Hi guys. I was reading Marx's "Capital" volume 1 (i'm only on the 1st chapter lawl) and I was prompted to write a disorganized, poorly supported, and somewhat repetitive dissertation on capitalism, society, and the difficulty of fully understand the nature of our current material reality. I thought someone on here might want to hear it, if not then I apologize for dumping a bunch of tl;dr on here.
Critical to our understanding of the capitalist system is the idea that commodities are only use-values. Here's the basic model of capitalist economics from what I learned in junior year of high school:
1. Humans need and want certain products- useful, corporeal, physical items with specific uses and methods of consumption and production.
2. The world's resources are finite and SCARCITY exists
3. Therefore, scarcity drives us to compete with each other for resources
4. This drives efficient production of these resources, and everyone trades for what they need
5. Again, social stratification exists, but is necessary and natural

Obviously that's not what's happening. Violent, malicious, and entirely ammoral exploitation are clearly traits inherent in our modern system. If you don't see that then you are blind. Some reasonable people would argue that this is due to an infiltration of our government(s) by corporate interests. Their theory is that, in order to curtail exploitation, we need a soverign body of a thousand or so democratically elected officials. These officials ought to be organized in a way to encourage their connection with those who elect them, and no one person or group of people should have enough power to take over the whole system for their own aims. This is the imperfect and inefficient but functional and relatively fair government that the founding fathers created, and we should stick to it.

This is the model that I think a lot of semi-well-informed people cling to. I would propose that this model is clearly not feasible. Capitalism is far more powerful than the government. Capitalism is all-consuming and eventually causes all posts of the government to become commodified and bought by corporations and individuals contributing huge sums of money. Barrack Obama's campaign was a billion dollars. A fucking billion. That's insane. And he's a democrat. There's no way to recover democracy from the corporations and lobbyists. In the face of capitalism, everything and everyone eventually sells out.

What I originally intended to write about was Marx's explanation of what a commodity really is. Again, we think of commodities as use objects. But for marx, they are also crystalized and materialized human labor. Because labor is done in a social context, and everyone is dealing with the same world of objects, labor is imbued in everything we produce. Money is used like a mirror to show and quantify the labor present in every object. Prices are sometimes far off the mark as to what an object is worth in labor-time, but once that becomes the case, people will generally stop producing that object and switch to a better commodity to produce. Therefore, as a rough estimate, money does equate to the labor put in to a commodity. There's no way to get money without doing labor, and there are very few times when you, a member of the 99%, can exploit the difference between the labor imbued in an object and the price. Money's function is indeed generally as a measurement of human labor time, NOT as a simple exchange value or "placeholder" for an economy that's based essentially on streamlined bartering. That's what we think of money as- a way to streamline the process of trading use values. That's not what it is. It's a measurement of labor.

And thus we see what we're REALLY doing in capitalism- we're exchanging a unified, homogenous substance called "labour." We obsess over this substance, not only money, but the labor which it resembels. Money is like the trope of a mystical mirror which reveals something in its true form, some kind of hidden detail, and shows an eerie difference between apparent visual reality and the reflected image. What we truly fetishize is not money but labor-power. We're constantly trying to dominate and control the labor of others, not just the crystalized past labor but indeed their future labors as well. That's the goal of capitalism. And thus the use-values of the world's commodities are absolutely trivial. And yet we all think that all the commodities are are use-values, and all we think money is is a lubricant for the exchange of use-values. And thus it's impossible for us to see what is really going on.

So here are some predictions of mine. Living in a society of consumers is the same as living in a society of laborers. In this society, increases in the efficiency of production are actually quite woeful problems for the working classes. Machines put people out of jobs, and are therefore hated. Isn't that absolute madness? We have tools, now, which can make our lives easier, and the power of these tools is constantly increasing; they are allowing us to produce more use-values with less labor. By the idea of capitalism outlined above, in which everyone is competing to use a scarce and finite supply of labor and materials to produce the goods they need and want, we should be rejoicing in our newfound abilities to get more for less. But that's clearly not what we're doing. Things are only getting worse, for everyone. Viewing the world as a whole, people are steadily being replaced by machines. People need to be able to expend their labor power in order to make the crystalized labor we are all after, and machines make it so that HUMAN labor is not expended in the production of more crap. The ratio between labor and material goods is changing, but that doesn't really matter to us; the economy is based on the trading of labor per se, not on the trading of its various vessels. What does matter is that it is becoming harder and harder for any given human being to expend his or her labor power and turn it in to crystalized, material product.

In the US this trend has accelerated rapidly with the advent of outsourcing to India, China, Malaysia, etc. These are countries in which labor can be extracted and essentially stolen. The workers convert their labor-power in to material product, and this conversion is made very efficient and productive through modern technologies. These people are producing far more material wealth than they would really need to survive. And yet all that is returned to them by the corporations is the bare minimum of what they need to survive. Thus they are kept addicted to producing vast ammounts of wealth from which they reap minimal benifit.

This sounds very benifitial for the United States, if we are to be so heartless and cruel, but it isn't, at least not for most of us. This is again due to the dual nature of labor. In our current society, every human being is an engine of labor-power, constantly searching for somewhere to expend their efforts. In America, we're basically running out of ways to expend that labor power. And now we have the idea of "job creation," which to any objective observer is perposterous. We've basically fabricated the entire service industry in order to keep everyone laboring as much as possible.