Society of Spectacle Crypotocurrancies Part 2

The "human phenomenon" referred to by Theilard de Chardin loses all ontological, ethical, erotic, playful, and aesthetic consistency by turning the human being into a worker. You can romanticize all you want to work, but in itself, as work, it is always brutalizing. Upon entering the factory, Simone Weil wonders, "What did I gain from this experience?" and the answer is: "The feeling of not having any right, whatever it may be ..." (Weil 2002, 170), and continues: "confused in the eyes of all and in my own eyes with the anonymous mass, the misfortune of others it has entered my flesh and my soul ”(Weil 2002, 32). Curiously, Simone Weil's testimony is very similar to that of Primo Levi, when he recounted his experience as a "worker" at the Lager. Regarding her experience as a worker, Simone Weil writes: “I received the mark of the slave there and forever” (Weil 2002, 38). Weil's testimony realizes that the work of the workers is brutalizing by definition and that “no perfect social equity can ever erase” that condition of modern slavery (Weil 2002, 39).

Definitely, the condition of workers impoverishes the human condition. Not only because of its ascription to capitalism and the conversion of human labor into surplus-value, but also in its very essence. Work as work removes all ethical, erotic, aesthetic, and ontological consistency from the "human phenomenon". Now we have more arguments to understand that Paul Lafargue was finally right, we must oppose the right to laziness to the ethos of work, or when Schiller proposed the ethics of play as a foundation and alternative ethos to work: “Well, to put it once, man only plays where he is a man in all the fullness of the word, and he is only completely man where he plays ” (Schiller, cited by Lukács (Luckács 1985, 68, original italics)).

Behind the ethos of work was the more prosaic reality that human work is the primeval source of all value. The civilizing defense of work is the protection of the fundamental nucleus of value, from which the bourgeoisie draws its power and its own conditions of possibility. The creation of wealth, in the bourgeois order, depends on the will to power which, as we know, has no limits.

As work and source of value, human beings, upon entering industry, were mutilated from all ontological considerations and transformed into workers. The ideology of work subdues everyone, but it is impossible to criticize that ideology. There is also a pride in claiming to be a worker. If the world has been created by workers' hands, then why not be proud of it? For this reason, work as an ethos could be at the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp, as well as in the mathematical functions of modern economic theory. No matter how many dreams, hopes, frustrations, passions make up the human condition, all of these could be sidestepped, obliterated, and suppressed to save work.

Labor, capitalism, value, and power

Modern economics has put aside all ontological considerations of the "human phenomenon", because they consider it a metaphysical question and, therefore, without analytical possibilities, to assume a principle of reality established since the emergence of capitalism and the world market, of the Modern nation-state and enlightenment.

What emerged in the bowels of capitalism was the promise to free humanity from the yoke of scarcity and, thanks to the division of labor, this promise could this time be fulfilled. Adam Smith had found the thread of Ariadna precisely in the division of labor to glimpse in his metaphor of the pin workshop the birth of a new era, in which the most humble of its inhabitants, according to Smith, could have access to riches that the mightiest of the ancient kings.

Wealth, this time as conscious production and as a will to power, could indeed be created in unprecedented magnitudes and, ultimately, it only depended on that will to power. Never before has humanity had before it the possibility of a volume of the wealth of such magnitude. The emancipatory promise to free humanity from scarcity had overtones of truth. On that promise rests the symbolic universe of the ideology of progress, progress, as we know is the “contradiction that is never resolved” (Luckács 1985, 92); but it is the symbolic sustenance of its heir: economic growth. It is believed, with the faith of the charcoal-burner, that economic growth will solve social problems. It does not matter that human life is on the verge of collapse due to the effects of global warming, but under no circumstances can economic growth be resigned. But economic growth, as we already know, is only part of the founding myth of the bourgeoisie. There is not, has not been, and never will be anything like progress.

But in this process of "economic growth" carried out by industrialization, human beings became an input and appendage of machines and technology. The work process became technical and human work was disciplined according to the rhythm of the machine. The factory became an authoritarian, hierarchical, bureaucratic, fascist space. This process was called Taylorism and, worse or better, it defines the very structure of all productive space in all capitalism to this day.

Work and ontological amputation

The conversion of human beings into workers that occurred in capitalism caused the amputation of all ontological dimensions of the human. He factored the human condition only as a labor force embedded in industry and as an appendage to the machine. That which constitutes the fundamentals of the human, their emotions, their passions, their affections, their dreams, their follies, their attachments and detachments, all ethical, erotic, playful, and aesthetic dimensions of life, in short, the dignity of the human. , were put aside to be able to recover only the labor force dimension because only from there, apparently, could wealth be valued.

However, strictly speaking, there is no labor force. Human beings cannot be cut off from the ontological dimension that structures and defines them as human beings, nor can they be cut off from their dignity, without the mediation of a process of violence and dispossession of that ontological dimension. The labor force is only a heuristic and methodological resource of classical political economy to understand the division of labor, the formation of production costs, and the extraction of surplus-value, but nothing beyond that. Seen in its proper perspective, surplus value is not only a dispossession of work, it is a dispossession of the ontology of the human.

No worker in the world can be reduced to a labor force because he is himself a totality and a complexity that goes beyond the definition of labor force on all sides. In every minute of the production process, there is a human being who feels, thinks, dreams, has emotions, memories, longings, frustrations, no matter how Tayloristic that industry is. Every fraction of that working minute is contaminated by the ontology of the human. Perhaps the suicides of workers at the Chinese company Foxconn (the largest technology company in the world), due to overexploitation and mistreatment, account for this.

That is why work cannot be liberated because the notion of work is already in itself an impoverishment of the human condition. There is not, and cannot exist, the emancipation of work because the emancipation of work, by definition, requires its annulment. But canceling the job would of course imply canceling the value. That is to say, to the bourgeoisie.

Ultimately, it is not about liberating work, it is about liberating human life subjected to work. It is about humanizing work and giving it the ontological conditions of the human because it is part of that ontology. It is about understanding workers as human beings with dignity. It is about recovering the ontology of the human and avoiding its evaporation, so to speak, in industrial and modern exploitation.

Work as a demiurge of the real

However, the ethos of capitalism, with its commitment to frugality, thrift, and asceticism, what Weber describes as the "spirit of capitalism", constructed work as a transcendent determination to the social. It was a point of view consistent with the processes of political emancipation of the bourgeoisie that wanted to free human beings from servitude relations to subject them to the disciplinary processes of factory and industrial production. For the bourgeoisie, work was determined from a contract that established the conditions of freedom and equality of the modern political order. Only a contract is signed between equals, such is the legal fiction of the bourgeois order.

For the Marxist critique, work was already alienated in itself because the worker does not own what he produces, in fact he has been reduced to merchandise and, as such, is the origin and foundation of private property. If work constructs the real as real, and if work is alienated in bourgeois society, then the real is also alienated. Emancipating work, therefore, was equivalent to allowing human beings to appropriate the reality that they themselves create in production.

In modern alienation, the producer does not own what he creates; objects appear strange to the process that generated them, and as such, they become fetishes of an alienated relationship. The alienated subject tends to see the world and social relationships as if they were things. Stop viewing social relationships to see them as relationships between objects. Objectify the real. It gives things a demiurgic power over themselves. But not only do objects become strange to their creators, but the activity of creation itself becomes strange in itself. The worker is not himself in the work process. This work process reduces it to being one more object, just an appendage of the machine. The activity of working itself no longer belongs to the worker. Consequently, the very production process becomes foreign to him.

If production creates its own conditions of existence as society and history, the alienation of labor implies social alienation as a whole, the alienation of its own history. Thus, and in the same way that workers do not recognize the objects that they make themselves, human beings make their own history but neither do they recognize themselves in it. They make and build their own society, but this same society appears to them as a foreign power.

That is why it was considered, since Marxism, that the emancipation of work is equivalent to returning the historical and social meaning to human beings themselves. In this sense, work is actually a category of political ontology, because it is the determination that allows us to understand the ontological structure of the real. However, it was read as if it were an economic category. An ontological-political category was hypostatized, as an economic and productive dimension.

The other alienation

The analysis and criticism of the alienation of work, which somehow is generated from the ethos of capitalism, however, did not allow us to see that other alienation that began the precise moment of leaving the factory, the workshop, the office. That other alienation that colonized apparently free time and turned it into the spectacle of its own alienation, became invisible, ceased to be noticed, and was ignored.

It was not only about the alienation of work that transferred wealth from the workers to the bourgeoisie, but there was something more than that and that could be understood, assumed, seen, verified at the very moment in which the worker, the technician, the clerk In short, any worker left the factory, the office, the workshop or any workplace. It is an even more aggressive alienation because it took away what the factory or office job had not yet taken away from him.

In the production process or in the office, the series of tasks to which the worker had to submit demanded his attention and, somehow, absorbed his abilities and left him little space to reflect on himself. But once off the job site, he was supposed to be able to make up his own time. It is assumed that he could replenish not only his strength but also himself. But there wasn't that.

When leaving the workplace, a process of alienation even stronger than that of production was at work. It was a process of alienation from his own free time and outside of productive time. An alienation that included all those independently who are or are not in the production process. Children, young people, unemployed, elderly, women, retired, in short, all of them felt how their own time was colonized, expropriated, subjected to a process of alienation even more intensive than that of the factory.

It was very difficult for the analytics of economic theory to account for this process because it was generated outside the coordinates of production, but it was part of the production. It was integrated into it. It complimented her.

There was, in effect, a whole powerful industry that managed the time of others according to its own profit needs and that, apparently, was not in the classical industrial process. An insidious process that will be revealed in all its breadth at the end of the first third of the 21st century, in the midst of late capitalism, when the daily structure of social life becomes big data, and is marketed as a commodity. How to understand this new alienation and that it does not come directly from the alienated work of the factory? Under which analytics to view it? What conclusions do you derive from it?

The society of the spectacle

In the mid-twentieth century, Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle. It is a seminal text for understanding the ways in which social time and individual time are alienated. Perhaps it is convenient to analyze the thick lines that Debord raises in the Society of the Spectacle, as a general theoretical framework to understand that other alienation.

The spectacle, Debord writes, is a social relationship mediated by images in which the truth becomes a moment of the false. “The whole life of societies in which modern production conditions reign is announced as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that is directly lived is removed in a representation ”(Debord 2006, 766).

The spectacle unifies society and allows people to be separated from their own representations. It is not a supplement or decoration, "under all its particular forms, information or propaganda, advertising or direct consumption of entertainment, the spectacle constitutes the present model of socially dominant life" (Debord 2006, 767, original italics).