In The Enemy of Nature, American psychiatrist and ecosocialist Joel Kovel argues that capitalism’s nucleus “is the abstraction of human transformative power into labor-power for sale on the market.” These abstractions occur existentially, temporally, and institutionally through the insertion of use-values to the individual “life-world” — “the portion of the universe which [each creature] is dwelt-in, or experienced.” These use-values, then, foster the accumulation of capital in the life-world by introducing a sense of obligatory dissatisfaction, replacing happiness with sensation and craving.
Take fast-food chains, for example. These corporations actualize “capital’s endless desire to use technology to squeeze more surplus value from its workers” by inserting the idea of fast-served food in our life-world. They cause non-industrialized eating to be considered an inconvenience in order to create an artificial need that can only be addressed through themselves. We see advertisements that reduce meals into a source of affordability and convenience, while new modes of purchase such as drive-through and delivery options further remove consumers from the workers that made it.
Capitalism also abstracts our life-world temporally. Kovel states that capitalism has created a time-obsessed society that “[desynchronizes] natural time and workplace time.” If the quantity of labor is determined wholly by the time worked — as is the case today — “it presupposes that labour has become equalized by the subordination of man to the machine.” Quantity does not account for the individual’s expertise other than accumulating surplus labor from those who completed more work in the same amount of time. Time worked functions only as a least common denominator among all workers to determine the exchange value of each worker with respect to the larger market. Furthermore, we see a difference in quantification between low-income laborers, paid entirely on an hourly basis; high-income laborers, with a yearly salary; and the ultra-rich, paid entirely by their performance.
Lastly, we see capitalism’s institutional abstractions in its drive for globalization. Following the pattern of mutual conditioning between new needs and new modes of accumulation with fast-food chains, globalization also reaches a world-wide stage that is mutually conditioned with “the building of new instruments to operate on it.” As a result, capitalism expands at an exponential rate. Globalization enacts a double abstraction: first by reducing the individual into one of the citizens of a nation, and second by reducing that concept into a global identity that they supposedly share. This kind of globalization operates under the illusion of a global community, when in reality it is a globalization dominated by a political few. It is the impulse to expropriate as much as possible, dividing the sectors of domestic labor that can be expropriated and foreign labor that cannot. As a result, the effects of capitalism’s abstractions are seen in all aspects of non-economic life.
Resisting capitalism’s abstractions is no easy task largely due to its association with convenience. After all, wouldn’t it be easier to leave the economy to “market forces” than attempt to manipulate it through a command economy? The issue is that market forces today are created not by true supply and demand — if they have ever been — but by the supply and demand preferences of the wealthy that are imposed onto the rest of the society.
If we can agree that fast food chains create an artificial dissatisfaction for their benefit — that is, for executives’ and shareholders’ benefits — we can agree that the demand generated by potential customers is also swayed this way. With tactics such as dynamic pricing, the few winners of capitalism not only can manipulate the needs of everyone else, but can freely exploit those at their lowest under the guise of free market. For customers, this is an inconvenience to the extreme, but we are told that a larger and more important system is at play that creates necessary evils such as these.
We can rightfully ask, then, Necessary evils for whom?
~ Benjamin Ha `27
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