THE REPRODUCTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
by fredy perlman
The everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces,
or perpetuates, a tribe. This reproduction is not merely physical, but
social as well. Through their daily activities the tribesmen do not merely
reproduce a group of human beings; they reproduce a tribe, namely a particular
social form within which this group of human beings performs specific activities
in a specific manner. The specific activities of the tribesmen are not
the outcome of "natural" characteristics of the men who perform them, the
way the production of honey is an outcome of the "nature" of a bee. The
daily life enacted and perpetuated by the tribesman is a specific social
response to particular material and historical conditions. The everyday
activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through theirdaily activities, slaves
do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also
reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their
own habits of submission to the master's authority. To men who live in
a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal
relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific
social form, and men submit to it only in very particular material and
historical conditions. The practical everyday activity of wage-workers
reproduces wage labor and capital. Through their daily activities, "modern"
men, like tribesmen and slaves, reproduce the inhabitants, the social relations
and the ideas of their society; they reproduce the social form of daily
life. Like the tribe and the slave system, the capitalist system is neither
the natural nor the final form of human society; like the earlier social
forms, capitalism is a specific response to material and historical conditions
. Unlike earlier forms of social activity, everyday life in capitalist
society sysematically transforms the material conditions to which capitalism
originally responded. Some of the material limits to human activity come
gradually under human control. At a.high level of industrialization, practical
activity creates its own material conditions as well as its social form.
Thus the subject of analysis is not only how practical activity in capitalist
society reproduces capitalist society, but also how this activity itself
eliminates the material conditions to which capitalism is a response.
Daily Life in Capitalist Society
The social form of people's regular activities
under capitalism is a response to a certain material and historical situation.
The material and historical conditions explain the origin of the capitalist
form, but do not explain why this form continues after the initial situation
disappears. A concept of "cultural lag" is not an explanation of the continuity
of a social form after the disappearance of the initial conditions to which
it responded. This concept is merely a name for the continuity of the social
form. When the concept of "cultural lag" parades as a name for a "social
force" which determines human activity, it is an obfuscation which presents
the outcome of people's activities as an external force beyond their control.'l`his
is not only true of a concept like "cultural lag." Many of the terms used
by Marx to describe people's activities have been raised to the status
of external and even "natural" forces which determine people's activity;
thus concepts like "class struggle," "production relations" and particularly
"The Dialectic," play the same role in the theories of some "Marxists"
that "Original Sin," "Fate" and "The Hand of Destiny" played in the theories
of medieval mystifiers. In the performance of their daily activities,
the members of capitalist society simultaneously carry out two processes:
they reproduce the form of their activities, and they eliminate the material
conditions to which this form of activity initially responded. But they
do not know they carry out these processes; their own activities are not
transparent to them. They are under the illusion that their activities
are responses to natural conditions beyond their control and do not see
that they are themselves authors of those conditions. The task of capitalist
ideology is to maintain the veil which keeps people from seeing that their
own activities reproduce the form of their daily life; the task of critical
theory is to unveil the activities of daily life, to render them transparent,
to make the reproduction of the social form of capitalist activity visible
within people's daily activities. Under capitalism, daily life consists
of related activities which reproduce and expand the capitalist form of
social activity. The sale of labor-time for a price (a wage), the embodiment
of labor-time in commodities (salable goods, both tangible and intangible),
the consumption of tangible and intangible commodities (such as consumer
goods and spectacles)--these activities which characterize daily life under
capitalism are not manifestations of "human nature," nor are they imposed
on men by forces beyond their control. If it is held that man is
"by nature" an uninventive tribesman and an inventive businessman, a submissive
slave and a proud craftsman an independent hunter and a dependent wage-worker,
then either man's "nature" is an empty concept, or man's "nature'' depends
on material and historical conditions, and is in fact a response to those
conditions.
Alienation of Living Activity
In capitalist society, creative activity takes the form
of commodity production, narlelp production of marketable goods, and the
results of human activity take the form of commodities. Marketability or
salability is the universal characteristic of all practical activity and
all products.The products of human activity which are necessary for survival
have the form of salable goods: they are only available in exchange for
money. And money is only available in exchange for commodities. If a large
number of men accept the legitimacy of these conventions, if they accept
the convention that commodities are a prerequisite for money, and that
money is a prerequisite for survival, then they find themselves locked
into a vicious circle. Since they have no commodities, their only exit
from this circle is to regard themselves, or parts of themselves, as commodities.
And this is, in fact, the peculiar "solution" which men impose on themselves
in the face of specific material and historical conditions. They do not
exchange their bodies or parts of their bodies for money. They exchange
the creative content of their lives, their practical daily activity, for
money. As soon as men accept money as an equivalent for life, the
sale of living activity becomes a condition for their physical and social
survival. Life is exchanged for survival. Creation and production come
to mean sold activity. A man's activity is "productive," useful to society,
only when it is sold activity. And the man himself is a productive member
of society only if the activities of his daily life are sold activities.
As soon as people accept the terms of this exchange, daily activity takes
the form of universal prostitution. The sold creative power, or sold
daily activity, takes the form of labor. Labor is a historically specific
form of human activity. Labor is abstract activity which has only one property:
it is marketable, it can be sold for a given quantity of money. Labor is
indifferent activity: indifferent to the particular task performed and
indifferent to the particular subject to which the task is directed. Digging,
printing and carving are different activities, but all three are labor
in capitalist society. Labor is simply "earning money." Living activity
which takes the form of labor is a means to earn money. Life becomes a
means of survival. This ironic reversal is not the dramatic climax
of an imaginative novel; it is a fact of daily life in capitalist society.
Survival, namely selfpreservation and reproduction, is not the means to
creative practical activity, but precisely the other way around. Creative
activity in the form of labor, namely sold activity, is a painful necessity
for survival; labor is the means to self-preservation and reproduction.
The sale of living activity brings about another reversal. Through sale,
the labor of an individual becomes the "property" of another, it is appropriated
by another, it comes under the control of another. In other words, a person's
activity becomes the activity of another, the activity of its owner; it
becomes alien to the person who performs it. Thus one's life, the accomplishments
of an individual in the world, the difference which his life makes in the
life of humanity, are not only transformed into labor, a painful condition
for survival; they are transformed into alien activity, activity perfonned
by the buyer of that 1abor. In capitalist society, the architects, the
engineers, the laborers, are not builders; the man who buys their labor
is the builder; their projects, calculations and motions are alien to them;
their living activity, their accomplishments, are his. Academic sociologists,
who take the sale of labor for granted, understand this alienation of labor
as a feeling: the worker's activity "appears" alien to the worker, it "seems"
to be controlled by another. However, any worker can explain to the academic
sociologists that the alienation is neither a feeling nor an idea in the
worker's head, but a real fact about the worker's daily life. The sold
activity is in fact alien to the worker; his labor is in fact controlled
by its buyer. In exchange for his sold activity, the worker gets
money, the conventionally accepted means of survival in capitalist society.
With this money he can buy commodities, things, but he cannot buy back
his activity. This revealsan peculiar "gap" in money as the "universal
equivalent." A person can sell commodities for money, and he can buy the
same commodities with money. He can sell his living activity for money,
but he cannot buy his living activity for money. The things the worker
buys with his wages are first of all consumer goods which enable him to
survive, to reproduce his labor-power so as to be able to continue selling
it; and they are spectacles, objects for passive admiration. Hc consumes
and admires the products of human activity passively. He does not exist
in the world as an active agent who transforms it. but as a helpless impotent
spectator he may call this state of powerless admiration "happiness," nnd
since labor is painful, he may desire to be "happy," namely inactive, all
his life (a condition similar to being born dead). The commodities, the
spectacles, consume him; he uses up living energy in passive admiration;
he is consumed by things. Tn this sense, the more he has, the less he is.
(An individual can surmount this death-in-life through marginal creative
activity; but the population cannot, except by abolishing the capitalist
form of practical activity, by abolishing wage- labor and thus dealienating
creative activity.)
The Fetishism of Commodities
By alienating their activity and embodying it in commodities,
in material receptacles of human labor, people reproduce themselves and
create Capital. From the standpoint of capitalist ideology, and particularly
of academic Economics, this statement is untrue: commodities are "not the
product of labor alone"; they are produced by the primordial "factors of
production," Land, Labor and Capital, the capitalist Holy Trinity, and
the main "factor" is obviously the hero of the piece, Capital. The
purpose of this superficial Trinity is not analysis, since analysis is
not what these Experts are paid for. They are paid to obfuscate, to mask
the social form of practical activity under capitalism, to veil the fact
that producers reproduce themselves, their exploiters, as well as the instruments
with which they're exploited. The Trinity formula does not succeed in convincing.
It is obvious that land is no more of a commodity producer than water,
air, or the sun. Furthermore Capital, which is at once a name for a social
relation between workers and capitalists, for the instruments of production
owned by a capitalist, and for the money-equivalent of his instruments
and "intangibles," does not produce anything more than the ejaculations
shaped into publishable form by the academic Economists. Even the instruments
of production which are the capital of one capitalist are primordial "factors
of production" only if one's blinders limit his view to an isolated capitalist
firm, since a view of the entire economy reveals that the capital of one
capitalist is the material receptacle of the labor alienated to another
capitalist. However, though the Trinity formula does not convince, it does
accomplish the task of obfuscation by shifting the subject of the question:
instead of asking why the activity of people under capitalism takes the
form of wage-labor, potential analysts of capitalist daily life are transformed
into academic house-Marxists who ask whether or not labor is the only "factor
of production." Thus Economics (and capitalist ideology in general)
treats land, money, and the products of labor, as things which have the
power to produce, to create value, to work for their owners, to transform
the world. This is what Marx called the fetishism which characterizes people's
everyday conceptions, and which is raised to the level of dogma by Economics.
For the economist, living people are things ("factors of production"),
and things live (money "works," Capital "produces"). The fetish worshipper
attributes the product of his own activity to his fetish. As a result,
he ceases to exert his own Fewer (the power to transform nature, the power
to determine the form and content of his daily life); he exerts only those
"powers" which he attributes to his fetish (the "power" to buy commodities).
In other words, the fetish worshipper emasculates himself and attributes
virility to his fetish. But the fetish is a dead thing, not a living
being; it has no virility. The fetish is no more than a thing for which,
and through which, capitalist relations are maintained. The mysterious
power of Capital, its "power" to produce, its virility, does not reside
in itself, but in the fact that people alienate their creative activity,
that they sell their labor to capitalists, that they materialize or reify
their alienated labor in commodities. Tn other words, people are bought
with the products of their own activity, yet they sec their own activity
as the activity of Capital, and their own products as the products of Capital.
By attributing creative power to Capital and not to their own activity,
they renounce their living activity, their everyday life, to Capital, which
means that people give themselves daily, to the personification of Capital,
the capitalist. By selling their labor, by alienating their activity,
people daily reproduce the personifications of the dominant forms of activity
under capitalism, they reproduce the wage-laborer and the capitalist. They
do not merely reproduce the individuals physically, but socially as well;
they reproduce individuals who are sellers of labor-power, and individuals
who are owners of means of production; they reproduce the individuals as
well as the specific activities, the sale as well as the ownership.
Every time people perform an activity they have not themselves defined
and do not control, every time they pay for goods they produced with money
they received in exchange for their alienated activity, every time they
passively admire the products of their own activity as alien objects procured
by their money, they give new life to Capital and annihilate their own
lives. The aim of the process is the reproduction of the relation
between the worker and the capitalist. However, this is not the aim of
the individual agents engaged in it. Their activities are not transparent
to them; their eyes are fixed on the fetish that stands between the act
and its result. The individual agents keep their eyes fixed on things,
precisely those things for which capitalist relations are established.
The worker as producer aims to exchange his daily labor for money-wages,
he aims precisely for the thing through which his relation to the capitalist
is re-established, the thing through which he reproduces himself as a wage-
worker and the other as a capitalist. The worker as consumer exchanges
his money for products of labor, precisely the things which the capitalist
has to sell in order to realize his Capital. The daily transformation
of living activity into Capital is mediated by things, it is not carried
out by the things. The fetish worshipper does not know this; for him labor
and land, instruments and money, entrepreneurs rind bankers, are all "factors"
and "agents." When a hunter wearing an amulet downs a deer with a stone,
he may consider the amulet an essential "factor" in downing the deer and
even in providing the deer as an object to be downed. If he is a responsible
and well-educated fetish worshipper, he will devote his attention to his
amulet, nourishing it with care and admiration; in order to improve the
material conditions of his life, he will improve the way he wears his fetish,
not the way he throws the stone; in a bind, he may even send his amulet
to "hunt" for him. His own daily activities are not transparent to him:
when he eats well, he fails to see that it is his own action of throwing
the stone, and not the action of the amulet, that provided his food; when
he starves, he fails to See that it is his own action of worshipping the
amulet instead of hunting, and not the wrath of his fetish, that causes
his starvation. The fetishism of commodities and money, the mystification
of one's daily activities, the religion of everyday life which attributes
living activity to inanimate things, is not a mental caprice born in men's
imaginations; it has its origin in the character of social relations under
capitalism. Men do in fact relate to each other through things; the fetish
is in fact the occasion for which they act collectively, and through which
they reproduce their activity. But it is not the fetish that performs the
activity. It is not Capital that transforms raw materials, nor Capital
that produces goods. If living activity did not transform the materials,
these would remain untransformed, inert, dead matter. If men were not disposed
to continue selling their living activity, the impotence of Capital would
be revealed; Capital would cease to exist; its last remaining potency would
be the power to remind people of a bypassed form of everyday life characterized
by daily universal prostitution. The worker alienates his life in
order to preserve his life. If he did not sell his living activity he could
not get a wage and could not survive. However, it is not the wage that
makes alienation the condition for survival. If men were collectively not
disposed to sell their lives, if they were disposed to take control over
their own activities, universal prostitution would not be a condition for
survival. It is people's disposition to continue selling their labor, and
not the things for which they sell it, that makes the alienation of living
activity necessary for the preservation of life. The living activity
sold by the worker is bought by the capitalist. And it is only this living
activity that breathes life into Capital and makes it "productive." The
capitalist, an "owner" of raw materials and instruments of production,
presents natural objects and products of other people's labor as his own
"private property. But it is not the mysterious power of Capital that creates
the capitalist's "private property" ;living activity is what creates the
"property," and the form of that activity is what keeps it "private."
Transformation of Living Activity into Capital
The transformation of living activity into Capital takes
place through things, daily, but is not carried out by things. Things which
are products of human activity seem to be active agents because activities
and contacts are established for and through things, and because people's
activities are not transparent to them; they confuse the mediating object
with the cause. In the capitalist process of production, the worker
embodies or materializes his alienated living energy in an inert object
by using instruments which are embodiments of other people's activity.
(Sophisticated industrial instruments embody the intellectual and manual
activity of countless generations of inventors, improvers and producers
from all corners of the globe and from varied forms of society.) The instruments
in themselves are inert objects; they are material embodiments of living
activity, but are not themselves alive. The only active agent in the production
process is the living laborer. He uses the products of other people's labor
and infuses them with life, so to speak, but the life is his own; he is
not able to resurrect the individuals who stored their living activity
in his instrument. The instrument may enable him to do more during a given
time period, and in this sense it may raise his productivity. But only
the living labor which is able to produce can be productive. For
example, when an industrial worker runs an electric lathe, he uses products
of the labor of generations of physicists, inventors, electrical engineers,
lathe makers. He is obviously more productive than a craftsman who carves
the same object by hand. But it is in no sense the "Capital" at the disposal
of the industrial worker which is more "productive" than the "Capital''
of the craftsman. If generations of intellecrual and manual activity had
not been embodied in the electric lathe, if the industrial worker had to
invent the lathe, electricity, and the electric lathe, then it would take
him numerous lifetimes to turn a single object on an electric lathe, and
no amount of Capital could raise his productivity above that of the craftsman
who carves the object by hand. The notion of the "productivity of
capital," and particularly the detailed measurement of that "productivity,"
are inventions of the "science" of Economics, that religion of capitalist
daily life which uses up people's energy in the worship, admiration and
flattery of the central fetish of capitalist society. Medieval colleagues
of these "scientists" performed detailed measurements of the height and
width of angels in Heaven, without ever asking what angels or Heaven were,
and taking for granted the existence of both. The result of the worker's
sold activity is a product which does not belong to him. This product is
an embodiment of his labor, a materialization of a part of his life, a
receptacle which contains his living activity, but it is not his; it is:
as alien to him as his labor. He did not decide to make it, and when it
is made he does not dispose of it. If he wants it, he has to buy it. What
he has made is not simply a product with certain useful properties; for
that he did not need to sell his labor to a capitalist in exchange for
a wage; he need only have picked the necessary materials and the available
tools, he need only have shaped the materials guided by his goals and limited
by his knowledge and ability. (It is obvious that an individual can only
do this marginally; men's appropriation and use of the materials and tools
available to them can only take place after the overthrow of the capitalist
form of activity.) What the worker produces under capitalist conditions
is a product with a very specific property, the property of salability.
What his alienated activity produces is a commodity. Because capitalist
production is commodity production, the statement that the goal of the
process is the satisfaction of human needs is false; it is a rationalization
and an apology. The "satisfaction of human needs" is not the goal of the
capitalist or of the worker engaged in production, nor is it a result of
the process. The worker sells his labor in order to get a wage; the specific
content of the labor is indifferent to him; he does not alienate his labor
to a capitalist who does not give him a wage in exchange for it, no matter
how many human needs this capitalist's products may satisfy. The capitalist
buys labor and engages it in production in order to emerge with commodities
which can be sold. He is indifferent to the specific properties of the
product, just as he is indifferent to people's needs; all that interests
him about the product is how much it will sell for, and all that interests
him about people's needs is how much they "need" to buy and how they can
be coerced, through propaganda and psychological conditioning, to "need"
more. The capitalist's goal Is to satisfy his need to reproduce and enlarge
Capital, and the result of the process is the expanded reproduction of
wage labor and Capital (which are not "human needs"). The commodity
produced by the worker is exchanged by the capitalist for a specific quantity
of money; the commodity is a value which is exchanged for an equivalent
value. In other words, the living and past labor materialized in the product
can exist in two distinct yet equivalent forms, in commodities and in money,
or in what is common to both, value. This does not mean that value is labor.
Value is the social form of reified (materialized) labor in capitalist
society. Under capitalism, social relations are not established directly;
they are established through value. Everyday activity is not exchanged
directly; it is exchanged In the form of value. Consequently, what happens
to living activity under capitalism cannot be traced by observing the activity
itself, but only by following the metamorphoses of value. When the
living activity of people takes the form of luhor (alienated activity),
it acquires the property of exchangeability; it acquires the form of value.
In other words, the labor can be exchanged for an "equivalent" quantity
of money (wages). The deliberate alienation of living activity, which is
perceived as necessary for survival by the members of capitalist society,
itself reproduces the capitalist form within which alienation is necessary
for survival. Because of the fact that living activity has the form of
value, the products of that activity must also have the form of value:
they must be exchangeable for money. This is obvious since, if the products
of labor did not take the form of value, but for example the form of useful
objects at the disposal of society, then they would either remain in the
factory or they would be taken freely by the members of society whenever
a need for them arose; in either case, the money-wages received by the
workers would have no value, and living activity could not be sold for
an "equivalent" quantity of money; living activity could not be alienated.
Consequently, as soon as living activity takes the form of value, the products
of that activity take the form of value, and the reproduction of everyday
life takes place through changes or metamorphoses of value. The capitalist
sells the products of labor on a market; he exchanges them for an equivalent
sum of money; he realizes a determined value. The specific magnitude of
this value on a particular market is the price of the commodities. For
the academic Economist, Price is St. Peter's key to the gates of Heaven.
Like Capital itself, Price moves within a wonderful world which consists
entirely of objects; the objects have human relations with each other,
and are alive; they transform each other, communicate with each other;
they marry and have children. .4nd of course it is only through the grace
of these intelligent, powerful and creative objects that people can be
so happy in capitalist society. In the Economist's pictorial representations
of the workings of heaven, the angels do everything and men do nothing
at all; men simply enjoy what these superior beings do for them. Not only
does Capital produce and money work; other mysterious beings have similar
virtues. Thus Supply, a quantity of things which are sold, and Demand,
a quantity of things which are bought, together determine Price, a quantity
of money; when Supply and Demand marry on a particular point of the diagram,
they give birth to Equilibrium Price, which corresponds to a universal
state of biiss. The activities of everyday life are played out by things,
and people are reduced to things ("factors of production") during their
productive" hours, and to passive spectators of things during their "leisure
time." The virtue of the Economic Scientist consists of his ability to
attribute the outcome of people's everyday activities to things, and of
his inability to see the living activity of people underneath the antics
of the things. For the Economist, the things through which the activity
of people is regulated under capitalism are themselves the mothers and
sons, the causes and consequences of their own activity. The magnitude
of value, namely the price of a commodity, the quantity of money for which
it exchanges, is not determined by things, but by the daily activities
of people. Supply and demand, perfect and imperfect competition, are nothing
more than social forms of products and activities in capitalist society;
they have no life of their own. The fact that activity is alienated, namely
that labor-time is sold for a specific sum of money, that it has a certain
value, has several consequences for the magnitude of the value of the products
of that labor. The value of the sold commodities must at least be equal
to the value of the labor-time. This is obvious both from the standpoint
of the individual capitalist firm, and from the standpoint of society as
a whole. If the value of the commodities sold by the individual capitalist
were smaller than the value of the labor he hired, then his labor expenditures
alone would be larger than his earnings, and he would quickly go bankrupt.
Socially, if the value of the laborers production were smaller than the
value of their consumption, then the labor force could not even reproduce
itself, not to speak of a class of capitalists. However, if the value of
the commodities were merely equal to the value of the labor- time expended
on them, the commodity producers would merely reproduce themselves, and
their society would not be a capitalist society; their activity might still
consist of commodity production, but it would not be capitalist commodity
production. For labor to create Capital, the value of the products
of labor must be larger than the value of the labor. In other words, the
labor force must produce a surplus product, a quantity of goods which it
does not consume, and this surplus product must be transformed into surplus
value, a form of value which is not appropriated by workers as wages, but
by capitalists as profit. Furthermore, the value of the products of labor
must be larger still, since living labor is not the only kind of labor
materialized in them. In the production process, workers expend their own
energy, but they also use up the stored labor of others as instruments,
and they shape materials on which labor was previously expended.
This leads to the strange result that the value of the laborer's products
and the value of his wage are different magnitudes, namely that the sum
of money received by the capitalist when he sells the commodities produced
by his hired laborers is different from the sum he pays the laborers. This
difference is not explained by the fact that the used-up materials and
tools must be paid for. If the value of the sold commodities were equal
to the value of the living labor and the instruments, there would still
be no room for capitalists. The fact is that the difference between the
two magnitudes must be large enough to support a class of capitalists--not
only the individuals, but also the specific activity that these individuals
engage in, namely the purchase of labor. The difference between the total
value of the products and the value of the labor spent on their production
is surplus value, the seed of Capital. In order to locate the origin
of surplus value, it is necessary to examine why the value of the labor
is smaller than the value of the commodities produced by it. The alienated
activity of the worker transforms materials with the aid of instruments,
and produces a certain quantity of commodities. However, when these commodities
are sold and the used-up materials and instruments are paid for, the workers
are not given the remaining value of their products as their wages; they
are given less. In other words, during every working day, the workers perform
a certain quantity of unpaid labor, forced label, for which they receive
no equivalent. The performance of this unpaid labor, this forced
labor, is another "condition for survival" in capitalist society. However,
like alienation, this condition is not imposed by nature, but by the collective
practice of people, by their everyday activities. Before the existence
of unions, an individual worker accepted whatever forced labor was available,
since rejection of the labor would have meant that other workers would
accept the available terms of exchange, and the individual worker would
receive no wage. Workers competed with each other for the wages offered
by capitalists; if a worker quit because the wage was unacceptably low,
an unemployed worker was willing to replace him, since for the unemployed
a small wage is higher than no wage at all. This competition among workers
was called "free labor" by capitalists, who made great sacrifices to maintain
the freedom of workers, since it was precisely this freedom that preserved
the surplus value of the capitalist and made it possible for him to accumulate
Capital. It was not any worker's aim to produce more goods than he was
paid for. His aim was to get a wage which was as large as possible. However,
the existence of workers who got no wage at all, and whose conception of
a large wage was consequently more modest than that of an employed worker,
made it possible for the capitalist to hire labor at a lower wage. In fact,
the existence of unemployed workers made it possible for the capitalist
to pay the lowest wage that workers were willing to work for. Thus the
result of the collective daily activity of the workers, each striving individually
for the largest possible wage, was to lower the wages of all; the effect
of the competition of each against all was that all got the smallest possible
wage, and the capitalist got the largest possible surplus. The daily
practice of all annuls the goals of each. But the workers did not know
that their situation was a product of their own daily behavior; their own
activities were not transparent to them. To the workers it seemed that
low wages were simply a natural part of life, like illness and death, and
that falling wages were a natural catastrophe, like a flood or a hard winter.
The critiques of socialists and the analyses of Marx, as well as an increase
in industrial development which afforded more time for reflection, stripped
away some of the veils and made it possible for workers to see through
their activities to some extent. However. in Western Europe and the United
States, workers did not get rid of the capitalist form of daily life; they
formed unions. And in the different material conditions of the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, workers (and peasants) replaced the capitalist class
with a state bureaucracy that purchases alienated labor and accumulates
Capital in the name of Marx. With unions, daily life is similar to
what it was before unions. in fact, it is almost the same. Daily life continues
to consist of labor, of alienated activity, and of unpaid labor, or forced
labor. The unionized worker no longer settles the terms of his alienation;
union functionaries do this for him. The terms on which the worker's activity
is alienated are no longer guided by the individual worker's need to accept
what is available; they are now guided by the union bureaucrat's need to
maintain his position as pimp between the sellers of labor and the buyers.
With or without unions, surplus value is neither a product of nature nor
of Capital; it is created by the daily activities of people. In the performance
of their daily activities, people are not only disposed to alienate these
activities, they are also disposed to reproduce the conditions which force
them to alienate their activities, to reproduce Capital and thus the power
of Capital to purchase labor. This is not because they do not know "what
the alternative is." A person who is incapacitated by chronic indigestion
because he eats ton much grease does not continue eating grease because
he does not know what the alternative is. Either he prefers being incapacitated
to giving up grease, or else it is not clear to him that his daily consumption
of grease causes his incapacity. And if his doctor, preacher, teacher and
politician tell him, first, that the grease is what keeps him alive, and
secondly that they already do for him everything he would do if he were
well, then it is not surprising that his activity is not transparent to
him and that he makes no great effort to render it transparent. The
production of surplus value is a condition of survival, not for the populntion,
but for the capitalist system Surplus value is the portion of the value
of commodities produced by labor which is not returned to the laborers.
It can be expressed either in commodities or in money (just as Capital
can be expressed either as a quantity things or of money), but this does
not alter the fact that it is an expression for the materialized labor
which is stored in a given quantity of products. Since the products can
be exchanged for an "equivalent" quantity of money, the money "stands for,''
or represents, the same value as the products. The money can, in turn,
be exchanged for another quantity of products of "equivalent" value. The
ensemble of these exchanges, which take place simultaneously during the
performance of capitalist daily life, constitutes the capitalist process
of circulation. It is through this process that the metamorphosis of surplus
value into Capital takes place. The portion of value which does not
return to labor, namely surplus value, allows the capitalist to exist,
and it also allows him to do much more than simply exist. The capitalist
invests a portion of this surplus value; he hires new workers and buys
new means of production; he expands his dominion. What this means is that
the capitalist accumulates new labor, both in the form of the living labor
he hires and of the past labor (paid and unpaid) which is stored in the
materials and machines he buys. The capitalist class as a whole accumulates
the surplus labor of society, but this process takes place on a social
scale and consequently cannot be seen if one observes only the activities
of an individual capitalist. It must be remembered that the products bought
by a given capitalist as instruments have the same characteristics as the
products he sells. A first capitalist sells instruments to a second capitalist
for a given sum of value, and only a part of this value is returned to
workers as wages; the remaining part is surplus value, with which the first
capitalist buys new instruments and labor. The second capitalist buys the
instruments for the given value, which means that he pays for the total
quantity of labor rendered to the first capitalist, the quantity of labor
which was remunerated as well as the quantity performed free of charge.
This means that the instruments accumulated by the second capitalist contain
the unpaid labor performed for the first. The second capitalist, in turn,
sells his products for a given value, and returns only a portion of this
value to his laborers; he uses the remainder for new instruments and labor.
If the whole process were squeezed into a single time period, and if all
the capitalists were aggregated into one, it would he seen that the value
with which the capitalist acquires new instruments and labor is equal to
the value of the products which he did not return to the producers. This
accumulated surplus labor is Capitnl. In terms of capitalist society
as a whole, the total Capital is equal to the sum of unpaid labor performed
by generations of human beings whose lives consisted of the daily alienation
of their living activity. In other words Capital, in the face of which
men sell their living days, is the product of the sold activity of men,
and is reproduced and expanded every day a man sells another working day,
every moment he decides to continue living the capitalist form of daily
life.
Storage and Accumulation of Human Activity
The transformation of surplus labor into Capital is a
specific historical form of a more general process, the process of industrialization,
the permanent transformation of man's material environment. Certain
essential characteristics of this consequence of human activity under capitalism
can he grasped by means of a simplified illustration. Tn an imaginary society,
people spend most of their active time producing food and other necessities;
only part of their time is "surplus time" in the sense that it is exempted
from the production of necessities. This surplus activity may be devoted
to the production of food for priests and warriors who do not themselves
produce; it may be used to produce goods which are burned for sacred occasions;
it may be used up in the performance of ceremonies or gymnastic exercises.
In any of these cases, the material conditions of these people are not
likely to change, from one generation to another, as a result of their
daily activities. However, one generation of people of this imaginary society
may store their surplus time instead of using it up. For example, they
may spend this surplus time winding up springs. The next generation may
unwind the energy stored in the springs to perform necessary tasks, or
may simply use the energy of the springs to wind new springs. In either
case, the stored surplus labor of the earlier generation will provide the
new generation with a larger quantity of surplus working time. The new
generation may also store this surplus in springs and in other receptacles.
In a relatively short period, the labor stored in the springs will exceed
the labor time available to any living generation; with the expenditure
of relatively little energy, the people of this imaginary society will
be able to harness the springs to most of their necessary tasks, and also
to the task of winding new springs for coming generations. Most of the
living hours which they previously spent producing necessities will now
be available for activities which are not dictated by necessity but projected
by the imagination. At first glance it seems unlikely that people
would devote living hours to the bizarre task of winding springs. It seems
just as unlikely, even if they wound the springs, that they would store
them for future generations, since the unwinding of the springs might provide,
for example, a marvelous spectacle on festive days. However, if people
did not dispose of their own lives, if their working activity were not
their own, if their practical activity consisted of forced labor, then
human activity might well be harnessed to the task of winding springs,
the task of storing surplus working time in material receptacles. The historical
role of Capitalism, a role which was performed by people who accepted the
legitimacy of others to dispose of their lives, consisted precisely of
storing human activity in material receptacles by means of forced labor.
As soon as people submit to the "power" of money to buy stored labor as
well as living activity, as soon as they accept the fictional "right" of
money-holders to control and dispose of the stored as well as the iiving
activity of society, they transform money into Capital and the owners of
money into Capitalists. This double alienation, the alienation of
living activity in the form of wage labor, and the alienation of the activity
of past generations in the form of stored labor (means of production),
is not a single act which took place sometime in history. The relation
between workers and capitalists is not a thing which imposed itself on
society at some point in the past, once and for all. At no time did men
sign a contract, or even make a verbal agreement, in which they gave up
the power over their living activity, and in which they gave up the power
over the living activity of all future generations on all parts of the
globe. Capital wears the mask of a natural force; it seems as solid
as the earth itself; its movements appear as irreversible as tides; its
crises seem as unavoidable as earthquakes and floods. Even when it is admitted
that the power of Capital is created by men, this admission may merely
be the occasion for the invention of an even more imposing mask, the mask
of a man-made force, a Frankenstein monster, whose power inspires more
awe than that of any natural force. However, Capital is neither a
natural force nor a man-made monster which was created sometime in the
past and which dominated human life ever since. The power of Capital does
not reside in money, since money is a social convention which has no more
"power" than men are willing to grant it; when men refuse to sell their
labor, money cannot perform even the simplest tasks, because money does
not "work." Nor does the power of Capital reside in the material
receptacles in which the labor of past generations is stored, since the
potential energy stored in these receptacles can be liberated by the activity
of living people whether or not the receptacles are Capital, namely alien
property." Without living activity, the collection of objects which constitute
society's Capital would merely be a scattered heap of assorted artifacts
with no life of their own, and the "owners'' of Capital would merely be
a scattered assortment of uncommonly uncreative people (by training) who
surround themselves with bits of paper in a vain attempt to resuscitate
memories of past grandeur. The only "power" of Capital resides in the daily
activities of living people; this "power" consists of the disposition of
people to sell their daily activities in exchange for money, and to gfve
up control over the products of their own activity and of the activity
of earlier generations. As soon as a person sells his labor to a
capitalist and accepts only a part of his product as payment for that labor,
he creates conditions for the purchase and exploitation of other people.
No man would willingly give his arm or his child in exchange for money;
yet when a man deliberately and consciously sells his working life in order
to acquire the necessities for life, he not only reproduces the conditions
which continue to make the sale of his life a necessity for its preservation;
he also creates conditions which make the sale of life a necessity for
other people. Later generations may of course refuse to sell their working
lives for the same reason that he refused to sell his arm; however each
failure to refuse alienated and forced labor enlarges the stock of stored
labor with which Capital can buy working lives. In order to transform
surplus labor into Capital, the capitalist has to find a way to store it
in material receptacles, in new means of production. and he must hire new
laborers to activate the new means of produciion. In other words, he must
enlarge his enterprise, or start a new enterprise in a different branch
of production. This presupposes or requires the existence of materials
that can be shaped into new salable commodities, the existence of buyers
of the new products, and the existence of people who are poor enough to
be willing to sell their labor. These requirements are themselves created
by capitalist activity, and capitalists recognize no limits or obstacles
to their activity; the democracy of Capital demands absolute freedom. Imperialism
is not merely the "last stage" of Capitalism; it is also the first.
Anything which can be transformed into a marketable good is grist for Capital's
mill, whether it lies on the capitalist's land or on the neighbor's, whether
it lies above ground or under, Boats on the sea or crawls on its floor;
whether it is confined to other continents or other planets. All of humanity's
explorations of nature, from Alchemy to Physics, are mobilized to search
for new materials in which to store labor, to find new objects that someone
can be taught to buy. Buyers for old and new products are created
by any and all available means, and new means are constantly discovered.
"Open markets" and "open doors" are established by force and fraud. If
people lack the means to buy the capitalists' products, they are hired
by capitalists and are paid for producing the goods they wish to buy; if
local craftsmen already produce what the capitalists have to sell, the
craftsmcn are ruined or bought-out; if laws or traditions ban the use of
certain products, the laws and the traditions are destroyed; if people
lack the objects on which to use the capitalists' products, they are taught
to buy these objects; if people run out of physical or biological wants,
then capitalists "satisfy" their "spiritual wants" and hire psychologists
to create them; if people are so satiated with the products of capitalists
that they can no longer use new objects, they are taught to buy objects
and spectacles which have no use but can simply be observed and admired.
Poor people are found in pre-agrarian and agrarian societies on every continent;
if they are not poor enough to be willing to sell their labor when the
capitalists arrive, they are impoverished by the activities of the capitalists
themselves. The lands of hunters gradually become the "private property"
of "owners" who use state violence to restrict the hunters to "reservations"
which do not contain enough food to keep them alive. The tools of peasants
gradually become available only from the same merchant who generously lends
them the money with which to buy the tools, until the peasants' "debts"
are so large that they are forced to sell land which neither they nor any
of their ancestors had ever bought. The buyers of craftsmen's products
gradually become reduced to the merchants who market the products, until
the day comes when a merchant decides to house "his craftsmen" under the
same roof, and provides them with the instruments which will enable all
of them to concentrate their activity on the production of the most profitable
items. Independent as well as dependent hunters, peasants and craftsmen,
free men as well as slaves, are transformed into hired laborers. Those
who previously disposed of their own lives in the face of harsh material
conditions cease to dispose of their own lives precisely when they take
up the task of modifying their material conditions; those who were previously
conscious creators of their own meager existence become unconscious victims
of their own activity even while abolishing the meagerness of their existence.
Men who were much but had little now have much but are little. The
production of new commodities, the "opening" of new markets, the creation
of new workers, are not three separate activities; they are three aspects
of the same activity. A new labor force is created precisely in order to
produce the new commodities; the wages received by these laborers are themselves
the new market; their unpaid labor is the source of new expansion. Neither
natural nor cultural barriers halt the spread of Capital, the transformation
of people's daily activity into alienated labor, the transformation of
their surplus labor into the "private property" of capitalists. However,
Capital is not a natural force; it is a set of activities performed by
people every day; it is a form of daily life; its continued existence and
expansion presuppose only one essential condition: the disposition of people
to continue to alienate their working lives and thus reproduce the capitalist
form of daily life. 1969 Reprinted in 'Anything Can Happen',
October 1992, Phoenix Press, PO Box 824 London N1 9DL, which also contains
Perlman's 'The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism' (SP000787.TXT)