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Reading Marx’s Capital on the train — thinking about his notion of value as “congealed” labor-time. That seems about right to me, that’s what going to work feels like: you’re time congealing, hardening, cooling, like bread in the oven to be shipped off to the bakery.
Marx writes like a contemporary; at least the Marx of Capital. The book doesn’t seem controversial to me — the literal accuracy of commodity and values theories is historically overrated, overemphasized; Marx is interesting because of the way he’s able to poetically trace the warping effect of profit-motive on human beings; on communities.
The point isn’t really the specific warping-effects that Marx traces: it’s his emphasis of that warping-effect; that emphasis is still very much relevant. The gravitational laws of capital still hold.
“There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be ‘modern,’” Walter Benjamin writes in the Arcades Project.
There has never been an epoch that hasn’t been exploited, in other words.
Or maybe any which becomes aware of its own fallenness is modern.
Goethe: “The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.”
How many people get to actually use their talent though? — I think people are coerced into the workplace with the promise that they will get to use talents that are, in actually, completely squandered.
