The Moving Contradiction

it's not Malthus after all...

The Monopoly game known as Capitalism has reached its logical conclusion. The game is over, and the so called winners have it all, or at least so much of it that the game is not much fun anymore. So they are extending the game, or trying to, by enclosing the commons.

So now, rather than have you quit and walk away, they want the family dog, your shoes, your glasses, everything near the Monopoly board, even your DNA, to now be considered a property on the board.

On the surface it looks like the economy runs on supply and demand, and in many ways it does, but it keeps on functioning because of surplus-value. Surplus-value is what Capital extracts from Labor that Labor can’t replace.

If a worker in a factory could sell their labor to the highest bidder, and keep doing that, then the worker can get ahead. But the factory owner extracts something a little more than the workers time. The worker’s youth and health are also extracted. That is the essence of surplus-value. It is exploitation.

Marx’s “moving contradiction” is that “The economy’s mission to generate surplus-value is both the drive to exploit the workforce and to expel it from production”.

This is not an endless cycle. As more of the workforce is expelled from production because of automation, there is less surplus-value available to be extracted. Something has to give, and what has been giving is that the Capitalists have been eating each other, but that too can only end in a big pile of debt and depression as everyone expelled from production can’t consume like they used to. Capital’s solution to all this has always been to enclose more of the commons.

“The economic motif of the Covid whodunit must be placed within a broader context of social transformation. If we scratch the surface of the official narrative, a neo-feudal scenario begins to take form. Masses of increasingly unproductive consumers are being regimented and cast aside, simply because Mr Global no longer knows what to do with them. Together with the underemployed and the excluded, the impoverished middle-classes are now a problem to be handled with the stick of lockdowns, curfews, mass vaccination, propaganda, and the militarisation of society, rather than with the carrot of work, consumption, participatory democracy, social rights (replaced in collective imagination by the civil rights of minorities), and ‘well-earned holidays.’”

Mr. Global will tell you that its all because of Malthus, but that is just a cover.

Where is this all heading? On the one hand you have the titans of capital driving the world toward totalitarian technocracy in order to feed their dying capitalist system.

But on the other hand…

The socialization of Labor has also accelerated along with the rate at which it is expelled from the economy. As the tools of the economy are automated, it takes more workers and fewer capitalists to manage them, even if those workers are paid less and less. Eventually the balance of power shifts to the point where the many workers needed to run the complex machines can more easily show the dwindling number of capitalists the door.

The best example of this dynamic is the news business, and the many low paid workers and the shrinking number of capitalists needed to run social media, which is even more crucial since it is the centralized way that the pathogenic technocrats, the pathocrats, exercise control. This will be the door they are shown.