/lit/ - Literature

"In Marx’s analysis, social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute. Marx sought to grasp this form of abstract, structural domination — which encompasses, and extends beyond, class domination — with his categories of the commodity and capital. This abstract domination not only determines the goal of production in capitalism, according to Marx, but its material form as well. Within the framework of Marx’s analysis, the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by the capitalists of the surplus product and the means of production; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself, a form of social wealth that confronts living labor (the workers) as a structurally alien and dominant power."

Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (1993)