Modest Ideas on Marx

“The direct relationship of labour to its produce is the relationship of the worker to the objects of his production and to production itself is only a consequences of this first relationship and confirms it” (73). I think based on this argument, Marx helps us to understand and alter the understanding of labour and our relationship with it. Unfortunately, the system shape our understanding about our relationship with all these act of labour and some notions that are related with estranged labour.

Generally we link our labour power with production, being useful, earning our bread and creating some products that are useful for others and so forth. All of these perspectives were synthetically produced by the system on purpose. We internalize these perspectives and miss the problem of the alienation. In this quote, it seems like Marx is trying to put the product to the secondary position and emphasize that our alienated labour’s main product is various alienation and our objectifications and disposable bodies and lives in this Capitalist Matrix.

“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The workers become an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (Marx 1867: 71). We can link this statement with The Capital’s sections about slave labour, too. When I read all of these arguments, these make me check my family history and my personal experiences. My great grand parents and grandparents were exiled from Greek and Bulgaria before and some of them after the World War I. Except my mother and father, my 3 generations ancestors were all tobacco farmers who were working for another landowners. My grandmother was telling me that sometimes she was preparing dinner for my teenager aunts when they came back from work at a very late hours. She said that they were sitting around the food, but could not eat because of the tiredness of the hard and long hours work and sleep nearby the food on the floor. They did not have any insurance or retirement. My mother was the only small child who was sent to a boarding school in different city. When she was homesick and refused to continue to go to school away from home, my two aunts told her ok, tomorrow you will come to field with us to work. They forced my mother to do the same work that they had to do every day. I learned that this made my mother so tired and cry. This hard conditions, slave labor conditions forced her to change her mind and she continue her studies. But she could not go to university. On the other hand, thankfully my father was the only one who was able to go university after all those three generations of sacrifice. Sometimes, these family history make me think about my life conditions and as Marx argues in the cotton farmers section in Capital, their slave labor conditions affects my recent struggles to pay my school tuition, too. It is similar with some of the African American slaves’ recent generations’ economic struggles that they experiences today. The formal and informal slavery has similar effects on people. However, I do not ignore the differences, we might link the modern slave labour produces situation with Malcolm X’s home slaves because of the internalization of their conditions.

“...his own spontaneous activity as activity for another and as activity of another, vitality as a sacrifice of life, production of the object as loss of the object to an alien power, to an alien person, we shall now consider the relation to the worker, to labour and its object of this person who is alien to labour and the worker” (Marx 1867: 81) With this quote, we can link all the disposable body argument, workers alienation to another workers, too. Sometimes, I see the security workers of the Banks, or the people who carry NIUE's tuition money to the Bank by a special car. They make me think about their alienation of the product that they carry; money. They work with minimum wage and carry hundred thousands of dollars. They must need some special therapy for this type of extreme insulting. Several times, I came across with some security guards on the news who stole the money that they have to carry or protect. Generally, this makes me laugh and sad at the same time. I laugh because at least some of them feel the insult of their working conditions and the irony of their situation in the bank and did something about it. Even Though I do not prefer any steeling, compared to white collar’s systematic stealing, blue collar’s modest stealing from big corporations has a different place in my mind.