The modern condition – expressed through the terms of political economy – has allowed the natural subject of man’s thought and action
(work) to become an unnatural expression of a
process (labor) in which he is engaged.
As Marx says when citing Engels, “The labour which creates use value, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour, that which creates Value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work.”21 Conceiving the products of work as labor, man alienates himself from his natural self and his environment. (A point to remember when thinking of Saito’s claims). They become foreign things to him, existing outside and away from him. “The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, assumes an external existence, but that it exists independently, outside himself and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power.”22 The illusion becomes reality. In other words, in the totally insular world of labor and its objects, man no longer stands at the center of the universe: he is, as is everything else in the contained universe of capitalism, simply a thing, a commodity, a product of this other thing called “capital” developed from alienated labor.
And here is where the trouble compounds. Feeling a need to be a part of the world, man naturally tries to enfranchise himself in this foreign world. He does so by appropriating
objects from that world, believing the more he appropriates the more enfranchised he would feel. However, existing within an unnatural environment, the appropriation process merely subsumes him into the unnaturalness of the
world by reinforcing and giving legitimacy to
the activity as being an abstraction from man, a process distinct from his real self. “So much does the appropriation of the object appear as alienation that the more objects the worker produces the fewer he can possess.”23
Why? Because his work had been transformed into labor, and the objects of his work into objectified labor. Through a distortion of man’s natural relationship with his environment, wherein he tried to appropriate things that were his all along, he lived/lives under false consciousness, a process of activity that lacked a cognitive foundation and “falls under the domination of his product, of capital.”24 These are the terms of the human condition, expressed through political economy. Capital is the product of alienated labor: it is man alienated.
This division between work and labor is predicated on a division between the subject and object, a division created between mental and physical labor (see forthcoming graphic representing the "Sprial of Capitalism"), a distinction that is crucial to understanding the “Commodities” section of Capital:
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Marx’s challenge was to “grasp the real connection between this whole system of alienation – private property, acquisitiveness, the separation of labour, capital and land, exchange and competition – and the system of money.” Marx would meet that challenge by beginning with a contemporary economic fact, around which he constructed a philosophical system.
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