Capitalism's Fatal Flaw, and the Way Forward: RUSHING LIFE and the Social Alienation of Modern [i.e., of Capitalist] Humanity -- 'Time is [Relative] Surplus-Value'.

Sunday, April 24, 2022

RUSHING LIFE and the Social Alienation of Modern [i.e., of Capitalist] Humanity -- 'Time is [Relative] Surplus-Value'.

RUSHING LIFE -- 'Time is [Relative] Surplus-Value'.

Dear Reader,

So much of humanity today, of modern humanity, worldwide, appears to live in a chronic rush, chasing power, money, or mere survival. No time to pause, to relax, to refresh, to reflect on one’s life -- a life not fully lived due to this very rush.

It is only, perhaps, during the ever-more-frequently recurring and worsening global depression-crises of global capitalism -- which are also crises of mass unemployment -- that workers have some time to reflect, albeit under the duress of the dire straits of their cratered incomes. And their reflections may accumulate toward a growing global ‘delegitimation crisis’ of the capitalist system!

Many, many have remarked upon this phenomenon, of perpetual rushing, of being always “short of time”, of always being late, or nearly late -- of all of this frenzied activity yielding so little satisfaction.

But these observers typically offer no explanation for this modern phenomenon, which seems to get worse all of the "time"; which seemed to have intensified across the course of the 19^th, the 20^th, and on into the 21^st centuries.

Some cite the ambient saying that “time is money”.

More apt would be to say that “time is capital”, or that “time is profit”.

The deeper explanation of this “life” of rushing is in the depths of the nature of “the capital-relation/wage-labor-relation” [Marx] as the dominating “social relation of [societal-self-re-]production” [Marx] of modern society, defining the essence of its very ‘‘‘modernity’’’.

After the mid-to-late 1800s transition, in the geographical core of industrial capitalism, from the merely ‘‘‘formal subsumption of the labor-process by/under capital’’’ to the ‘‘‘real subsumption of the labor-process by/under capital’’’, with the relative waning of the pursuit of “absolute surplus-labor-time”, it is the maniacal drive for “relative surplus labor-value” that characterizes modern capitalism.

The ruling class, the capitalist class, is constantly pushing, rushing, "speeding-up" the wage working class for more relative surplus-labor-time extraction.

The mania for relative surplus-labor-time thus comes to shape the entirety of the ‘descendence-phase’ of the capitalist system, driving virtually the whole of society into a seemingly endless, but accelerating race -- onward to capitalism’s “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” [Marx] demise.