The Reproduction of Daily Life, by Fredy Perlman
Part 2: Alienation of Living Activity:
In capitalist society, creative activity takes
the form of commodity production, namely production
of marketable goods, and the results of human
activity take the form of commodities. Marketability
or saleability is the universal characteristic
of all practical activity and all products.
The products of human activity which are necessary
for survival have the form of saleable goods:
they are only available in exchange for money.
And money is only available in exchange for
commodities. If a large number of men accept
the legitimacy of these conventions, if they
accept the convention that commodities are
a prerequisite for money, and that money is
a prerequisite for survival, then they find
themselves locked into a vicious circle. Since
they have no commodities, their only exit
from this circle is to regard themselves,
or parts of themselves, as commodities. And
this is, in fact, the peculiar "solution"
which men impose on themselves in the face
of specific material and historical conditions.
They do not exchange their bodies or parts
of their bodies for money. They exchange the
creative content of their lives, their practical
daily activity, for money.
As soon as men accept money as an equivalent
for life, the sale of living activity becomes
a condition for their physical and social
survival. Life is exchanged for survival.
Creation and production come to mean sold
activity. A man's activity is "productive,"
useful to society, only when it is sold activity.
And the man himself is a productive member
of society only if the activities of his daily
life are sold activities. As soon as people
accept the terms of this exchange, daily activity
takes the form of universal prostitution.
The sold creative power, or sold daily activity,
takes the form of labor; labor is a historically
specific form of human activity; labor is
abstract activity which has only one property;
it is marketable; it can be sold for a given
quantity of money; labor is indifferent activity;
indifferent to the particular task performed
and indifferent to the particular subject
to which the task is directed. Digging, printing
and carving are different activities, but
all three are labor in capitalist society;
labor is simply "earning money." Living activity
which takes the form of labor is a means to
earn money. Life becomes a means of survival.
This ironic reversal is not the dramatic climax
of an imaginative novel; it is a fact of daily
life in capitalist society. Survival, namely
self-preservation and reproduction, is not
the means to creative practical activity,
but precisely the other way around. Creative
activity in the form of labor, namely sold
activity, is a painful necessity for survival;
labor is the means to self-preservation and
reproduction.
The sale of living activity brings about another
reversal. Through sale, the labor of an individual
becomes the "property" of another, it is appropriated
by another, it comes under the control of
another. In other words, a person's activity
becomes the activity of another, the activity
of its owner; it becomes alien to the person
who performs it. Thus one's life, the accomplishments
of an individual in the world, the difference
which his life makes in the life of humanity,
are not only transformed into labor, a painful
condition for survival; they are transformed
into alien activity, activity performed by
the buyer of that labor. In capitalist society,
the architects, the engineers, the laborers,
are not builders; the man who buys their labor
is the builder; their projects, calculations
and motions are alien to them; their living
activity, their accomplishments, are his.
Academic sociologists, who take the sale of
labor for granted, understand this alienation
of labor as a feeling: the worker's activity
"appears" alien to the worker, it "seems"
to be controlled by another. However, any
worker can explain to the academic sociologists
that the alienation is neither a feeling nor
an idea in the worker's head, but a real fact
about the worker's daily life. The sold activity
is in fact alien to the worker; his labor
is in fact controlled by its buyer.
In exchange for his sold activity, the worker
gets money, the conventionally accepted means
of survival in capitalist society. With this
money he can buy commodities, things, but
he cannot buy back his activity. This reveals
a peculiar "gap" in money as the "universal
equivalent." A person can sell commodities
for money, and he can buy the same commodities
with money. He can sell his living activity
for money, but he cannot buy his living activity
for money.
The things the worker buys with his wages
are first of all consumer goods which enable
him to survive, to reproduce his labor-power
so as to be able to continue selling it. And
they are spectacles, objects for passive admiration.
He consumes and admires the products of human
activity passively. He does not exist in the
world as an active agent who transforms it.
But as a helpless impotent spectator he may
call this state of powerless admiration "happiness,"
and since labor is painful, he may desire
to be "happy," namely inactive, all his life
(a condition similar to being born dead).
The commodities, the spectacles, consume him;
he uses up living energy in passive admiration;
he is consumed by things. In this sense, the
more he has, the less he is. (An individual
can surmount this death-in-life through marginal
creative activity; but the population cannot,
except by abolishing the capitalist form of
practical activity, by abolishing wage-labor
and thus de-alienating creative activity.)
