion which Marx often used to distinguish a serious
economist form the vulgar one. According to political economy, the
labor which is at the bottom of value-relation is not any labor. It is a
special form of labor, labor in its form of homogeneity, reducible,
countable and exchangeable. It is abstract labor, human activity
stripped to its bare bones, the expenditure of muscle and brain,
measurable with its intensity and its duration in time. It is not the
concrete work of producing use-values, means for satisfying needs
and whims, which is common in all ages. In Marx own words, the
labor that forms the substance of value is equal human labor, the
expenditure of identical human labor power. Socially necessary labortime. This is the labor which produce values, and is separable from the
labor which produces use-values. Marx is very strict on this
characterization. He emphasizes that I was the first to point out and
examine critically this twofold nature of labor contained in
commodities. It is this homogeneous, measurable, the abstract labor,
distinct and separable form useful or concrete work, which he
establishes as the solid base of his reconstructing or his critique of
political economy. Needless to say, for Marx this abstract labor,
labor pure and simple, is not a theoretical device, a scientific gauge to
render reality constrained and under observation. It is reality itself, the
social reality, the form which labor takes or imposed on it to be used
and accounted as socially-necessary labor6. It is the capitalist from of
6 Marx explain adequately the reality of abstract labor among others in the following

16

labor, or a form of labor which capitalism found it emerging from

commodity production, took it over and drove it to dominance as
common form of labor, the source of its own empowering.
As capitalist counts only as personification of capital, wage-laborer
too, counts as embodiment of this form of labor, the abstract, the mere
expenditure of muscle and brain, labor power, simple and devoid form
any further usefulness and concreteness. How can we identify this form
of labor at the level of actuality and in its physical being, not in value
relation which manifest itself in the sphere of circulation, where this
relation tend to hide itself out of sight, but in the concrete processes of
production and its place and role in it? I can get help form Marx text,
when he describes another form of labor, this too formed in the relation
of capital and is caught in the net of capitalism, but totally
distinguishable from the homogeneous, abstract labor, which lies at
bottom and constituted the historical base of value relation.
Labor no longer appears so much to be included within the
production process; rather, the human being comes to relate to
text: The last point to which attention is still to be drawn in the relation of labour
to capital is this, that as the use value which confronts money posited as capital,
labour is not this or another labour, but labour pure and simple, abstract labour;..
the worker himself is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour; it has
no interest for him as such, but only in as much as it is in fact labour and, as such,
a use value for capital. It is therefore his economic character that he is the carrier
of labour as suchi.e. of labour as use value for capital; he is a worker, in
opposition to the capitalist. This is not the character of the craftsmen and guildmembers etc., whose economic character lies precisely in the specificity of their
labour and in their relation to a specific master, etc. This economic relation- the
character which capitalist and worker have as the extremes of a single relation of
production- therefore develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour
loses all the characteristics of art; as its particular skill becomes something more
and more abstract and irrelevant, and as it becomes more and more a purely
abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, hence indifferent to its particular
form; a merely formal activity, or, what is the same, a merely material activity,
activity pure and simple, regardless of its form. p296 Grundrisse. Moreover,
what is interesting in this text is the positing of capital and abstract labor as two
extreme of a single relation of production whose development is marked by
transforming all the previous form of labor into this form. Abstract labor is
characterized as use-value of capital here. We can mark, in reverse, or on the
other end of extreme, capital as being the exchange-value of abstract labor.

17

production process more and more as its watchman and as its

regulator, rather than being pat of production process itself.
(What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination
of human activities and the development of human intercourse.)
No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing as
middle link between the object and himself; rather, he inserts
the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as
a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He
steps to the side of the production process instead of being its
chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human
labor he himself performs, nor the time during which he works,
but rather the appropriation of his own general productive
power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by
virtue of his presence as a social body - it is, in a word, the
development of the social individual which appears as the great
foundation-stone of production and of wealth.
This lines are quoted from a passage in Grundrisse, when Marx is
contemplating on the Machinery and living labor and Contradiction
between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and
its development. Machines etc. For the time when it was written, not
far passed from mid 19th century, not only the lines quoted above, but
the whole passage strike one as a very audacious and wild theoretical
speculation. As I said, a far reaching theorizing on the limits of
possibilities. I'll return to this passage with more quotes from it. It worth
every bit pausing at it. It tell us much more about the present day
capitalism and the place of labor in it, than all those historiographic
accounts about condition of working class, the conditions which any
honest eye looking at it, could not avoid the deep sentiments involved
in it, those sentiments which I believe bothered Marx too throughout his
theoretical exposition on capital and tainted it out-of-place, here and
there, with a touch of morality. It is another matter. I was trying to
figure out the labor which wage-laborers, in constituting an economical
class, are personification of it. The text quoted contrast this form of
labor with another form, or could be used to do so. It seems that we
have two forms of labor, both under the mold and stamp of capital, but
18

non-the-less different forms as far as their role in the production process

and their place in the development of productive forces is concerned.
The first is the familiar one, it counts and constitutes the building block
of political economy. It is the abstract, homogeneous labor, measurable
with time and capable of providing a base for value and its forms,
exchange-value, money, prices, wages, profits, etc. This labor, in its
physicality, is a part, is enclosed in material production process itself.
It is the labor involved it the material production process as one of its
inner elements. It is a modified natural thing which laborer insert as
middle link between the object and himself. It is part of production
process itself and is consumed in it. It is productive labor measurable in
time. It is labor, replaceable with machines, a modified natural force
which could be replace with another tamed and modified force or any
such a process from nature. The other form of labor, is the
transformed one. It does not seem as exerting a modified natural
thing, but is characterized as exercising, discharging, putting to action
of a charged or accumulated social force7- a force which individual
becomes its accumulator. It is a kind of labor, which stay aside, or step
to the side of production proper, acting as its watchman, regulator,
designer, or in more general terms, it the work involved in all other
social layers which encompass the production as its core, the labor
involved in preparing, stimulating, manipulating social forces and social
7 I've not managed to phantom what Toni Negri calls immortal labor. Probably it
is similar, could correspond, or is the same in some extent as this transformed
labor which I try to depict here. I've not managed to read his influential work with
Hardt, Empire, to the end as yet. According the Anderson, this work, with the
Givani Arraghi's the long twentieth century, had been most prominent theoretical
Marxists works in recent yeas. Anyway, my first impression encountering Nigris
immortal labor was not encouraging and push me away from his work. It seemed
to me he is despair to find something to restore the lost world of the opposition of
capital and labor, that central theme of Marxism. It happens that I look from
another end of spectrum, I guess. Making it completely black and white, striped
of all its shades of gray, the transformed labor to me is not against or oppose to
capital. It is the site of capital, the living force of it in the present configuration of
capitalist society. In this view labor has lost all its innocence, it is the main
accomplice of present time slavery, slavery to labor. Critique of capital push me in
the direction of critique of labor! I could amount to turning the Marx of his head,
or on his feet, depending from where one looks at it!

19

body to set and keep in motion the material production. This second
form could be seen more in that field which Marx puts in parentheses,
the work involved in the combination of human activities and the
development of human intercourse. From the standpoint of capital, it is
the labor which is more involved in the outer, exterior, life cycle of
capital, that which engulf production, stimulate it, bring it to halt, or
drive it to explosive proportions.
How political economy, or Marx in his critique of it, accounts for this
second form of labor? Marx is badly in pain, in Volume III of Capital,
when he apparently opposes the capitalist notion which regards the
profits of enterprise - that part of profit which after counting the rent,
interest, and taxes, and deducing them from total profit, remain in his
hands his wage, wage of his own labor, his labor of
superintendence.
Since the estranged character of capital, its antithesis to labour,
is shifted outside the actual process of exploitation, i.e. into
interest-bearing capital, this process of exploitation itself appears
as simply a labor process, in which the functioning capitalist
simply performs different work from that of the workers. The
labor of exploiting and the labor exploited are identical, both
being labor. The labor of exploiting is just as much labor as the
labor that is exploited. The social form of capital devolves on
interest, but expressed in a neutral and indifferent form; the
economic function of capital devolves on profit of enterprise, but
with the specifically capitalist character of this function
removed.
There is a bit of cat and mouse play of forms of capital here, which
suppose to say: watch, the interest-bearing form of capital has shifted
the estranged character of capital to outside of production process,
and that shift make one blind to antithesis between labor and capital
which remain at the core in the production process. There is a subtle
differentiation between the social and economic functions of capital
too. Marx apparently, opts for viewing it from social side. Alongside
this, there came a measured dose of morality, the sharp contrast of
exploiting and exploited labor. They have a meaning in social
20

view, but what about the economic one? Social view is supposed here
to save Marx, in writing off the line of economic analyses, in his failing
to recognize the two forms of labor, and in his reluctance of counting
the labor of exploiting as labor, a labor with a legitimate claim to
wage as exploited labor has claim to it.
But what if the labor of exploiting is not laboring to make somebody
else launders his dirty underwear for him, but laboring to exploit
them in building the public rail roads? What if the exploitation is not
at personal level, but for the good of accumulation of capital and in its
fixation in the infrastructure of productive forces? It has been what
capitalists as a class have always claimed. Exploitation is a moot
argument, a notion with a charge of morality, we better to write it off
from the accounts of political economy. Even Marx's social view, in
its longer perspectives, could not bear exploitation, when he, many
times, credits and with it justifies, the capital and bourgeoisie for their
role in unprecedented development of productive forces. I'll leave this
failing of Marx in Capital aside fro now. The point was that there is
two from of labor, not one, and the second from, though not recognized
in Capital, hunts the analyses there too. I prefer to call these two forms
of labor, first and second form, or value-creating labor and
valorizing-labor, if one prefer such names that could hints to some
significations.
Let's try again to figure out the theme in a morally neutral, or in an
immoral, grounds. In place of capitalist society, we can consider a
society of the sort of the famous example of association of free
producers- not the boring Christian, Amish type kind of communities,
but some imaginary lively one which will not deprive us from a lot of
fun discovered in present day capitalism if one have a choice in it! We
Can imagine this society based on two different assumptions, in two
extremes as much as political economy is concerned. First, our
imaginary society is out of grips pf political economy altogether. It
means that the work is not any longer something separable from social
life and social intercourse with all its enjoyments and pains; the
principle of work as something separable from life has been vanished to
a great extent, separation of work and life and coupling of work and
21

reward, or work and wage or share, is at most a marginal nonsense left

over from previous forms of social life. Here there is no political
economy and with it social accounting has lost all meanings. In our
second assumption, the imagined society is still one of the type of
political economy. Work and rewards and social accounting of it is
at the core of social relations and organizations. It is based on, as yet,
the same fundamental separation of work and life as two aliens which
only wage or rewards could bring them under one ceiling. We suppose,
that there is a lot fairness in sizing the rewards to the amount of work,
and there is a lot of accounting and planing for avoiding waste in social
production and organization. In other words, we have a capitalism
purged and cleansed according to priestly, moral, criticism of fairness,
and the scientific-technocratic criticism of minimizing waste, but
political economy is in place. In such a society citizens have to work
not for their direct-consumption, but have to do work to replace the all
which is consumed in their work, and on top of this an extra portion for
expanding the condition of their work, and a plus for their whims,
desire and having fun. They have to do surplus-work. And to do all this,
some of them have to do the managerial, superintend work, some fun
creating, desire and whim stimulating work, some science and
technological innovation work, and some distribution and accounting
work and some industrial and production work. Apparently here too, we
have two different kinds of work, lets call them social-work and
production-work. We can not deny here that social-work is work, social
necessary works though all the accounting labor could be seen as a
big waste, as the whole apparatus of welfare state in many European
countries has become itself a grand kind of waste more expensive to
maintain compare to cost of those which this apparatus is supposed to
maintain! Anyway, economy always is political economy, meaning,
under the constrain of social relations that economy has to uphold. The
question is how such a society remunerate such works, the socialwork. How does this kind of work enter into social accounting? Two
alternative arises. As far as the production-work is dominant, all claims
of social-work, would be resolved on the bases of surplus-work-hours
of total production-work, what is left after deducing the production22

workers rewards. But as the production-work lose it centrality and its

importance, and as the social-work become more predominant, all bets
will be off, social accounting and remunerations loses their base and
logic. The same processes which made possible to replace productionwork with machines, also make many services, and servants,
replaceable with machine too, and as a consequence the social-work
tends to become the kind of irreducible, heterogeneous, not measurable
kind of work, the kind of work which is involved in accumulating and
exertion of social power by individuals. As a result, we will have a
crisis of political economy. It is political economy, because it is an
economy on the foundation of work and reward, and it is in crisis
because work has ceased to be what it used to be, the rod of all
measurements and the bases of social accounting. It seems, probably, as
a purely technical matter, but only at the face of it. Social-labor is not
only heterogeneous, and irreducible, it is charge and discharge of socialpower8 in individuals which are putting it in motion in social relations,
or looking at it form the other side, it is the power of social relation
itself which is charged in individual and is discharged by him. It is
something totally unaccountable on the basis of work and reward.
Capitalism does all that which our imaginary labor based community
does, and in case of capitalism, apparently without the constrains of
social fairness and social efficiency. Here instead of work-hours, which
in case of our imaginary society could be used for value and valuation,
value has its independent from and run its own course. At the first phase
or stages, all claims of valorizing labor, could be resolved in terms of
8 A good example of what could constitute 'social-labor', or 'valorizing-labor', could
be found in Marx lively description of theft work which give an impetus to vast
range of all sorts of works. It is an ironic, a little bit sarcastic, and very funny
passage in the Theories of surplus-value, when Marx expose how a thief could
be a productive laborer and theft a productive force. Theft bring work for the
police, the workers who produce food and cloth and equipment for him, and so on.
The whole social-body come in motion by theft! It is the kind of valorizing
labor, without any moral and legal prejudice, the kind of work which keeps
values in circulations and give impetus to their creation out of blue in the
excitements of social body, it could be science, charm, crime, law. It is the real
economy which capital thrive in it, economy of production is just a diminishing
sub-part of it, and economy of subsistence, even a much smaller part of the latter.

23

what is left of value-creating work, in terms of the pool of total surplusvalue available to it. But as we go on, as value-creating works diminish,
it is valorizing labor which put claim to everything, to all available,
and also potential wreath which is now is produced and could be
produced relatively independent of labor, but has to be accounted and
kept in motion and circulation as values. We can not discriminate the
exploiting labor which is as necessary as exploited one in the
course of value creation. How much capitalist add to produced value
with his work, or is he, too, contributing to total surplus-value which
he extracts, is another matter. As much as capitalist step-aside from
production, replacing himself with managerial wage-salary workers, or
relying to a better trained, integrated self-exploiting workers and
redefined himself at the top their social ranks, we more see that there
was a capitalist work involved in production which justified him to
claim wage for it!
Marx, in Capital, as I mentioned, failed, or refused to distinguish clearly
between these two forms of labor. He did not work out those two stages
in development in productive forces, which give prominence to one or
another form of labor in turn. He did not bring the second from, the
valorizig labor, into analyses of value relations. Though, I think, it
hunts him in many guises, form example in the guise of unproductive
labor. What is this unproductive labor? Marx rightly, reject Adam
smith's characterization of it. For Max every labor which create value,
or contribute to creation and realization of surplus-value counts as
productive labor. Under this characterization of productive labor one
can count not only the labor of capital, which could be performed by
capitalist himself or by the growing army of wage-earners who take
over the function of capital in both spheres of circulation and
production, but one can also counts all other labors of charlatans, thefts,
criminals, law worker and any imaginable labor all those labors which
outside value relation could be considered even destructive, any labor
which could give impetus and excitement to creations, circulation and
realization of values and surplus-value. Productive labor, in Marx
exposition of it, when he puts aside his social preferences and moral
judgments, and judging it only on its capitalist basis, include both
24

value-creating and valorizig labor, though Marx did not recognize

the second from and do not give to it its due place in the course of
analyses.
Marx insists in holding the criteria of earlier stages. In his explanations,
superintendent, managerial works, scientific or technical invention,
entrepreneurship in exploring, or cultivating some new social needs or
whims, arts, the labor involved in these activities could claim for wage.
But it did not mean that this labor was a source of value, or could create
values. This from of labor did not create values, but had its price and
more often monopoly prices. It had its price, like the land had its
price or the capital had it, later in the form of interest and former in the
form of rent. It could be even a monopoly price, like the best located
lands in the heart of cities, which could often be the case for the second
form of labor too. But this price, whatever its form of claimant, rent,
interest, taxes, salaries, was accounted as a ticket. A ticket to have a
share in the greater pie of total surplus-value which was extracted from
the first form of labor.
Marx recognizes the second form of labor, in the privacy of his
manuscripts, not in the public face of published Capital. We can guess
why. In the mid 19th century, the second form of labor was as yet in its
very embryonic forms, one could see it with the speculative theoretical
eyes, but not in the actual configurations of the capitalism of the day. As
far as the first form of labor, the value creating labor was the dominant
form of labor, the second form of labor could be considered as labor of
exploiting, labor involved in upholding the overall condition of the
creation of greatest pie of surplus-value which claimants could share
among themselves. Even morality had its appeal there. The antithesis
between capital, the self-valorizing value, and the first form of labor,
value creating labor, seemed to be too strong a force, not allowing
anything to escape form its field of action and influences. It was a
magnet forcing everything to be either attached or attracted to one of its
two opposite poles. It was the age of coal and iron. It cast its shadows
in the story of political economy as Marx reconstructed and narrated it
in Capital. All this may or may not contributed to the expositions which
Marx laid out in Capital. But he was not the kind of thinker to give up
25

to morality or transient circumstances without a good theoretical

justification. I think he had one: price. Theory of price, and specially
monopoly price could explain and save the phenomenon for a while.
2.2.7 Two trajectories in Marx's Critique

My suspicion is - and I admit that it is only a suspicion which has to be

inquired closely, but for now I'll hang to it as a hypothesis, a far
reaching one - that there is two trajectories in Marx critique of political
economy, and in his reconstruction of it. The first trajectory has, or try
to keep, the antitheses of capital and labor at the center stage and
account for it as the ultimate outcome of value-relation. In this, lets
call the shorten trajectory, value-relation seems to have been worked out
only to bring that antitheses, the opposition of capital and labor into
sharp focus. The whole analyses is being chased, is in a hurry to blow
out this opposition, conclude all its development in the birth of a new
social relation that sublate that opposition, or lets say, all sounds like a
kind of bringing out a Hegelian rabbit out of the hat of political
economy. This trajectory, as I mentioned, could be seen also, as the one
that follows the shadows of gods from machine- those political
preferences of Marx the agitator, which are cast from off the stage of
political economy, they are not native player in it. The second
trajectory, the longer one, is the analyses of value-relation in its far
reaching development, there is a lot of oppositions, contradictions,
zigzags, unending fluctuation in search of a balance, in the development
of this relation, but there is no duality in it- in the sense which there is
in the making the labor and capital two opposite poles, it is unitary
movement of value and its forms. Capital is one and a single relation, it
is not something essentially different or oppose to social labor, but a
definite form of social-labor itself, which shape and transform it as
whole. Social labor here, in its capitalistic form, move along with its
value creating phase and is transformed by it. This second trajectory
subsume the first one and do not seeks, or mange, to conclude the line
of development, in any politically desired blow up out of the
opposition or not, and consequently is not by itself tends to bring about,
or give birth, to any new social from or social relation which would be
26

free from mold and stamp of exchange-value. The encounter of selfvalorizing-value, capital, and value-creating-activity, bare bone
labor, no doubt is a decisive moment in the development of value
relation. But just as one of its moments, it is not the whole story.
Whatever the force of antitheses between labor and capital, there is
another tendency inherent in capital which could subsume it and bring
that antitheses to some conclusion within itself. It transforms the labor.
It is not just that, that value-relation somehow precede and outlive that
antitheses of capital and labor which is just an episode of it. Their
encounter brings a new from of labor and new form of capital, one can
say, very much merged into each other. The opposition, antitheses
is overcome in the transforming of value relation itself. As I said, the
first trajectory is more evident in the public and published texts of the
Capital. The second is in hideous of Manuscripts, showing its 'pushed
back presence' and its marks in these texts. Let me go back to
Manuscripts, to that passage which is my reference. I'll do an attempt to
bring out, or reconstruct, the longer trajectory, with help of this passage.
Here we look at capital, moving on its own limits, in the overall
trajectory of value-relation. This is a picture of capital, not as
opposition, the two poles of labor and capital, but as a moving
contradiction:
Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to
reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the
other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it
diminishes labor time in the necessary form so as to increase it in
the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing
measure as a condition- question of life and death - for the
necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all powers of
science and of nature, as of social combination and of social
intercourse, in order to make the creation of the wealth
independent (relatively) of the labor time employed on it. On the
other side, it wants to use labor time as the measuring rod for the
giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the
limits required to maintain the already created value as value.
Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of
27

the development of social individual - appear as mere means, and

are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In
fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this
foundation sky-high.p706
Marx seems is in hurry to drive this line of his thoughts to some end. He
just imagine that this contradicting movement, making the creation of
wealth independent from labor-time, and at the same time relying on it
as measuring rod of wealth, will blow this foundation sky-high.
Blown into what forms? Will it be a blown out of value-relation which
is encompassing all the wealth and its creation, despite its relative
independence from labor? We do not find so much hints here, except,
perhaps, the emergence of social individual which relies on, stands on
forces of production and social relations as its two feet and is ultimate
creation of these forces. I'll do a preliminary and speculative attempt to
figure out this social individual in the context of development of
value-relation later. For now, what we can draw from the text is that
capital, and value-relation, is eroding its reliance on value-creating
labor.
To the degree that labor time - the mere quantity of labor- is
posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree
does direct labor and its quantity disappear as determinant
principle of production - of creation of use values - and is reduced
both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as
an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to
general scientific labor, technological application of natural
sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising
form social combination in total production on the other side - a
combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labor
(although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its
own dissolution as the form dominating production.p 700
Again, it seems a hurried ending, Capital thus works toward its own
dissolution as the form dominating production. What kind of
production this refer to? Text make it clear that it is the kind of
production based on, in my jargon, the first form, or the valuecreating labor, the production that labor as yet act as its internal
28

element. Capital, dissolve itself as the from dominating production,

as far as it make possible that the labor step aside of production
process, by this development, capital is not the form dominating
production, as production itself is not anymore the encounter of dead
labor with the live labor, and the consummation of the later by former.
What happens in the meanwhile to the labor which has been brought out
from the inside of production process, and what happens to the
production which is not the immediate production of material wealth,
but is solely the production of exchange-values, is the production and
reproduction the social relations and social condition of value-relation?
Do capital works to dissolve itself as the form dominating this larger
and greater sphere, the circulation, or the reproduction sphere? The
text is silent about it. But it does not exclude that the dissolution of
capital as dominating from of production, could not be accompanied, or
even itself being a resultant of its consolidation and its penetration as
the dominant form of the outer spheres of material production, the form
dominating the production and reproduction the social condition which
engulf not only the material production of wealth, but social-life as a
whole.
The exchange of living labour for objectified labour- i.e. the
positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital
and wage labour - is the ultimate development of the valuerelation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is and remains - the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of
labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of
wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation
of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the
amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set
in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is
itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent
on their production, but depends rather on the general state of
science and on the progress of technology, or the application of
this science to production... Real wealth manifests itself, rather and large industry reveals this - in the monstrous disproportion
between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the
29

qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure

abstraction, and the power of the production process it
superintends The theft of alien labour time, on which the present
wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this
new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour
in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth,
labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence
exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The
surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the
development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few,
for the development of the general powers of the human head.
With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and
the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of
penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities,
and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit
surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary
labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the
artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time
set free, and with the means created, for all of them.
The above text sums it all up. This text could be read and interpreted in
two ways. As an explanation of an inherent tendency in capitalism to
break down, as the production based on exchange value breaks down,
if we take the production in its narrower sense, immediate production
of material wealth, abstracted and separated from the totality of socialreproduction which at the same time,encompass the production and
reproduction of social-relations and conditions of material production
too. Text somehow over looks this totality of production. The other way
of reading the text is to see it as an indication of the break-down of
political economy as a definite science of capitalism. The
development of capitalism reaches a point that the science which has
accompanied it, could not keep pace with it. I'm leaning toward this
later reading. The exchange of living labour for objectified labour,
could not be seen as the ultimate development of the value-relation.
Though it could be the ultimate development of the production
resting on value. These two phrase, value-relation and production
30

resting on value which has been brought together in a hurry are not
pointing to the same thing. Capital is self-valorizing value, it is M-M',
money begetting money, which found and did establish in the
exchange of dead and live labor its source of valorization. If that
exchange ceased to be the prevalent mode of production of material
wealth, as I mentioned in the previous comment, it does not mean that it
is the end of value relation, or capitalism as over prevailing form of this
relation, or any definite break-down of it. Value relation, money and
capital with it, by penetration and reshaping all the layers of social life
and social relations, have captured and have rebuilt stronger spheres to
live on it, though all of theses spheres could be seem as if they are very
precarious, are suspended structures without foundations, or relying on
a shaky foundations- compare with the solidity of material production
from the stand point of political economy. Text could be read more as a
break-down of political economy, in so far as this science was narrowly
built on the labor theory of value. But labor as it is being transformed
under value-relation and under the stamp of capital, could not any
longer accounts for value and value relation as it did before. Political
economy come down on its foundation, but capitalism escape, expands
it foundation not on labor, but on value-relation, which now seems to be
all suspended in the air, detached from its material base, like the
world of credit. I'll pause on the break-down of political economy
later. Before that, let me try to drive this line of speculation to another
twist, to fill the gaps which has been left empty in the text, not stopping
at those hurried end that marks the text, but driving it to its imaginable
conceptual limits. I'll attempt to outline the longer trajectory in Marx.
2.2.8 A Longer trajectory, an Outline.

The shorter trajectory in Marx critique of political economy finds its

climax in capital encountering labor. The contradiction of capital and
wage labor, in this trajectory, -is the ultimate development of the
value-relation. It is the end of the road, or the beginning of the end.
The class struggle between capitalists who are the personification of
capital, and wage-laborers who are equally in sociopolitical terms,
31

personification of living-labor, considered to be the force which

eventually will dictate and bring about that end. Capital, a moving
contradiction, tends to explode sky high - presumably in a
Proletarian Revolution. With it, the value-relation - that underlying
social relation which called forth and gave birth to capital as its
contradictory form, the form of its self-expansion, is presumed that will
be buried under the debris of its own exploded form. Capital, will bury
value-relation, too.
Will capital and value-relation follow such a fate? How, and in which
sociopolitical configurations? Any such a prophecy, will lie outside the
horizon of the political economy. The end does not come from inner
working of value-relation and capital, it comes as a verdict of
History9. It is a Historical Judgment imposed on capital and valuerelation from outside. This exterior Judgment of History on capital and
value-relation is what that gives Marx his moral and political critique of
political economy. This critique, in turn, brings its own perspective: a
Messianic one, which tends to shortcut the movement of value-relation
in its contradictory phase in an apocalyptic eruption of classstruggles. This Historical Judgment could find as much support - by
putting class-struggles on the edifice of political economy - as it could
be rejected from within it. The blown up stage in the Judgment
perspective, from within political economy, could be seen, not as a
final, but as a mediatory phase. The contradiction of capital and
wage labor, could be seen as the moment in which value-relation
gathers strength, counteracts and builds up to suppress and surpass
precisely those contradictions which are endangering it.
If we push back the Historical judgment and its companion, the
Messianic outlook, a longer trajectory in the Marx's reworking of
9 With History capitalized, I'd like to refer to history as it is constructed as a
teleology of social-life. A teleology overarching social-life from a beginning to an
end, and providing it with meanings as we could find it in its elaborate and secular
from in Historical Materialism. This History could differ from actual history. The
latter is constructed as a time dimension serving in sequencing and arranging
events, possibly in a causal or reciprocal inter connection, or merely for
juxtaposing them next to each other. Das Kapital could be characterized among
other thing by over-presence of History and the absence of history in it!

32

political economy began to come forth. It is as yet, somehow

suppressed. But it is there. ..
[Note:
I'm editing this sub-section, as it is now, it
is too log and make things more confused than
clear!..]
2.2.9 The Break Down of Political Economy?

There is an analogy from Physics. It may help to look at political

economy and its present demise in more imaginative way. We know,
physics has been a more solid science than political economy, and it is
well known too, that different sciences borrow from, and imitate each
other to the point of exhaustion! Once upon a time physicists begun to
explain every constellation in the skies and all the distribution of planets
and stars in universe, in term of gravitation. Gravitation promoted to the
status of a law governing the shape of material universe. Then came an
erupting question. What if a star, a constellation of them, collapse under
its own weight, what if forces counter-balancing the force of gravity
lose their strength, or overcome by gravity? The answer was blackholes. Sure, three was as yet physics in black holes, and this physics
was even more in the grips of gravitation. But for physicists all the laws
of his science were broken down. Not because the gravity was not there,
but because it was two strong which made all hitherto assumptions of
space and time out of shape and rendered any measurement and
accounting impossible. The whole trade of physics seemed overturned
at once!
It seems to me that political economy, and Marx reconstructing of it,
has reached such a fate. Marx draws this fate for political economy in
many places, among them in the texts quoted above. But it seems to me
he took the break down of the science for that of reality.
Political economy as analyses of value-relation, reaches a phase which
no longer could count on labor-time as the measure of value. The
classic labor theory of value proved to be inadequate for explaining
33

fully developed value-relations. Value on the basis of labor-time could

not account for creation, circulation and distribution of social wealth
and it condition. It is not because exchange-value has been weakened
in social relations, that it is no longer the bond which glues individuals
and holds and society together, because it has become too strong, too
dominant kind of force, a force which seems to be its own base and
holding everything else to itself. Not because it is absent, because it has
penetrated and shaped all social-life in its mold, even emotions and
affections is now subsumed in value-relation. It is the force which
defines all the labyrinth of relations, animate social body, keeps its
material forces in motion, and glues every one and everything
connected itself. To return to analogy of physics, value-relation is not
anymore in the grips of time and space of material production, it
seems that it has now created its own social space and time, or, its
ownspace-time which act as the foundation and meteiality in all
things.
The way that political economy treated the problem of prices and
specially monopoly prices, .was showing to it that that the possibility of
a break down has been there all the way after the initial starts. In
Marx analyses, price assume to be the form of value in actual exchange,
where the trace of any real value and count of it, could be lost or
disappear. A thing could command a high price, without containing any
value as objectified labor time. The total prices of, say a total
commodities produced in a year, assume to correspond to total value
produced in that year, which is total labor time spent in their
productions. But whether the price of a given commodities is the same
as its value or not, is more a matter of chance than the rule. For a
commodity as a member of community of commodities, to have a price
correspond to its value, it has to prove containing a socially necessary
labor-time, no more, nor less. But this socially necessary labor-time is
an average, a moving target, and a thing that is not only determined by
the degree of changing productivity of labor in its own branch of
production, but by necessity of total labor in that branch in relation to
other branches. Value as necessary labor-time is a moving reality and
Price is the actual form of exchange-value, but a the form of it which.
34

As we move away from economy of subsistence, this divergence of

value and prices became more , price, the actual exchange-value, is a
claim into the pool of all values. It is like a molecule in a chamber of
gas, hit by other and hit them, A thing can have price, without having a
bit of value. The totality of prices is supposed to be the same as the
totality of , the necessary labor time for producing them. But this
necessary is never given and stand still, and it is not only the changing
of productivity that render it to fluctuation, the total labor time spend in
the total of the special commodity too. Like a container of gas10,
molecules keep themselves in motion. We will have a self-move, selfcontained and baseless relational world, a step away from Newtonian to
relativity point or view11!
There is another assumption which accompanies 'political economy'. It
is a social-configuration assumed to be in place and to keep pace in the
whole development of political economy, or to the end of it in Marx
narration. Society pictured on its wealth producing merit and capacity
and the dividing line is that of 'productive labor'. The are those who
produce this wealth, and those who accumulate it and those who
consume it. Apart from accumulators of produced wealth, which played
an useful social function, there were wealth producers themselves,
'productive laborers', everybody else could be an unproductive burden
to this feast. Adam Smith thought that A man grows rich by employing
10 It seems to be the trick which make of economy a modern science. Find an
analogous model, say of gas chamber, fluids in a tanks, waves in the sea, clouds in
the skies, weather patterns, and then superimpose that model on the surface of
circulation of credit, money, and commodities; work out the observation patterns
of movement and put them in modified mathematical equations! Now you have an
objective science of economy which more than often proved to be a good device
in the hands of a Wall Street gamblers. If you are clever and lucky the model could
bring to you a Nobel Prize too! Poor classical political economist. They were very
much mistaken thinking they are doing a science. They were doing an social
endeavor very much biased in their subject of their inquiry. They were as yet far
away from the luxury of objective economics. Only an over powerful capitalism
and over confident a scinetific apparatus could afford such objectivity in the sphere
of economics, or the other social sciences for that matter!
11 There has been talk about a linguistic turn in the sciences of man. It has brought
about new outlooks and new attempts to decipher value. It worth to take a look at
them.

35

a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor, by maintaining a

multitude of menial servants'. He marked that The former, as it
produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive
labour. This view was not challenged by Marx, he tried to inject a bit
of dynamism into it and characterize it with its specific social form.
Marx emphasized that from the standpoint of capitalism 'menial servant'
too could be productive laborer, if he produce surplus-value. Consider a
servant which at the private table of his master is consume the wealth of
his master, but at the public table of a restaurant he could bring more
wealth to the master12. From standpoint of capital the line between the
productive and unproductive was drawn between those which produce
surplus-value and those who consume it unproductively, namely not
using it in a new, or a further value creation processes. Other judgments
about the usefulness or harmfulness of activity, or the labor which was
performed doomed irrelevance. Money begetting money, it is capital
and productive or unproductive, could be judged only in this light.
It fitted into that sociology which Marx wanted to build around political
economy, or the other way maybe more true, to narrate political
economy with an eye to the limiting dictate of the sociology. The
society was divided into two classes. Capitalists, who accumulate all the
produced wealth, and with it all the means and condition of producing
of wealth in their own hands, against the laborers which on the other
side have been reduced to a mere wealth producing slaves deprived
12 The determinate material form of the labour, and therefore of its product, in itself
has nothing to do with this distinction between productive and unproductive
labour. For example, the cooks and waiters in a public hotel are productive
labourers, in so far as their labour is transformed into capital for the proprietor of
the hotel. These same persons are unproductive labourers as menial servants,
inasmuch as I do not make capital out of their services, but spend revenue on them.
In fact, however, these same persons are also for me, the consumer, unproductive
labourers in the hotel. It seems that Marx, despite his characterization of it as
surplus-value producing activity, is not comfortable with the notions of 'productive'
and 'unproductive' labor, or his characterization of it at all! Consistency in holding
to capital characterization of productivity ends to considering the most notorious
activities, artful cheating, charming and enchanting, charlatanism and crimes,
among the most productive activities which keep in motion the M-M' drive at the
surface of whole society.

36

form the means and conditions of their social life. They are two pillar
poles of society and everybody else, at most is in and push and put state
of living between these two poles. It is society reconstruct, not as
'personifications' of dynamic of value-relation, but as personification of
capital and labor, which was a transient state of that relation. As we
move away from this initial state, or as capitalism capture the
production process and gather strength, other development and changes
in the class configuration began to leave their marks. It is not only that
the labor, abstract, pure and simple one, become more and more
redundant in production and pushed out and it not the service .
Alongside it the 'capitalist in person', too, become more and more and
redundant social being. Nearly all functions of capital which were
performed by capitalist is now more and more become separated from
him, and organized and lobar exchanged for wage. What hitherto was
accounted as the exchange of revenue with services, in their turns
assume the form of capital.
Following value-relation, apparently, we move away from that kind of
social configuration, and 'sociology13 which is known as Marxian one. It
13 I do not believe that one can make any sound conciliation between a Marxian view
and a sociology of not only of positivist heritage, but of any sort. They
separate precisely on the very point of their departure. Marx takes the path of an
active, interested, change-seeking, insidious and formative view. It differ and
oppose that positive, objective, disinterested, stand outside view, which
sociology imitating natural sciences tends, or pretends to assume. From any
consistence Marxian view any science of man, is absurd, nonsense, a
contradiction in terms, because it is always the man himself which made a
science of himself. If we deny the all knowing God or stop to exalt an allembracing, omniscient apparatus of science in place of him, which could judge and
know the man form their own heights independent of him and in objective manner,
the knowledge of man of himself is always subjective - or rather formative and
intentional. Sociology with a claim to objectivity and on empirical grounds is
ultimate nonsense in Marxian view, as any consistent Marxian view is a
subjective, non-science, and speculative in the eye of sociology. When talking of
Marx, we have to be very cautious in assigning to him any sociology, the term has
a very shallow depth and poor content. This point which came in the way, relate to
another one, which I consider as the most important one. The one which I believe
lies at the heart of current crisis of Marxism, or social-criticism which Marxism
not doubt has been its pinnacle and the most radical and consistent one in the

37

is moving away from class configurations. Class too, like nation,

territorial state, seems to be another transient historical entity in social
configurations. Classless society has been reached, as the same
degree that the nation-less world community has been reached. It does
not mean that these is not any social hierarchy in place, or the divide in
the access and command of material wealth has narrowed or that that
social power has lost its suppressing and oppressing character. All that
has been promised or has been identified with a 'classless society'. On
the contrary. This classless society, has the most elaborated hierarchy
which amount to crushing machinery, the social power has so diffused
and at the same time such penetrating and suppressing, it has the 'self',
and the technology of inbuilt self control and self-obedience, with at its
disposal, and gap between the commanding wealth and not servitude,
but the crushing the whole great bunch of population has never been so
wide. But all this is around free individuals engaging in value relations,
there is just one unitary flow which every one enter it and it has its
inner mobility at it work around a mobility, a flux, a flow and material
wealth. On the contrary, social is the mist elaborated, most impersonal
and oppressing and. Boundaries in flux, social mobility I guess we can
put it in tree or four interconnected, but differentiated layers. The is
hierarchy, but not classes, a class open to all moving up or down in its
ladder. There is suppression, but it is not longer an outright oppression.
The power act at the level of the self, rationalization and normalization,
it is and industrial kind of the production of the selves, where all the
natural bases of senses of 'pain and pleasure', detached and reproduced
as 'chemical', 'psychological', or lets say socially produced senses. It is
the class of free individuals, but all individuality, an abstract being, an
elastic surface for the reflection of social power, but it is at the level of
modern history of thoughts. If we take out the labor, if we consider the labor is
its transformed form, the form which has lost all its flesh and blood significance
- its natural distinctions and opposition to exchange-value and value-relation, then
where man can stand and make a science of his world? The Marxian ground is
lost and everything is shifted into the formative subjectivity of capital and value
relation, which modern ideology of science reconstruct it as its own standards of
objectivity. It is the point which hunts my text and come back in many guises
and make me to return to it time after time!

38

producing, molding the self, and it is self suppression, there is the gap,
and there is growing antagonism. But it is, saving capitalism from itself.
Here is my very rudimentary take at it:
Rentiers. They are the top gloss of the class., its aristocratic
pretension and imitation. It is content provider - a mirror
which class hold in front of itself, reflects, and measure the
values of its life it. It is American Dream crystallized. They are
celebrities, but they are not the active core of the Class, the
engine which keep all relations and this pointing top in place. As
we know, once upon a time the land was the main source of a
special kind of revenue, which was called rent. Land property,
and its rent, begun to constitute a safe heaven for the flight of
the tired, exhausted capitalist, or the flight of over accumulated
capital. Capitalist drew his money out from the active and
uncharted waves of circulation and put in landed property. Land
lost most of its natural attractions, as improvement in industrial
agriculture leveled out the natural productivity of different lands
and destroyed the basis of differential rent. But rent bearing land
property find a new source and gained a social attraction,
properties at the heart of cities, land and locations in big cities,
where social concentration, provide a new basis for differential
rents. Alongside this money find the ways to propertize and
monopolize all other, non-natural and purely social resources,
forces, and spaces, nearly all the conditions of social
intercourse, and turn them to rent bearing property. The
invention of 'intellectual property' has only been a recent
symptom in solidifying rent. What characterize this new kind of
rent is precisely it is social basis, it has to be produced and
reproduced and defended all the time. Money, that universal and
independent form of exchange-value has left out all its
thingness, it is detached form any substance and the age of gold
convertibility seem like ancient times. Money has the form of
pure credit. Credit, is purely social, social power and
commands. Every new advance in science and technology,
building virtual spaces, brands, any force or space in social life
39

which could be properiteized and monopolized has becoming a

source of rent. Intellectual property, marketing space, brands,
names.. . What characterize this new social rentires, to
distinguish then from landed property, is their advance claims,
claim to not only available power and wealth, but to the all its
potentials, to power and wealth as yet not produced. It is claim
to wealth not yet exist, it is indebtedness of generation to come
and simple assumption that they are able and willing to pay. ..
1. Laborers. It is the real and active body of the class. The core
which keep everything in motion, the artful jugglers which hold
the balls of value in the air, keeping it from hitting the grounds.
Can we figure out this body of class, in term of its socialeconomical presence. It is the vast and over sophisticate
apparatus of sciences, technology and education, from
universities, labs and garage workshop. It is the great apparatus
of crime, or violence, It is finance and commerce, and its
entertainment and art. This is the one and the only class in
capitalism, the one in which the distinctions of capitalist and
laborer has been, vanishes, they are fixed capital in themselves,
they are value-in-flesh. They14 consist of scientists, marketeers
14 I'd like to nominate the Bush and Cheney, along the guys like Steve Jobs, Mark
Zakerburg, as the bests and most productive among the new class laborer of 21th
century. Let us dub Bush, Julius Bush and Cheney Dick Caesar, because being
good laborer, they just imitated Julius Caesar. As story goes Julies Cesar borrowed
a lot of money in Rome, gave Rome the most glamorous Gladiator game that city
has ever had, build his public image and a lot more credit. With his lavish spending
of borrowed money, he easily acquired a public office and an army, that with it he
went to pillage in territories which is France and Spain today. He came back to
Rome, paid his debt and make a handsome profit. Our Julius Bush and Dick
Caesar, likewise with borrowed money- mainly from China- went to Iraq and an
drived an extended worldwide war of terror for pillage of energy reserves of the
world. The adventure of original Julius Cesar was very successful in its pillage and
empire-building, but it had a very bad and ruinous effect on Rome's economy
itself. It took too many hands away from the cultivating the land and pushed the
Roman agriculture towards a collapse. Our Julius Bush and Dick Caesar adventure
brought about a revers course compare to original. It is not that they killed and
destroyed less than what Cesar did in their pillage adventure. It was that pillage did
not pay for itself from the pillaged land, but economy at home received a God-

40

and criminals in the main. The class is plagued the fierce

competition, which is the other side of social mobility.
Servants. Domestic servant has always been a vast hidden
population, if we believe Bruadel. It has been brought from its
hideous places to the pubic eyes. Its ranks has swallowed
manifolds, Active core of the class find the great army of
servants which in its turn is put in service by the impetus of
value-relation..
Human waste. Capitalism, as Marx explain, produce excess
capital alongside excess population. Capital become excess
capital, In industrial phase it was reserve army of labor. But in
post-industrial phase it become human waste, the new inner city
populations...

2.2.9 Social Individual, Value with Flesh?

[Note:
It is most unfinished sub part in this draft. Some
thoughts and ideas which converge here, are as
follows:
- There is, apparently a parallel between, things
and men. Man become a thing. He has been thrown in
the world of commodities and has acquired their
characteristics. Analyses of commodities bear on
men. Thingness of man.
-Value and value relation among things, parallels
the Christianity.]

In Marx accounts, social individual" seems to be the pinnacle of all

development which value-relation and its highest form capital, will
send impetus to sustain and expand itself. Millions of new jobs was created. It
was not just Black Water and even China was happy with this adventure, the
American economy was somehow salvaged too. The Economy of crime is the real
impetus of whole economy of modern capitalism!

41

bring about. What he leaves open to speculation is what could

characterize the social aspect of the supposed individual? It was not
the habit of Marx to talk of something social, discarding the specific
from of it, there is not any general society above the specific form of it,
and something social which is not characterized by the form of society
defining and engulfing it. Individual could not be any exception. Marx,
in many places, emphasize that individual is not an entity ready made
and given, it is not a product of nature, it is a social product which is
created by capitalism, when it shatter those social bonds which were
holding every individual in pre-captalist society as a part of a
community. We all know that once upon a time, exile was counted one
of harshest punishment which a community could bring upon its
member, probably a little short of beheading. Now it is the first step
every teenager go through in search of 'own-self'. The question is not if
'individual' is the product of value-relation, but if he/she is, or has
become the main bearer of this relation too? Using Marx term, and
painting it with intriguing colors: is not social individual", capital
incarnated, value-in-flesh?! In other words: is not individual itself has
become, the depository, the site and source of value?

42