5. Measures of Exploitation

Labour and Value, 2019

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say, of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other as with a simple owner of commodity, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage […]. And precisely for that reason, either in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of the omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest. When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the 'free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but a tanning.

2019

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say, of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other as with a simple owner of commodity, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage […]. And precisely for that reason, either in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of the omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest. When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the 'free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but a tanning.

2019

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say, of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other as with a simple owner of commodity, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage […]. And precisely for that reason, either in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of the omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest. When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the 'free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but a tanning.

Open Book Publishers, 2019

The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say, of labour-power, are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other as with a simple owner of commodity, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage […]. And precisely for that reason, either in accordance with the preestablished harmony of things, or under the auspices of the omniscient providence, they all work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal, and in the common interest. When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the 'free-trader vulgaris' with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but a tanning.

International Journal of Semiotics and Visual Rhetoric

Marketing is always a kind of inter-cultural communication, in the sense defined by the semiotics of culture: a message from someone in a group who says “I” to a group he sees as “You” or “Them”. But marketing is also an inter-cultural message in a narrower sense: it often emanates from a global company, which needs to sell a product on a local market. To do so, it may also make use of classical group values, notably national identities, which it can ascribe to the products it wants to sell. In the first part of this article, the author discusses communication within the framework of cultural semiotics, with a particular emphasis on the marketing situation. In the second part, the author looks at particular cases of visual rhetoric, in which cultural values are used to sell specific products. These are exemplified by the ascription of European values to a Swedish product (Absolut Vodka), and Swedish values to a product most of the time produced elsewhere (IKEA), as well as the assig...

The fundamental problem behind the tyranny of abstraction is shown to concern how forms of human life come to assume an independence of the human beings who have created them in their process of producing their social life. This indicates the reification of forms of social action. The central theme is the paradox of how human agency is transformed into human enslavement. One comes back to money as the expression of the reified character of the forms of human life.

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2014

Competition is taken for granted by neoclassical economics: its cause is human nature and its functioning is the result of spontaneous interactions. As such it is contrasted with power, which is an unnatural restriction on human liberty. By contrast, Marx discusses competition as a coercive mechanism. Historically, competition develops with the development of market relations and what today appears as 'human nature' is part of this process. Thus it is within competition and not outside of it that Marx explains the coercive nature of capitalism. His critique shows that competition and power appear to be antithetical because market relations are based on individual freedom. However class relations are another essential aspect of capitalism. By neglecting these relations, neoclassical economists (including those of a 'radical' inspiration) implicitly espouse the ruling class's viewpoint, which they simply translate into rigorous mathematical terms. In this sense they are the modern expression of what Marx called the 'vulgar political economy'.

Economica, 1959

We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land-likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classesproperty owners and propertyless workers. Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws-i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land. When, for example, it defines the relationship of wages to profit, it takes the interest of the capitalists to be the ultimate cause, i.e., it takes for granted what it is supposed to explain. Similarly, competition comes in everywhere. It is explained from external circumstances. As to how far these external and apparently accidental circumstances are but the expression of a necessary course of development, political economy teaches us nothing. We have seen how exchange itself appears to it as an accidental fact. The only wheels which political economy sets in motion are greed, and the war amongst the greedycompetition. Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild, the doctrine of the division of landed property to the doctrine of the big estate-for competition, freedom of the crafts and the division of landed property were explained and comprehended only as accidental, premeditated and violent consequences of monopoly, of the guild system, and of feudal property, not as their necessary, inevitable and natural consequences. Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc.-the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system. Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance. The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce-namely, the necessary relationship between two things-between, for example, division of labor and exchange. Thus the theologian explains the origin of evil by the fall of Man-that is, he assumes as a fact, in historical form, what has to be explained. We proceed from an actual economic fact. The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity-and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general. This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces-labor's product-confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in

Transversal journal, 07, 2018, 2018

It is usually thought that the revolt of the poor against oppression and hardship manifests itself in a noble way. Conversely, the wealthy elite are imagined as vicious and immoral exploiters. The paper unravels the concealed controversial psychoanalytical motives in the unconscious conduct of the poor and the rich - the servant and the master - in the absence of the political influence of leftist politics; it does so to reveal that without social consolidation of the enlightened 'left' with the 'poor', the latter inevitably indulge in revengeful resentment, whereas the true masters - are not the rich proprietors, but rather the enlightened benevolent intelligentsia. The true capital at present is not financial, it is grounded in knowledge and intelligence. Hence, virtue and malevolence change their places. It is this mutation that fosters the poor to rather search for the feudal patron, than join the complex theory-based leftist rhetoric of emancipatory politics. This controversy results in astonishment of the left-liberal enlightened middle classes about the incomprehensibility of their lexicons of emancipation, liberation and equality for the disenfranchised.