"Since the economists identify past labour with capital—past labour being understood in this case not only in the sense of concrete labour embodied in the product, but also in the sense of social labour, materialised labour-time—it is understandable that they, the Pindars of capital, emphasise the objective elements of production and overestimate their importance as against the subjective element, living, immediate labour. For them, labour only becomes efficacious when it becomes capital and confronts itself, the passive element confronting its active counterpart. The producer is therefore controlled by the product, the subject by the object, labour which is being embodied by labour embodied in an object, etc. In all these conceptions, past labour appears not merely as an objective factor of living labour, subsumed by it, but vice versa; not as an element of the power of living labour, but as a power over this labour. The economists ascribe a false importance to the material factors of labour compared with labour itself in order to have also a technological justification for the specific social form, i.e., the capitalist form, in which the relationship of labour to the conditions of labour is turned upside-down, so that it is not the worker who makes use of the conditions of labour, but the conditions of labour which make use of the worker. "
Marx THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE Product to the producers, Mike B) *********************************************************************** Wobbly Times http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
