Capitalism and experience

Obviously enough, from the dogmatic tenets of capitalism, the one regarding the function of surplus value in capital formation process is of decisive importance. Not by chance, enframing the favorable model of extraction the surplus value from labor is the foremost interest of capital. In Grundrisse we read - “What appears as surplus value on capital’s side appears identically on the worker’s side as surplus labor in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive.” Evidently, since the year of 1857 times have changed, dispositions between capital and labor transformed, technologies of advocating either of them newly immunized, lived experiences for both intellectually rearranged, and still, the tension between the two never resolved.

Symptomatic moment with capitalism is that systematic logic in accordance with which it operates is applied to entirety of beings. Its planetary scale surmounts not only the farthest units of spatiotemporal reality but the most intricate facets of human existence. There are thoughts and sensations attested by capitalist rationality, actions and intentions measured by its commanded ethics, dreams and pleasures sanctioned by its institutionalized psychology. Quasi-anthropological image of a clumsily named homo oeconomicus as if tries to identify the appropriate mode of existence in capitalism, but in its meaningful characterization barely says anything about its philosophically valid giveness. Unbounded egotism and lust for fully instrumentalized habitat is more of a derivative qualities of man in capitalism, so to speak, his culturologically subverted veil, than the truth of nebulous atmosphere of evasiveness one lives in. The thing is that while rapidly expanding the zone of availability for the norm of extracted surplus value, capitalism reshapes not merely the angles of perception, order of values or procedures of justification but the very possibilities of experience itself. In a word, the norm of surplus value as the guiding dictum of capitalism causes the dissolution of experience.

With the norm of surplus value being spilled over from the production process to the principle of world, man ceases to experience but permanently multiplies. The object of multiplication is the phenomenon of surplus itself. The facts of life unless they become unrecognizable and doomed for oblivion are enthusiastically delegated to the dominium of surplus engines. From scattered images on social networks to pharmacology everything fuels the engines of surplus reproduction. The subject of experience is dismantled into the entanglements of self-reproductive surplus processes. With strange astonishment I remember how in one of those pleasant summer nights with music, I have found myself next to the young man, who while attending the event which was live channeled, was himself following the same livestream on the telephone screen. Truly, mise en abyme in its ontological grandeur.

Any possible surplus but not to experience is an algorithm of today’s self.

All those discourses about disappearance of reality or about new hegemony of visual representations or even about the industrialized passion for self-consumption are mere appendages to ongoing transformation into the existential analytics of human being. Historically exhausted model of self, the one which commissioned extermination camps and wars of mass atrocities is rightly put in progress of erasure. The question is, aren’t we running a risk with good intentions for best (as it often happens), in reality to recreate the same monster with mutated appearance?

Is not the self ultimately devoid of real experience of life the concentration camp personified? The one with deadened affections and sensibilities, with unquenchable stimulus everytime to look for the surplus of any kind. And still, nobody knows with exact knowledge what will be the future concept of man, but in case it will disappoint the hopes, nth times again some of the basic causes will be addressed from the thought of Marx cited above, precisely from the reality of an abyss between satisfactory surplus value of capital and oppressive surplus labor of worker.