#13

#13

The domination of science according to the contemporary paradigm that necessitates the objective worldview - »weltanschauung« - makes political economy the force-dominant behind the establishment. The colonization of social life by the machinations of power leads to a higher visibility of the commodity within the open market; its global production depends upon mass consumption, which can only be sustained by labour and its division into its associated areas of manufacture, thereby suppressing any volition towards revolution.

There is an essential element of Kapital that remains largely unknowable. Similarly, like the ephemeral nature of power, when Kapital's power becomes greater its sophisticated and ramified qualities retreat from the knower. Kapital is the grand artificer. “Representation recedes directly.”¹ Representation recedes directly into the plenipotentiary, where Kapital assumes full power to act independently; we serve this master apparently through our direct relationship to money, the sum of all its parts, the commodity, the actuality of Kapitalismo-sozjietie.

The manner in which Kapital remains opaquely covert is by its exertion over the economy and its dominion over the commodity to reduce its visibility; the commodity and the economy mask Kapital's true identity. Kapital makes these particular aspects familiar to us, as if they were its conduit, whilst as an entity, by itself and at large standing alone, its complete form can remain relatively unknown. When understood as an independent entity we notice that Kapital moves through all areas of social life. If Kapital's base is material then its role is economical.

“{C}ommodities, money, capital and the state are fetishes,” writes Daniel Bensaïd.² They are illusions that are fabricated and are only necessary because they depend on social relations; abolishing these social relations would abolish these illusions. “{C}apital exists because we create it,” argues John Holloway³, but will it cease to exist if we do not create it tomorrow? “Abolishing the conditions of fetishism in reality means overthrowing the despotism of the market and the power of private property and breaking the state that ensures the conditions of social reproduction.”⁴

If labour is the social relation that produces the commodity then it is labour itself that would have to be abolished to remove the social relations that manufacture the fetishistic illusions. We return to Victor Riesel, writing to us from 1972, who calculates that “American labor now can influence directly and indirectly ... almost $40 billion.”⁵ Citizen Riesel writes to us from a time when American banks were going through the process of being unionized after unions had been kept out of the banking field for so long.

Citizen Riesel tells us that unions begin moving union money into union banks. Sozjietie has the ability to bargain with Kapital – where Kapital is a singular entity, sozjietie is a nebulous and populous body. Sozjietie wants money. Sozjietie knows that Kapital has the exchangeability. If sozjietie has the employability, Kapital sees the opportunity. Profitability. Labour unions give profitability some measure of security.

Citizen Riesel's report is documenting a historical precedent. Social relations are strengthened by the unions. The more labour becomes social, the more it is in the service of Kapital. It would be more insecure without unionization. The two of them can work together to lower inflation. It all depends on the negotiation and type of transaction.

Citizen Riesel describes this transaction as “a flow of multi-colored checks, totalling billions of dollars, pour in futuristic cinematic fashions from union treasuries into the unionized banks.”⁶ Citizen Riesel credits Howard Coughlin, then-president of the Office and Professional Employees International Union, with 'cracking the dike' by fully unionizing the National Bank of Washington. “On Aug. 11,” writes Citizen Riesel, the Union Label Department of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, “mailed a $10,000 check to True Davis, National Bank of Washington president. The check was for a certificate of deposit for two years.”⁷ Union label attracted union dollar. “The implications are obvious,” writes Citizen Riesel. “The unions ... can influence the deposits of billions of dollars.”⁸ Here we see a sharp inversion of the orthodoxy of monetary influence. In a quick turnaround, or role reversal, the unionists have become the capitalists and the social interests lie with the one who invests.

1#1.

2Bensaïd, D. (2005) “On a Recent Book by John Holloway.” Historical Materialism, Vol. 13, No. 4; p.188.

3Ibid.

4Ibid., p.189.

5Riesel, V. (1972) “Labor Backing Unionized Bank.” Ludington Daily News, Sep. 11.

6Ibid.

7Ibid.

8Ibid.

©Elijah Nathaniel James

#1

#1

Representation recedes directly; the intermediary draws away from actuality. The spectacle of mediation accumulates an immensity of production under the condition of domination.

Socialism coexists with the production of the commodity; {C}. Kapital {K}, abstractly, is the commodity.

Kapitalismo-sozjietie is a “social formation in which the presence of commodity production reflects the struggle within the bureaucracy and between the bureaucracy and the proletariat.”¹

Victor Riesel writes from 1970 concerning wage labour, portraying the immiseration of the Kansas City labourers union of unskilled workers. Citizen Riesel uses the term proletarian explicitly, a term not anachronistic to 1970. Citizen Riesel writes from a time when strikes in The United States of America spanned across 22 states. Rather than the mobilization of the sickle and the hammer, Citizen Riesel's comrades lay down their arms. America's “endemic rebels,” according to Citizen Riesel, redistribute the capital of their expropriation by means of the strike.

George Shultz and then-president Richard Nixon author the apology of capital's representation. The proletarian, the immiseration, the expropriation. Citizen Riesel assigns power to the radicalism of rebellion with a juxtaposed view of an establishment that considers the strike to be “militant.”²

In a 1970's America, those who built the structures owned the houses whilst those who did the talk wore the trousers, the labourers were the lower classes remaining expropriated and immiserated in their masses.

A rise in wages means a rise in commodity exchange value which has lead to a rise in the number of bureaucrats serving the bureaucracy that upholds capitalist domination. If each and every one who considered themselves a bureaucrat, thereby recognizing themselves as the proletariat – Citizen Smith addresses ye, o people of the telephone call centre, the mill worker, the night-shift shelf filler – and walked out «en masse» on bank holiday Monday in the month of May then each and every one of us would get their own way, put it to a vote, let each and every one have their say.

That is what Kapitalismo-sozjietie does.

The collectivity, extending to all members of the commonality, share a belief-system brought about by cohesion. Between individuals consensus is established. “At the same time, their voluntary consensus links up with a coercion imposed upon them 'from within' – that is, by the collectivity greater than their sum.”³ Conscience collective describes the process of coercion by consensus. “Or, to reformulate, conscience collective is the norms, constraints, moral or religious sentiments, and all manner of symbolic representation that express a society and legitimate both its institutions and the actual behaviour of the people in it.”

°There must be something wrong with society if I'm behaving badly° thinks Citizen Smith.

The freedom to make choices falls under the illusion of external forces that nullify any determination of individual behaviour. Depressions mark the oscillations of liberal culture, the very thing that determines our behaviour, liberal culture. Material circumstances delimit the determinations that give us real choices.⁴

“Consciousness of the material origins of culture and its relation to material progress, the history of the material struggle of classes is disprivileged. This favours an appeal to 'man's history' in which the unified subject 'man' has progressed. It is 'in our day' that this progress is said to be challenged.”⁵

1Gillette, C./Raiklin, E. (1988) “The Nature of Contemporary Soviet Commodity Production.” International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 15, No. 516; p. 65.

2Riesel, V. (1970) "Nation Disdains Much Authority." Rome News-Tribune, Jun. 23.

3Shevtsova, M. (1989) “The Sociology of the Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 5, No. 18; p.182.

4Wallis, M. (1994) “Pageantry and the Popular Front: Ideological Production in the 'Thirties'.” New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 38; p.140.

5Ibid., 141.

©Elijah Nathaniel James.