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THE COST OF SURVIVAL
�� Everything has a price, the measurement of
its value as a quantity determined in terms of a general equivalent. Nothing
has value in itself. All value is determined in relationship to the market�and
this includes the value of our lives, of our selves. Our lives have been
divided into units of measured time that we are compelled to sell in order to
buy back our survival in the form of bits of the stolen lives of others that
production has transformed into commodities for sale. This is economic reality.
�� This horrendous alienation has its basis in
the intertwining of three of the most fundamental institutions of this society:
property, commodity exchange and work. The integral relationship between these
three creates the system through which the ruling class extracts the wealth
that is necessary for maintaining their power. I am speaking here of the
economy.
�� The social order of domination and
exploitation has its origins in a fundamental social alienation, the origins of
which are a matter for intriguing speculation, but the nature of which is quite
clear.� The vast multitudes of people
have been robbed of their capacity to determine the conditions of their own
existence, to create the lives and relationships they desire, so that the few
at the top can accumulate power and wealth and turn the totality of social
existence to their own benefit. In order for this to occur, people have to be
robbed of the means by which they were able to fulfill their needs and their
desires, their dreams and aspirations. This could only occur with the enclosing
of certain areas and the hoarding of certain things so that they are no longer
accessible to everyone. But such enclosures and hoards would be meaningless
unless some one had the means to prevent them from being raided�a force to keep
others from taking what they want without asking permission. Thus with such
accumulation it becomes necessary to create an apparatus to protect it. Once
established this system leaves the majority in a position of dependence on the
few have carried out this appropriation of wealth and power. To access any of
the accumulated wealth the multitudes are forced to exchange a major portion of
the goods they produce. Thus, part of the activity they originally carried out
for themselves must now be carried out for their rulers, simply in order to
guarantee their survival. As the power of the few increases, they come to
control more and more of the resources and the products of labor until finally
the activity of the exploited is nothing but labor to create commodities in
exchange for a wage which they then spend to buy back that commodity. Of
course, the full development of this process is slow in part because it is met
with resistance at every turn. There are still parts of the earth and parts of
life that have not been enclosed by the state and the economy, but most of our
existence has been stamped with a price tag, and its cost has been increasing
geometrically for ten thousand years.
�� So the state and the economy arose together
as aspects of the alienation described above. They constitute a two-headed
monster imposing an impoverished existence upon us, in which our lives are
transformed into a struggle for survival. This is as true in the affluent
countries as in those which have been impoverished by capitalist expropriation.
What defines life as mere survival is neither the dearth of goods available at
a price nor the lack of the means to buy those goods. Rather when one is forced
to sell ones life away, to give one�s energy to a project that is not of one�s
choosing, but that serves to benefit another who tells one what to do, for a
meager compensation that allows one to buy a few necessities and pleasures�this
is merely surviving, no matter how many things one may be able to buy. Life is
not an accumulation of things, it is a qualitative relationship to the world.
�� This coerced selling of one�s life, this
wage-slavery, reduces life to a commodity, an existence divided into measured
pieces which are sold for so much a piece. Of course to the worker, who has
been blackmailed into selling her life in this way the wage will never seem to
be enough. How could it be when what has really been lost is not so much the
allotted units of time as the quality of life itself? In a world where lives
are bought and sold in exchange for survival, where the beings and things that
make up the natural world are simply goods for sale to be exploited in the
production of other goods for sale, the value of things and the value of life
becomes a number, a measurement, and that measurement is always in dollars or
pesos or euros or yen�that is to say in money. But no amount of money and no
amount of the goods money buys can compensate for the emptiness of such an
existence for the fact that this sort of valuation can only exist by draining
the quality, the energy, the wonder from life.
��� The
struggle against the rule of the economy�which must go hand in hand with the
struggle against the state�must begin with a refusal of this quantification of
existence that can only occur when are lives are stolen away from us. It is the
struggle to destroy the institutions of property, commodity exchange and
work�not in order to make people dependent on new institutions in which the
rule of survival takes a more charitable face, but so that we may all
reappropriate our lives as our own and pursue our needs, desires, dreams and
aspirations in al their immeasurable singularity.
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