Ideological Expropriation

You are probably familiar on some level with how capital employed the working class to produce surplus-value for itself, in the form of their product and its value on the market.

However, also notable in Marx's account is how capital ideologically expropriated the properties of its labourers, a central part of capitalist ideology.

For example, one such instance drawn upon by Marx is capitalist claims that money, or capital, is directly productive in the capitalist labour process. This hence takes the labour's property of productivity, and instead appropriates it to capital, quite as capital is said to expropriate them generally. It is partially true, however: money is the productive force because it is the spur of working class production, and hence the animating force of production. Of course, people can and have produced for many reasons unrelated to money, and hence this only applies to a highly specific form of society - it was true of the working class under capitalism, but the defiant schoolboy does not throw paper-planes they make at a teacher for such reasons. This is generally conceded, however.

Just as the working class is that sector of society hired to serve the interests of capital, as a whole, and procuring unto it surplus-value, so ideologically capital relies on the working class and description of it is relied upon to furnish the attributes of capital. Money capital must, in its own functioning, realise in some manner the division between itself and the 'working class.'  Hence, developing the category of the 'working class' and trying to explain its attributes is implicit in the interests of the capitalist class, and in this sense quite safe because it is done under capital's guidance. It is unlikely to be able to lead any further than this.

The working class is a social force of capitalist production, and not a strata of people, insofar as it is not a fixed attribute but requires constantly to be refurnished and redefined by the process of employment and atomised signing of contracts. People cannot start 'working class' - they become working class because they are hired to do things, which then has to be repeated continually. The working class is hence not comparable to the aristocracy, which was slightly more stable at least due to not having to go through the same process: the working class is not a stable social strata of people, with whatever traits, but a certain role in capital's process of production.

The 'working class' is hence composed in a highly atomised process which occurs periodically, and not by identification with a group. This derives in some manner from capital, which is similarly amorphous and therefore forms the working class in this manner. In this sense, the traits of the working class are also derived from that of capital, which actively forms them as such.

Attempts at avoiding this identification with capital, or dissociating the working class from capital, have generally sought to avoid referencing this formation. Nonetheless, it is true, and does great violence to such attempts at a working class 'identity' and so on.

In any case, it should be clear that the traits which capital promotes itself as having in the production process, are generally rendered up by the working class, and this ideological function on behalf of capital is a part of their function. While it is generally recognised that ideological jobs have the clear function of pandering to capital, and require people of such disposition, due to the law of value other forms of labour are not qualitatively distinguished, and hence have similarly an ideological component. If this is neglected, people will not be offered jobs, though they can still perform human labour. Where production for the market is to assimilate also the intellectual fields significantly, all other forms of labour must take on such an ideological character, as the law of market production is the law of value. This hence requires the possibility of an 'ideology' of the market, or that the market has taken the form of a partisan, social force, or formed a society around it, hence capital. It was hence in this sense inevitable that the promulgation of market labour would result in a society structured around the market.

When we say 'ideological,' however, we mean of course not honestly or independently so, but instead in terms of how the 'ideological' functions were carried out - pandering.

Promotion became an increasingly effective force as the means of producing it expanded, and capital would not promote things that did not favour it. As such, anything else was excluded from such. As all economic actors, apart from communists of whatever place, functioned in all of their economic activities with a prospect of monetary gain, therefore none of these could organise an alternative to this form of promotion by this point, as it would inevitably fall into monetary and hence business schema within the economy. This is important, as it concerns the cultural life of a nation, as well as what causes and such were promoted within it.

In general, then, capitalist ideology is founded on expropriation of the traits of the working class. This means that merely accusing them of expropriation needn't mean much, as after all this is the purpose of capitalistic production, and a higher development of the law of value than producers' property. They are both ideologically and in reality inoculated against this charge, they take on the properties of labour and drive it. The labour is carried out for monetary return from the capitalists, which is in a sense more immediately assured than from sale, and therefore money capital is not in actual fact excluded from the production process. One could hypothesise a communistic situation where production is not carried out under these lines, or this abstraction from its traits as labour, but this would not describe the act of production under capitalism, where capital cannot be extricated from it. To equate them would merely be to attempt to portray things as already communist, which is problematic although it might make apologetics easier.

In general, then, ideological defences of capital appropriate the traits of the 'working class' to capital. The production of this is necessary, as it helps in the appropriation of ideological labour. Hence, any attacks on this system, to be publicised among a group directly involved in capitalist production, had to in some way link into or complement this systematic. To make up for this, 'leftist' groups were apt to configure artificial categories like 'far-right,' generally inconsistent with their own portrayal of the economic spectrum, where these involved obvious tendencies towards social regulation and often the turning of society towards a common, consciously specified end. In this, such a 'left' will of course oppose them The left is so used to apologetic that anything likely to be inaccessible among capital's supporters is likely to offend it. From there, negotiation with labour is negotiation over a common fund, it is in a sense despite its bitterness something finite. Its organisations are organisations of negotiation with capital, and hence limited in their radical intent. They can easily come into enmity to this, once it reaches beyond where this cannot go, if it cares about bringing the unions along with it. In a society of abstract labour, it seems reasonable that affluence would ultimately flow to some extent to people of various kinds that did not work. That's not wholly down to them. While Marx begun from the notable position that the mode of production, and class, is constructed on the basis of a certain type of production or is an inevitable result of it rather than an active impulse, this slightly unpopular view wasn't significantly represented later on, leaving Das Kapital to be taken as a bunch of rousing but amorphous slogans. People like to be cheered on, but one might question what their purpose is.

As such, this general expropriation cannot be seen as confined to economic questions. It is not only the means by which capital happens to defend itself, but also the means by which it was forced to do so. However, capital is not content with 'defence' - it wants people to fall in line, and to serve it, in whatever capacity. This leaves it actually quite shorn of defences, as it has no interest in such stasis - it is vulnerable. Hence, capital thrives on expropriation, which implies that capital must by itself lead to some differentiation of the classes, and investigation of another class. When the capitalist mode of labour, so far as it was developed by capitalist and labourer, grew past a certain threshold, it became incompatible with previous systems, and hence had to absorb their subjects into its thrall. Capitalist production involves a relation in which this expropriation is systematic and hence something dealt with from the beginning, this is hence a feature of capital which isn't wholly foreign to it. Likewise, whether or not the husband is 'bourgeois' and the wife 'proletarian,' as the famed analogy goes, the latter still has sex - of whatever type - with the former and marries them, often due to their own passion, and is hence in a marital or close union with them. Their relation to the rest of society is hence left out of the original account, nonetheless their relatively closer relation would thus seem to exclude the rest of society, who are outside of this relation, and hence perhaps by implication communism. Of course, the rest of society cannot usually relate to them in this way, and rather seek to participate in their relationship, support them and bring them closer together, which hence relegates them from this. In general, in order to retain their relationship at an artificial distance, they would have to appropriate the categories of society outside of this to it in a domesticised way which is hence ideological promotion and immersion.

A relation of expropriation cannot be stable, unless the system is itself based on expropriation. If people are producing or acting with the intent of being expropriated from, then they cannot actually produce content of their own, because they are trying to produce for another. This is hence highly problematic, and requires content to be expropriated from outside of this relation. However, this means that the task of both expropriation and, inherently, confrontation and attacking is given to the 'lower' class, while the other class pretends that this external element, apart from and probably against the system, does not exist. This means that both are hostile to forces outside of this system, and will go out of their way to undermine it. This is especially the case where such sentiments in favour of the system are deep-rooted. Nonetheless, it hence means that neither is to be trusted, at least as a group, with doctrine.

To conclude, capital's ideological apparatus hence clearly also shows signs of 'appropriation,' suggesting that this is not a merely economic mechanism. This has direct consequences for its mode of engaging with 'other views,' or even those which are nominally so, which can disturb this if they are not hemmed into it again.