| This question <603|603> overall <602|604> Marcellus: <551|41>. |
| Question 727: What is the right answer to the question: “How has the worker” (and not only the worker but mankind as a whole) “been able to pass from being the master of capital—as its creator—to being its slave?” |
| [603] Marcellus: Two Dimensional Appearance, Three Dimentional Reality. There may have been a time when workers were the masters of their capital. Such a time may have occurred in a truly barter society where people survived by using their labor and time to make what they knew best and what society generally wanted. They then would take the results of their labor and trade them for a means of sustenance. In this way, all of the value they created was realized for themselves when their exchanges took place on the market. However, with the introduction of money as the general equivalent of exchange, it was no longer necessary to trade commodities for commodities which could be a burdensome process. For example, as every commodity owner may not have accepted cotton as payment, every commodity owner could now accept money because money could buy any commodity. |
| The right amount of money could also buy means of production as well as another important commodity “labor-power.” But this is no longer called money; it is called capital because it uses money to make more money, and this is its sole intention. So, as everyone in the barter society aforementioned labored to live in relative equality, the new capitalist society is now divided into classes with different intentions; there are the majority laborers who create valuable products and are paid a wage below the value they create. Their intentions are to provide for themselves and their families. And then there are the minority capitalists who own the means of production which tend to be expensive and out of the ordinary laborer's reach. The capitalists' intentions are also to provide for themselves, but as many times over as they have laborers working for them and creating surplus-value. They then give the laborers just enough money to survive so they are forced to come back to work the next day. When looked at from this point of view it is evident how the system has become tweaked, making the majority of people tools for the rich. And as this system presses on, the capitalists' coffers will ever-expand while the ordinary folks continue to live from paycheck to paycheck. |
| To sum up, it is the separation of the realization of value of sold commodities from the labor that created them which makes mankind the slave to capital, and it is done in such a way that it is hidden from view. When people get their paycheck, they think it is for the labor and time they put into their job, which it is. They just create much more value than they are compensated for. |
| Hans: The step from money to capital is not as immediate as you depict it. Capitlist production presupposes also the expropriation of the direct producers from the means of production, so that they had to sell their labor-power instead of being able to sell their labor. |
| On the other hand, Marx would say that commodity production itself is not as benign and beneficial as you say. Social relations of production which are mediated through commodities inherently have the mysterious qualities Marx called the “fetish-like character of commodities.” Indeed, the present question 727 could be reformulated as: why does the fetish-like character of commodities come from? |
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