Capitalism’s socialized labor is experienced by individuals as alien market relations

Evidence

For Marx, capitalism is the most dynamic and rapidly expanding mode of production so far to be seen in human history. One consequence of its dynamic but antagonistic movement is that, within its logic, production comes pro gressively to depend on the increasing “socialization” or interdependence of labor. At this level, capitalism contributes to the further development and transformation of man’s productive powers. But this continuing all-sided interdependence of labor in the sphere of production is, at every moment under capitalism, realized in and organized through the market . And in the market, men’s all-sided interdependence, the basis of their “sociality,” is experienced as “something alien and objective, confronting the individual, not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsist independently of them, and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent individuals” (Grundrisse ). So the progressively social character of production appears as a condition of mutual unconnectedness and indifference. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 889

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the Grundrisse mechanism by which socially interdependent production appears as mutual indifference — core to Marx’s and Hall’s theory of ideology.
• XREF: connects to: Industrial society reduces individuals to interchangeable species beings through conformist working conditions; Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 410; Under monopoly capitalism classes persist objectively while becoming socially invisible. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 680 (+9 more)