Ultimate Poverty

POVERTY IS THE MAIN mistake of capital. Let us examine it from two angles: the relation between material and immaterial production, and the relation that poverty has to knowledge. When these two relations fail to be grasped, poverty is ultimate misery.

The first point we should consider is how material needs began to be expressed in the abstraction that is money. Since the birth of the market (10th to 8th centuries B.C. E.), things produced (a house, a bed, a shoe) have been compared for the purpose of exchange (one house equals five beds). The need for housing can be translated into the common value of the house that will make it possible to purchase it (or the amount of money needed to buy the house). The production of an object capable of being exchanged, that is, the production of an object with value, is called material production. Another kind of production employs labor for ends that may be termed immaterial. Immaterial production produces an immaterial thing, something that, even if it has the capacity of being exchanged, is not entirely identified with value. What immaterial production fabricates and exchanges is called a service (all service of assistance can be an example).

So, apart from material production (the production of things), there is a kind of immaterial production, which consists of productions of service (for example communication services, caretaker services, personal assistance services). Even if, originally, immaterial production produced something that could not be measured as value (Karl Marx gives the example of the piano player who produces pleasure for the audience), immaterial production is measured with value and produces value.

Immaterial labor often creates the material situation that we understand as ultimate poverty: the wealth system produces ultimate poverty in that it bases its core productive mechanism on taking away the individual's time of life to convert it into a time of labor, which no longer serves the interest of the individual. Capitalist production disguises this stealing process by letting its productive mechanism remain abstract, that is, by setting ungraspable relations between its workers and their products.

The function of capital—if we assume its core mechanism to be the production of surplus, of that “occult quality of being able to add value to itself,” as described by Marx; that part of production which is not absorbed but stored for the following process; that part of the production process on whose anticipation the entire engine rotates—is to let the capacity of the individual separate from his self-actualization. Ultimate poverty is the continuous production of lives, whereby the enjoyment of life is taken away to increase the time of labor reaped.

The abuse and misuse of individual self-actualiza-tion operated by capitalism are reflected in all the a priori forms of knowledge. A priori forms of knowledge are those forms of knowledge whereby the separation occurs between manual and intellectual labor. The first separation of manual from intellectual labor is marked by the birth of the slave, in turn connected to the birth of money (coinage). It is reflected in the first a priori forms of knowledge given birth by Western metaphysics in the 8th to 6th centuries B.C.E.

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