Subject and VerbLet us

#90778
twc
Participant

Subject and VerbLet us revisit the transitivity of worker [subject] — working instrument [verb] — resource [object] to see how it actually expresses itself in real social systems.Who's really subject and who's merely verb under capitalism?Worker—instrument—resource is the situation that prevails when the worker owns and controls instrument and resource.But we assert that the worker doesn't own and control instrument and resource. The ultimate proof that the worker has voluntarily relinquished ownership and control is expressed in the actual prevailing reality of the inverse transitivity — that which actually occurs in capitalist production:Instrument [subject] — labouring worker [verb] — resource [object].The worker is controlled in the working process by the things he doesn't control. He is demoted from the working process's subject to its mere verb.If the worker is a mere verb in his own workplace, the working class is collectively a mere verb in the social system at large.With Ownership and Control go Responsibility and AccountabilitySo, to assert that the working class is the subject of the social system [in which it's practically the verb] is to saddle it with responsibility for the social system it allegedly subjects. As alleged subject, the working class must now be held responsible for, and so accountable to its wretched self for, the poverty, degradation, destruction, war, famine, … endemic to the system it allegedly subjects.The insidious implications of the allegation of worker as subject of production is the final humiliation of his degraded status — the worker is now morally guilty for the mess he is forced, by actual lack of ownership and control, to be illusorily in ownership and control of. Can any further degradation await him? Any crueler mockery?And what does that allegation do to the socialist case? It trivializes the socialist case to merely expunging moral guilt for the mess the working class has allegedly wrought upon its own class and upon the world through its gross mismanagement of the world it's allegedly in charge of. Can humiliation go lower!But, let us now unmask the real subject of the capitalist social system. The capitalist class owns and controls the worker's conditions of working, and it legally and socially owns and controls the worker's labour. The capitalist class therefore owns and controls the whole social system in the only sense that matters — at the level of assigning responsibility and accountability for it. It owns and controls the mismanagement of the world it's legally and socially in charge of. [Apparently they don't teach management of the world in a Harvard MBA — only management of the working class.]Sheet home responsibility where it so obviously belongs!So the Capitalist Class isn't in Control?We therefore have no common interest with the capitalist class in any sense that matters — ownership and control. Any other sense is blather!Now to examine the assertion that neither class owns and controls the whole social system… [By implication, the allegation that both classes do have a common interest.]The illusion that the capitalist class isn't in control of capitalism — and so, not in control of the working class — rises primarily from our everyday popped illusions over the workings of capitalism. Capitalism always suggests opportunities and possibilities that can't be realized within it. Ever expanding capital growth that "pops" only to collapse in a heap. Non-class conscious politicians finding solutions that "pop" because the problem can't be solved under capitalism. Everyone wants X but it "pops" and they get Y. Things just don't work out as we believed they should.No wonder the disillusioned delude themselves that nothing can be controlled and that the poor dispossessed capitalist class controls absolutely nothing, least of all the working class. How very deluded, but how wonderful for capitalism that its very workings [or failure thereof] generate protective illusion.The non-class conscious desire an imagined capitalism without its popped disappointments. That is the very essence of illusion.We deterministically know why capitalism always pops the illusions it copiously creates. But the explanation is entirely deterministic, and is entirely about control, and not the absence of control.We oppose the capitalist class because it robs us [it legally and socially owns society's instruments and resources, and the working class's labour] and because it rules us [it legally and socially controls how we labour for it, and so controls our lives].The capitalist class owns and controls its very own mismanaged mess. We should relieve it of its responsibility.