This Life
by martin hägglund
The surplus of time makes it possible for us to lead free lives but also to be exploited in the social form of wage labor, which converts our surplus of lifetime into surplus value for the sake of profit and the growth of capital.
The investment in labor-power is generally a profitable investment because living beings generate more lifetime—and therefore more labor-power—than it costs to maintain them.
To reduce the issue to individual choice and character is to disregard how exploitation is systemic under capitalism.
Super-profits are temporary, other businesses will soon catch on.
“The development of technology is the best way to increase relative surplus value, since with a more efficient technology I can make my workers produce more value in less time and keep their wages down at the same time.”
The reduction of the socially necessary labor time—which could be liberating— instead leads to a fatal contradiction.
“We must get people to consume ever more, regardless of whether they need the goods they consume and regardless of whether consuming the goods is fulfilling for them. We must even produce commodities in view of having them break sooner rather than later, so that consumers are forced to buy the commodity again.”
The expanding commodification of natural resources and life- activities is not optional but necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. If we are committed to capitalism, we are committed to commodifying more and more aspects of our lives. This vicious circle can be broken only through an overcoming of capitalism, which requires a transformation of our conception of value.
The deepest reason capitalism is a contradictory social form is that it treats the negative measure of value as though it were the positive measure of value and thereby treats the means of economic life as though they were the end of economic life.
Even if we developed our technologies to the point where we could provide the necessary means for everyone to lead their lives— with only a small amount of social labor required to operate the technologies— we would still have to exploit wage labor as much as possible, since capitalism recognizes no other source of value.
The most striking example is of course when people in our society are not needed for wage labor and we regard this as a problem that needs a solution (“unemployment”) rather than as an opportunity to be seized.
The problem with capitalism is not that it privileges value and social wealth. The problem with capitalism is that it distorts the meaning of value and social wealth
The key text for the revaluation of value in Marx is the seventh notebook of his Grundrisse
Water cost = Average time it takes to do work
Workers will work more because of competition
Technology makes less workers
All of this leads to falling sales because people are losing their jobs, all from efforts to increase profits
These companies are not evil, they need to do this to survive in a capitalist society
Tech should be making us freer, however this is obviously not the case.