The Workers Adjucant

Revolutionary theory for the rest of us.

[theworkersadjutant]

History, Ideology, and Organization.

    History does not repeat itself, although the present does reflect the past. as Marx said in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." the seeds of the present are located in the past, but their particular forms have been negated as the material conditions of society and social relations have changed, never can they be reconstructed in their real original manifestations, but their legacies haunt our present and can be used to influence the construction of a future that could be far better or far worse which solution involves which traditions and ideas we reflect on, and as Marx explained in the Geman Ideology, "“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Sadly, in this position we are on a course towards the more dismal side of our potential future.     The solution is to build organizations from the bottom up based at the foundation through which society is built and on who's backs its history is created (but often with little credit where it is due), organizations of fellow workers organized by workers who can help to break the ruling ideology and assist with the collective self education of those around them and themselves. Workers who can counter the propaganda of the ruling class, and help to unite all the oppressed around their common interests. This way we can hit the system where it hurts, the point of production and reproduction. Only then with a militant strongly organized working class will we have the leverage and foundation we need to build a better future free from the dominance of the ideologies of an exploitative few, only then can we break the cycle of class exploitation and all of the other oppression which stem from it to reproduce and expand its grasp into our physical, mental, and personal space, and its domination over our bodies and our lives. Isn't that really the point, all history is the history of struggle, but bourgeois history clouds over the realities of this struggle and essentially hide the realities below the surface.     Dominant ideas in philosophy and social sciences often take the appearance of the surface as the actual reality to help produce the ideological cloud that blocks our view of the real, the concrete realities around us, they protect the social base at the root of our exploitation by expanding the ideological superstructure of ideas, one example would be the ever popular purely descriptive politics of difference which break up the workers to make organization more difficult, a political philosophy which hides the intersections of class and oppression, and as an end the acknowledgement of the whole class nature of society. this is how ideology works through the system to repress the workers and expand exploitation, this is what we are fighting and have been fighting for centuries. In his Theses on Freurbach, Marx concisely and powerfully communicates a key issue with descriptive theories divorced from real struggle when he declares that, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." These words are inscribed in marx's grave as his eternal last words a strong defense of praxis, demanding an end to the separation of theory and practice, of the thinkers and the workers, idea and action. It has been a long hard fight, but now is not the time to give up. we need to get organized.

[theworkersadjutant]

The dialectics of ketchup.

A tomato sits and looks at a bottle of ketchup, ketchup looks back at the tomato, the tomato sees a potential future. the ketchup sees its forgotten past. are they not the same? yet at the same time are they not different? there is a dialectic at play here, a negation of identity through an interpretation of the transition of one thing to its opposite.

at the same this challenges the mediation of our perception through the capitalist production process, through the medium of the process of the mechanical creation and commercial distribution of the ketchup, the history of its creation is hidden away, as we associate it with the bottle, the shelf, the market, but through the defiant act of thinking through the movements of its history one unmasks the hidden transformation and the relations involved to show us the truth within the falsity. what is the true essence of ketchup? And what is the subjective factor that has created this new object from its previous forms? When we answer these questions we now are exposed to the event of the ketchups creation, the real origin, history, and reality of the ketchup itself and in that process we are exposed to our own alienation from our labor/being/history/essence.

it is true the assimilation of other identities has negated the ketchup's existence as solely a product of the tomato and created a new identity a new reality. In this transformation the history of the ketchup is the history of all the negated identities which have merged through this dialectical movement of quantity to quality. the ketchup in reality is each of these ingredients and at the same time it is none of them. As these past identities have been negated and just as our own past they can never be reassembled in the same way and reconstituted again.

[theworkersadjutant]

C.R.E.A.M: What can Wu-Tang Teach Us About Commodity Fetishism

"...the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself... becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object... the greater this product, the less is he himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien" -Karl Marx (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)      Cash rules everything around me, the hook from one of Wu-Tang clan's most popular songs reflects a common ideological phenomenon rooted in the social relations of capitalist production. Many slogans throughout history in popular culture have repeated these particular personifications of inanimate objects, especially currency: money makes the world go round, Money is the root of all evil. Does money have these properties? Can it consciously create the inequality and greed which we attribute to it? Does it rule over society as cold unfeeling despot, or are these misconceptions rooted in an obfuscation of  real social relations between human beings? My answer and the answer provided by Marx is the latter, it is not money which rules society but a specific class of people based on their relations to the forces of production. 

     The illusions which lead one to attribute human properties to the objects produced through these relations between human beings are attributed by Marx to a process he refers to as alienation rooted in what he refers to in capital chapter one section four as the fetishization of commodities. This fetishization is the result of the form of capitalist production where the worker, who is not in control of the means of production (for example machines in a factory) is forced to sell their power to produce (labor) to a capitalist (the owners of the machines, who rather than selling their productive abilities live off of the buying and selling of the labor of the workers), in order to gain the necessities which they need to survive and reproduce themselves (food, shelter, clothing, etc).

     The capitalists monopoly on the means of production puts the individual worker is in a very weak position to bargain the means through which this exchange will occur. This fact results in the capitalist extracting the largest amount of the product of the labor done by the worker possible while returning only what little portion of the value created by this worker is necessary for them to maintain their ability to continue to sell their labor, while keeping the majority of the value of the production (what Marx refers to as surplus value) for themselves as profit. Through this process the worker is divorced from the products of their labor, and receive only an impersonal commodity (currency), through which to secure products for use in their reproduction and subsistence 

     Due to the impersonal nature of the relations of work under capitalism the individual workers see as the interface of this exchange the machines and the commodities more than the individual capitalists whom they are working for, Paul D'amato explains that "because the aim of production is profit rather than human need, the products of past labor--the machinery and materials, controlled by the capitalists--completely dominate living labor. Workers are literally slaves to the machine and the work process. It controls them, rather than the other way around."(D'amato 2003). Since the product the worker receives for their labor is not a product for use (as it was in earlier forms of barter and exchange), but for exchange alone (modern currency) this mystifies the relation even more than in previous systems, D'amato explains "In a modern capitalist society, where everything can be and is bought and sold, money's historical origins are invisible. Its existence appears to be a power independent of human will."(D'amato, 2005) From the perspective of the worker money divorces the process of labor and social relations between workers and capitalist from the realization of value. This process paints the determination of value as a relation between objects. Marx describe this process saying that, "The character of having value,when once impressed upon products, obtains [stability] only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the [workers]. To [the workers], their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.." (Marx, Capital Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 4)

    Since the labor seems to be mediated by commodities (products created primarily for exchange) for which value seems to the worker to be dictates as relations between objects rather than relations between workers and capitalists in the production of said objects, the worker sees these objects as having a power of their own. The real source of this power, of the realization of value lies not within the objects but the greater social relations involved in their creation. Cash does not rule everything around us, A class of people rule everything around us, and the role of commodities as an intermediary in the relations of the workers and this class of capitalists hides from the workers their role in the creation of value and reproduction of their own conditions of exploitation. In order to free ourselves themselves from domination they need to recognize rulers not as impersonal objects but the class that, through their ownership of the means of production and subsistence, hold the power to extract surplus labor as profits and use it to reinforce conditions of servitude. To break the cycle of alienation and exploitation D'amato and Marx agree that workers must come together collectively to "abolish their separation from ownership and control of the means of production, and to use that control to abolish the market and replace it with conscious planning for human need." (D'amato, 2003) Individually we have little power to break through the alienation and ideological haze created by our conditions but as a conscious mass, organized and disciplined, we can overcome. Workers are the foundation on which this exploitative system rests, together we have the power to bring it to a halt.

"...[in the commodity] the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation,existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.... There is a physical relation between physical things.But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things [as being] commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities." (Marx, Capital volume 1, chapter 1, section 4) Cited Works: Karl Marx. "Estranged Labor." Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844  Paul D'Amato."How to explain the mystery of money." Socialist Worker. Janury 7, 2005. Page 7 Paul D'Amato  "Alienation in capitalist society." Socialist Worker. September 12, 2003. Page 9 Karl Marx. "Capital volume 1." chapter 1, section 4