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Capital is itself contradiction in action, since it makes an effort to reduce labour time to the minimum, while at the same time establishing labour time as the sole measurement and source of wealth. Thus it diminishes labour time in its necessary form, in order to increase its superfluous form; therefore it increasingly establishes superfluous labour time as a condition (a question of life and death) for necessary labour time. On the one hand it calls into life all the forces of science and nature, as well as those of social co-operation and commerce, in order to create wealth which is relatively independent of the labour time utilized. On the other hand it attempts to measure, in terms of labour time, the vast social forces thus created and imprisons them within the narrow limits that are required in order to retain the value already created as value. Productive forces and social relationships—the two different sides of the development of the social individual—appear to be, and are, only a means for capital, to enable it to produce from its own cramped base. But in fact they are the material conditions that will shatter this foundation.
[...] machines can only develop in opposition to living labour, as a hostile power and alien property, i.e. they must, as capital, oppose the worker. But it is equally easy to see that machines do not cease to be agents of social production, once they become, for example, the property of associated workers. But in the first case, their means of distribution (the fact that they do not belong to the workers) is itself a condition of the means of production that is founded on wage-labour. In the second case, an altered means of distribution will derive from a new, altered basis of production emerging from the historical process.
Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production
relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not the means of
subsistence, the instruments of labour, the raw materials of which capital con-
sists, produced and accumulated under given social conditions, in definite
social relations? Are they not utilized for new production under given social conditions, in definite social relations? And is it not just this definite social
character which turns the products serving for new production into capital?
Capital consists not only of means of subsistence, instruments of labour, and
raw materials, not only of material products; it consists just as much of
exchange values. All the products of which it consists are commodities. Capital
is, therefore, not only a sum of material products; it is a sum of commodities, of
exchange values, of social magnitudes.
It is only the domination of accumulated, past, materialized labour over
direct, living labour that turns accumulated labour into capital.
Capital does not consist in accumulated labour serving living labour as a
means for new production. It consists in living labour serving accumulated
labour as a means for maintaining and multiplying the exchange value of the
latter.
The indispensable condition for a tolerable situation of the worker is,
therefore, the fastest possible growth of productive capital.
But what is the growth of productive capital? Growth of the power of
accumulated labour over living labour. Growth of the domination of the bourgeoisie over the working class. If wage labour produces the wealth of others
that rules over it, the power that is hostile to it, capital, then the means of
employment, that is, the means of subsistence, flow back to it from this hostile
power, on condition that it makes itself afresh into a part of capital, into the
lever which hurls capital anew into an accelerated movement of growth.
To say that the interests of capital and those of the workers are one and
the same is only to say that capital and wage labour are two sides of one and
the same relation. The one conditions the other, just as usurer and squanderer
condition each other.
A noticeable increase in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive
capital. The rapid growth of productive capital brings about an equally rapid
growth of wealth, luxury, social wants, social enjoyments. Thus, although the
enjoyments of the worker have risen, the social satisfaction that they give has
fallen in comparison with the increased enjoyments of the capitalist, which are
inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the state of development
of society in general. Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we
measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their
satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.
reminds me of what baudrillard says about the socially constructed and relative nature of commodities
I think Adorno talks about this too (though who doesn't tbh)
To say that the worker has an interest in the rapid growth of capital is only to say that the more rapidly the worker increases the wealth of others, the richer will be the crumbs that fall to him, the greater is the number of workers that can be employed and called into existence, the more can the mass of slaves dependent on capital be increased.
so dramatic but I love it
on the next page he says "content with forging for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train."
[...] The majority would be justified in dissolving the London branch and expelling the minority as being in conflict with the principles of the League. I do not wish to put a motion to that effect as it would cause a pointless scandal and because these people are still communists in their own view even though the opinions they are now expressing are anticommunist and could at best be described as social-democratic. [...]
lmao so petty
[...] with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal. But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
[...] Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact we started from exchange-value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. [...]