Monday, March 16, 2009

capital self-destruction



Will Capitalism still live on into the future? Is it possible that in thousands of years, human beings living on galaxy satellites will still be reliant upon a base of wage labor, and the ever-flowing trade of commodities? Karl Marx once wrote that "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of product and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society"(5). Constant revolution is also another way of saying constant destruction -- the destruction of the social hierarchies that come before, and the destruction of the ruling class as a new revolution creates a new ruling class, and so on. However, once we've revolutionized so far, and become so advance there must be a point at which we top out. There must be a place where the machines are so state-of-the-art that they cannot be made more efficient, when production and input are equal. Once human beings have achieved this maximum amount of production we will still need to find new ways to encourage the market to grow, and for jobs and labor to be valuable.
A society in which human beings are totally reliant upon machinery and technology, and all work is produced through this fashion would be a society that lacked the labor-power of human beings. There would be no one to buy things, and thus the system would fail, since "the condition for capital is wage labor".
Here what Zorg proposes is in order to stimulate capitalism, and life, men must "become an appendage of the machine", by only being employed as laborers and engineers to create new machines. The destructive force that Zorg would promote would destroy all things created by man, and therefore require the machines to clean up the mess. The new machines would need to be created by someone, and this would supply human beings with jobs. This is quite an extreme measure in order to keep the market growing and capitalism stimulated. But this is nothing new, in fact Karl Marx himself wrote that "in these crises[of overproduction] a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed...society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce". To see it written so plainly by Karl Marx is to shed a new light on the character of Zorg. Yes, he is advocating for destruction and death, but capitalism is founded on the constant renewal of itself -- and there can be no renewal without destruction.
The fact that this argument takes place with a priest is very insightful. Is there a meaning behind this? The priest represents God, or mans communion with God directly. He is a symbol of religiosity -- and here he is, vehemently opposed to the ideas that Zorg is voicing about capitalism. But what does he do? Just as Zorg, who in all his awfulness represents the ugly side of Capitalism is about the choke, and perhaps snuff out the hideousness of Capitalism with him, the priest gives him a hearty slap on the back. The slap on the back is like the slap of a new born infant to start his breathing, and here the priest is literally resuscitating Zorg and all he stands for, thus insuring the continuance of Capitalism and with it, destruction.

Marx, Karl. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Chapter 5.

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