Marx’s inversion reveals workers coveting their own labor in commodities

Evidence

Perhaps the best example of this critical maneuver in Marxist analysis is his sardonic assertion that laboring people had long failed to see that the “value” in the consumer objects they coveted was not some occult “desirability” magically suffused through every commodity, but rather the actual labor of the working people themselves. In other words, those callous-handed workers gazed longingly through the shop windows at their own calloused hands. What they wanted, what they needed, what they longed for, was what they already had. Cut out the middleman, and they could have everything they made—because human making, human labor, was the basis of all the “value” in the universe. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 272

Categorization

• CANDY: The image of workers gazing at their own calloused hands in shop windows is vivid and tweetable.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s commodity fetish discussion and to the human-fracking thesis across this reading list.