Inversion
Marx stated repeatedly in the Grundrisse that capital
inverts the relationship between necessary and superfluous labour time. Capital
both creates disposable time and expropriates it in the form of surplus value,
reversing the nature-imposed priority of necessity before superfluity and
making the performance of necessary labour conditional on the production of
surplus value. Marx’s analysis of this inversion bears unmistakeable traces of
Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique in The Essence of Christianity of the
inversion of collective humanity and the divine, which had so influenced the young
Marx. The theme of inversion returns in the first chapter of Capital in the
section on the fetishism of the commodity, where in the first sentence Marx comments
on the commodity’s abundant “theological niceties.” The table made of wood, “not
only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other
commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain
grotesque ideas.” A couple of pages later: “In order, therefore, to find an analogy
we must take flight into the misty realm of religion.”
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