{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":13,"pdf_page":13,"physical_index":13,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d1d2a44ff4522fa271199123304939e4ff4c40a9a2225f65865fa25ce69c8e23"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"In his early writings Marx called what was happening \"alienation\", taking up a philosophical term developed by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Frederich Hegel. Marx's contemporary Ludwig Feuerbach had used the term to describe religion. It was, he argued, a human creation that people had allowed to dominate their lives. Marx now saw capitalism in the same way. It was human labour that produced new wealth. But under capitalism that wealth was turned into a monster dominating them, demanding to be fed by ever more labour.\n\nThe object that labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him . . . The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object . . . <sup>10</sup>\n\nAs Marx put it in his notebooks for Capital in the early 1 860s:\n\nThe rule of the capitalist over the worker is the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer, since in fact the commodities which become the means of domination over the worker are . . . the products of the production process . . . It is the alienation process of his own social labour. <sup>11</sup>\n\nBut Marx did not simply record this state of affairs. Others had done so before him, and many were to continue to do so long after he was dead. He also set out, through a quarter of a century of grinding intellectual labour, to try to understand how the system had come into being and how it created forces opposed to itself.\n\nHis works were not just works of economics, but a \"critique of political economy\", of the system which other schools of economics took for granted. His starting point was that capitalism is a historical product, arriving where he found it as a result of a dynamic which drove it ever onwards in a process of endless change with \"constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation\" .12 The economic studies of the mature Marx aimed to grasp the nature of this dynamic, and with it the trends in the development of the system. They are the indispensable starting point for anyone who wants to try to grasp where the world is going today.\n\nIntroduction\n\n13","previous_page":12,"next_page":14}