MEANS that our struggle must be centred on the ‘struggle over the terms and conditions of wage-labour’. As the phrase suggests, the realism which some cretins would hold up against my alleged romanticism is quite simply the realism of capitalist mentality.
My argument is just the opposite: we need to take revolutionary theory far further than the revolutionaries of the past. Revolution has failed in the past not because revolutionaries set their sights too high, but because they set them too low.
Capital, and therefore class struggle and therefore revolution, penetrate every aspect of human existence. The more we see struggle as an aspect of everyday life, the more radical our concept of struggle has to become. Our struggle is the struggle of that which does not even appear in ‘realistic’ accounts of Manchester capitalist reality. That is why we must break with the ‘realist’ logic of capitalist reality. This is what the critique of fetishism, and therefore Marxism, is all about.
Simon Clarke concurs
Marx takes over from classical political economy the idea that labour-power has a value that corresponds to the labour-time necessary to produce the means of subsistence required to reproduce the labourer, criticising political economy only for not distinguishing the labour-power, command over which the worker sells to the capitalist, from the activity of labour. Marx is here not sufficiently radical in his critique of political economy. Labour-power is not produced as a commodity, so there is no reason why it should tend to sell for a wage corresponding to its value, as defined by Marx.
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