social relations – Unity–Struggle–Unity

Money

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:44:36 +0000

Both a social relation and the universal commodity which is exchangeable for all other commodities. As a social relation, money is the power to command the labor of others. As the universal commodity, money is how exchange occurs under the capitalist mode of production. Money that is used to extract surplus value is capital.

Gender

Mazal — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:39:39 +0000

Gender, in the abstract, is the class-ordered division of labor and property. Patriarchy is the logic of gender that forms the basis (or substructure) of all consequent patriarchal class societies, which from ancient times was predominant across the Old World, comprising most of Eurasia and much of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Yet patriarchy is not the only possible, nor the only existing, organizational structure of gender – gender emerges according to the earliest divisions in labor – nor is every society fundamentally labor-divided, that is to say gendered. However, owing mainly to colonialism – although, long before them, also merely to migrations – patriarchal gender became global in scope. Patriarchy, therefore, forms the most ancient substructural bedrock of a globally connected modernity. This is why our analysis is concerned specifically with patriarchal gender ontology.

The principle element of patriarchy is its gender binary. This binary took form during the earliest division of labor (reproductive vs. productive), and the transition to collective-exclusionary property, especially with the advent of the home during the Neolithic Revolution, the transition to early agricultural society. Expressed simply, this binary is the division between womanhood and manhood; although, it is not really quite so simple. A common mistake, including among feminists, is to conflate the ideological reflection of patriarchal gender with its structural substance. That is to say, that the gender-categories of “man” and “woman” are, as used in common speech, merely ancient ideological conventions, categorical forms, aspect of social identity arising from actual productive relations.

Likewise, the existence of other gender-categories than “man” and “woman” (non-binaristic genders) is possible within patriarchal societies – such gender-categories have also existed from ancient times to the present day in a variety of traditional and (in modern times) coercive patriarchal societies – yet necessarily without ever meaningfully eroding the gender binary, the very “core” of patriarchy.

During the modern-colonial period, gender became inextricable from race, with ancient patriarchal-gender categories subject to a fundamental alteration. The racialization of gender is not the first such major alteration in the structure of the patriarchy, but it is probably the only such alteration on a comparable, worldwide scale since the emergency of the patriarchal class-structure.

How does gender structure class? First, through the division of labor. Simply put, productive laborers and reproductive laborers constitute, at first, two separate classes. These classes construct ideological gender-categories, which over the millennia, have become abstracted from their substructural (that is to say, labor-economic) substance. It would therefore be incorrect to say genders, by which we mean here social identities, are classes. But it would be incorrect to say that gender does not structure class. In fact, a class-distinction between reproductive and productive laborers prevails today. Waged workers in industry; unwaged workers in the home; these are two separate classes on account of different productive relations. However, under capitalism, reproductive labor is becoming increasingly proletarianized, brought out of the home and into industry, and made more efficient.

Disability

Mazal — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:38:00 +0000

In its social sense, “ability” describes a person’s capacity for labor, relative to the social average. This social average makes up the general labor-power of society. Disability describes the individual’s deviation below that general labor-power. The degree of disability is the degree to which a disabled person will be excluded from the social process of production. Disability is not a natural category, but a social one, determined by the relations of production which exclude disabled persons from social reproduction and, thereby, from social life. That is to say: disability will be defined by any given mode of production only in contradistinction to the manner in which production functions. In a given social order, different attributes or conditions will be disabilities (or not) depending on whether they cause the person who exhibits them to fall below the general labor-power.

The ideological reflection of disability is found especially in medicine, but also throughout the ideological state machinery, and is ubiquitous in culture, where it finds its expression in ableism. Under capitalism, disability excludes the propertyless and poor from selling their labor-power, which leaves them destitute, beneath the proletariat, forming a “surplus” population that capitalists can subject to conditions of hyper-exploitation. Disabled persons are at a much higher risk to fall into debt bondage or otherwise be trafficked than the general population, and suffer ableist abuse both in the home and in public institutions. This is how disability structures class, particularly the laboring classes. However, there are also ideological ramifications for “disabled” persons of the dominant class, who might also suffer ableist abuse and even fall to the exploited classes as a result.

A person who suffers disability is therefore, under most circumstances, disabled against selling her labor-power, and is semi-proletarian. More precisely, a person who suffers such a degree of disability is a proletarian worker when she is able to work and is excluded from the proletariat when she is unable. Likewise, persons who suffer injury or illness and who are, for that reason, temporarily unable to work are, correctly speaking, also temporarily excluded from the proletariat, because their real productive relations have, however temporarily, changed to those of a non-proletarian class. A person, lastly, who is, under all circumstances, disabled from selling her labor-power is, therefore, excluded entirely from the proletariat.

But what about “disabled” capitalists, landlords, politicians, judges, military leaders, and so on? In the most precise sense (this may come as a shock) such persons are not and cannot be disabled. They are entirely free to participate in social life; indeed, some belong to those classes that dominate, structure, and order social life. And yet we cannot help but see a capitalist with mobility issues, a missing limb, chronic pain, a psychiatric illness, and so forth, as disabled. Why?

Because class-structure (real economic relations) is reflected in ideology. Disability has a real, structural existence, but it also has a real ideological existence. Therefore, in culture and institutions, persons of the dominant classes whose bodies fit what is, ideologically, the image of disability, will invariably be viewed and medically classified as disabled. We will see this process of reification, the disjoinder of the ideological products of labor-economic relationships into free-standing and inaccurately mapped categories, again. It is a recurring aspect of human class society.

Capital

Comrade Editor J. Katsfoter — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 22:26:01 +0000

(generally)
Anything which is used to procure or extract surplus value.

Capital is not a static definition, but rather constitutes an economic relation. Machinery that forms the instruments of production, such as industrial machinery and property that is a condition of production, such as farmland or the physical fabric of a factory, are both forms of capital (see means of production, the), money that is used to set labor in motion is all capital. Money used to buy food and so forth is not capital, unless that food is being used to pay laborers.

Capital is any material investment of any kind that results in the investor receiving more in return than they invest.

Marx gives us the equation M-C-M’, that is (money) is exchanged for -> (commodity) is exchanged for -> (money with increased value, i.e. initial money + surplus value).

Any money or object (including means of production) used to gain money prime (money increased) is in or performing the capital relation, whether it is in the form of liquid currency or not.

(metonymically)
A shorthand for capitalists and all of their agents. (Thus, “capital is the bastion of reaction”).