Marx’s Method

I have been reading so much of the man in the past 2 months that I am becoming strange and weird and beginning to speak in thoughts and phrase-ology that are prevalent in his books.

Here is the simplified crux of the method: appearances, dualities, contradictions!

Things in the capitalist mode of production and in our society are not what they appear to be, this is to say that our day to day relations and interactions as workers and members of this society, our lives as a totality under capitalism, are condradictory to our own personal freedoms and desires, etc, etc, etc. Everything apparently has a dual nature wrapped inside a singularity =  I am a possessor of labour-power and I am composed of a use-value and an exchange value, as a commodity, but I only produce a surplus-value for my employer and I produce a subsistence for myself and hopefully my loved ones. 

My ‘socially necesary labour-time’ is meant to keep me alive on the one hand but on the other it is meant to reproduce the class that is exploiting me as a worker, the class that has alienated me from my own personal production and means of production and means of subsistence; the class that reproduces me as a wage-labourer and continues to exploit the generations. This thing, or living person that is capital has robbed me of my abilities to subsist on my own thus I am compelled to work for it in order to survive, as we all are.

The contradictions are ever-present in my life. I am a worker and I like to have conveniences and free time and access to my own abilities and thoughts but when I am on the clock I am owned by somethinig external to me; contradictory to my own will and passions. Contradictory to itself in that it creates its own means of extinction through me and my cohorts; who will not be reproduced in this fashion forever and one day it will have to account for its misgivings and exploitations.

Contradictory in that it needs healthy and educated workers in order to survive. Thus it trains me to speak and subsist and smile but inside I know that this appearance is false. I am not what it says I am, I am not this thing, this relation, this process, this reproduction. I too am a contradiction because I produce those things that is says I am but I know that intrinsically I am not what it says I am. I am not what I appear to be, in some sense. 

I am a worker and I do not even own the product that I produce with my hands and my mind. My production is external to me and the property I produce is not mine, it is owned by something I will never meet.

To paraphrase that amazing introduction to No Country For Old Men:

“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, O.K., I’ll be part of this world.”

Appearances, dualities, contradictions!