/lit/ - Literature

>>11216454
long answer:
>As Marx pointed out, capital is engendered at the point where selling (C-M) and buying (M-C) are separated spatially and temporally. The separation not only fosters surplus value, but also eventually causes a credit crisis. This separation cannot be collapsed, and it is wrong to presume that direct exchange is ever possible. Since Georg Lukács, a theory of reification has been influential which problematized the situation in which the relation between humans wrongly appears as the relation between things. This problematization is, more than anything else, a construct of the consciousness of craftsmen (or producers of simple commodities) living within the frame of the feudal hierarchy. For them, the relation which had been transparent and direct now appears to be reified. However, social relations between human beings in the commodity economy have been organized, from the beginning, by capital, and appear as the relation between things. There has been no other way. It has always already been the case that we never know with whom we are connected. It is nevertheless this separation that socially connects
people from enclosed communities and nation-states, and could form a cosmopolis, a world civil society. In this social relation we cannot know how we are mutually connected, while it is this ungraspable spatial ‘whole’ that morally forbids us to claim our mutual unrelatedness. At this moment, more than half of the people around the globe are starving; people in advanced countries cannot claim to be unrelated, that is, innocent. But still the social relation cannot be presented conspicuously. Thinking of the problematic spatiality, one can no longer be so naive as to insist that the originally healthy and organically connected relational world has become reified by the intervention of capitalism. This is an ex post facto perspectival perversion. It overlooks the most crucial fact that it is capital and nothing else that organized social relation in the first place.

short answer:
in capitalist society - that is to say, in society - you owe your own rational free agency to people at part in least to people you have never met and never will meet. some are dead, some are living, and some have yet to be born.

really short answer:
pic rel