Deformity

Fetishizing Our Lives Away

As of today, the first paragraph under festishism in Wikipedia reads, "A fetish...is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism is the attribution of inherent value or powers to an object."

One of the fundamental deformities Marx talks about is the way we've made money (accumulated capital) into a fetish. In a sense, we see our own power as something alien to us. Lebowitz explores various aspects of this here.

Lebowitz writes:

How capitalist production deforms workers

50. Think about the situation of workers in capitalism. As we have seen, the goals and authority of capital rule the process of production. Further, workers produce products which are the property of capital. But, workers don’t recognize those products as the result of the activity of working people. On the contrary, machinery, technology, all “the general productive forces of the social brain”, appear to workers as capital and as the contribution of the capitalist. Those products, further, are turned against workers and dominate them—they become the power of capital. What has happened? Simply, Marx explained, because the worker has sold his creative power to the capitalist, that power now “establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him.”

I remember this older woman working at a McDonald's one day who was joking (half-joking) that the managers were setting up the security camera so that, if she were robbed, they'd get some nice film of her but nothing of her robbers. Of course, her managers were more concerned that she'd take money from the till than they were anyone was going to rob her, right? That was the point of her joke.

That camera itself is a product of the collective work of laborers just like that woman, and that product is being trained on other workers for ensuring that every penny the capitalist makes stays under the control of the capitalist.

On one hand, this idea of the worker being alienated from what her hands have made takes the form of the dangerous machine that takes workers lives in Stephen King's "The Mangler." In a more overtly political way, the anti-riot personnel carriers and weapons used to put down worker demonstrations are all products actually made by workers. On another level, this alienation of the product from the labor explains why a worker can be fined a million dollars for file sharing despite the fact that her actual contribution to wealth may be abstractly counted as millions of dollars of social labor for which she is unpaid--the amount of money she is underpaid on her job, the support services she offers for her family that allow her to work, the incalculable services she provides to her neighborhood and community on a daily basis. Capitalism turns virtually everything we do into the private property of those who cut our checks. And even if it is not threatened, capitalism will turn those products into weapons to be used against us.

51. The world of wealth, that world created by human activity, faces the worker “as an alien world dominating him.” For workers in capitalism, producing is a process of a “complete emptying-out,” “total alienation,” the “sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end.” And what is the result of this “emptying-out,” this impoverishment in the process of producing? We try to fill the vacuum of our lives with things—we are driven to consume (consumerism). How else can we do this but with money, the real alienated need that capitalism creates?

Money is a commodity that symbolizes a certain value for labor at any given time, and most of us work all the time for precious little of it. We like to have things to show for our money as well, so we collect stuff--I-Pods, Kindles, DVDs, whatever. When we have nice things, we look like, and may even feel like, we're doing all right, even though we're less than two paychecks from the street. Ironically, when Americans hear the term "private property" in relation to capitalism, they think of this list of personal property that stands as our concession prizes for not having a stake in the system. We tend to be bribed to a comfort level where we won't resist the system in large numbers, which may be the greatest genius of the capitalist system.

Other ways that capitalist production deforms people

52. But that drive to “consume, consume!” is only one way that capitalism deforms people. In Capital,Marx described the mutilation, the impoverishment, and the “crippling of body and mind” of the worker “bound hand and foot for life to a single specialized operation” which occurs in the division of labor characteristic of the capitalist process of manufacturing. Did the development of machinery rescue workers under capitalism? No, Marx stressed, it completes the “separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labor.” “In this situation, head and hand become separate and hostile,” “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.

There's a Springsteen song called "Youngstown," about a steelworker more or less singing to his blast furnace. He tells her he's "sinking down," but he takes pride in his work at the same time, seeing himself in the next life, working the "fiery pits of hell." I think, in many ways, it's a song about the struggle involved in the "emptying out" described above.

53. But, why does this happen? Remember that the technology and techniques of production that capital introduces are oriented to only one thing—profits. Since workers have their own goals and struggle for them, the logic of capital points to the selection of techniques that will divide workers from one another and permit easier surveillance and monitoring of their performance. The specific productive forces introduced by capital are not neutral—they do not empower workers and allow them to develop all their capabilities (mental and manual). On the contrary, “all means for the development of production,” as Marx stressed about capitalism, “distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him” and “alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process.”

I was just joking with a co-worker earlier today about how, since I've taken a job in my school that allows me to pursue more of the social justice concerns I have, I've in many ways been deprived of my personal strengths--because of the dynamics in my relationships with co-workers in the new department, because of the cultural climate of our institution that becomes more entrenched with every attempt to change it, because of the way the very creation of this job places the person trying to change the institution outside of the role in which real change can be made. It's almost funny to me to see that reflected in Lebowitz's comments about the nature of the system and its effect on our capabilities.

I think it's important, crucial to recognize that capitalism is not neutral. It is a system organized around taking the power of workers and turning it into tools to be used against them. It works because it makes a religion people refuse to question. We wind up worshiping wealth, i.e. stolen labor. This, in turn, shapes every aspect of our lives and virtually every detail of the environment in which we try to work.

That's some kind of deformity.