The twenty-eighth night
Time clocks, date stamps, clock-in, clock-out, punch cards, swipe cards, flexi-time, hard time, peace time, piece work, war time, serving time, time server, clock watcher, shift worker, time thief, time bandit, time catcher, time rich, time poor, time to start and time to finish; time the sixth sense, understood in our blood and in our hearts.
Marx looks at his watch, “Time is money.” he says to himself.
Tools are extensions of ourselves, the spear extends the arm, the club extends the fist, like a second skin, or abnormal growth, we inhabit them, feeling for their every hurt; a chip off the axe, a nick in the blade, hurts both the wielder and their implement. These early tools were valued as we value life. Their association with us was a deep bond of trust and belief in their ability to come through in difficult times. Nets it was believed would hold and be strong enough to haul in the fish, the spear strong and sharp enough to kill our foe, the axe keen enough to shatter bone and sever sinew. The social bonds between people were mirrored in the bonds they made with their tools. To pass a trusted tool on to another would be a deeply felt gesture. People would identify themselves by and with their tools, a symbiotic relationship eventually developing, and in that relationship we built a model for our relationships with others and the wider world.
The man who has just killed a lion knows his spear’s value. The tribe who have just feasted on fish, understand the value of strong nets. The trust placed on these objects becomes a powerful force beyond the material objectness of the tool, they may develop an aura, a life not unlike their owners, a presence that is spoken to and with, like others of the tribe. This situation can lead to myth. The deep bond of man and tool is central to what it is to be human. The moment this bond is betrayed, a rupture is created. The present rupture between the maker and the merchant is Marx’s worry. He gnaws at it like a dog on a bone. In his own mind he seeks to heal the rift, but in reality only forces it wider apart, this opening valley of the fetish will swallow hordes of his messianic followers. They will lose all sense of reality, speaking in tongues and harboring ghosts as neighbours, rather than speaking to and helping out the people they live next to.
Marx has never really understood use value. He has never fished or hunted, only in words does he fish for souls and hunt the haunted, real value, trusted value is not in silver tongued rhetoric or an academic text, it lies in terror on the bleak mountain side, horror at sea and the dread of starvation as the crops fail; those places and times where limits of our survival are tested and boundaries drawn between the living and the dead are where use is truly valued.
Within the money economy nostalgia is a luxury, trading in nostalgia a decadent delight that many thinkers have been guilty of. The depth of the Capitalist descent is hard for Marx to really understand but in the construction of consumer law, the inverse law of perennial collection, it has opened up for him the doors of Hell and a vision of a doomed future of permanent damnation within the thought screen of commodity. He realises now that each money transaction is a selling of a soul and by now all souls have been sold and only a new revolution, a revolution of the soulless can dig us out of the shameful pit of cynical capital.
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