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For herein lies capitalism’s secret: the uncommodifiable sweat, effort, inspiration, goodwill, care and tears of employees are what breathe exchange value into the commodities that employers then flog to eager customers – this is actually what makes the building or restaurant or school desirable.
For it is ultimately they who pocket the difference between the exchange value they pay employees in exchange for their commodity labour (wages) and the exchange value of the commodities created thanks to their experiential labour. In other words, labour’s dual nature is what gives rise to profit.
Capital, in short, is both a thing (commodity capital) and a force (power capital) – just as labour is split between commodity labour and experiential labour.
The moment people believed they had to choose between freedom and fairness, between an iniquitous democracy and miserable state-imposed egalitarianism, it was game over for the left.
‘Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?’
As long as humans are still part of a semi-automated production line, performing tasks that the machines cannot, the pace of human workers will be dictated by machines whose priority is to squeeze the last drop of productive energy from their human co-workers.
Possessive individualism has always been detrimental to mental health. Technofeudalism made things infinitely worse when it demolished the fence that used to provide the liberal individual with a refuge from the market.
