Addendum from Marx's Capital

Here's a minor addendum from Uncle Karl's Capital Vol. 1 (in relation to the previous post "Machiavellian Morality"):

"...it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist..." (Marx Capital 98).

This passage is interesting because the capitalist is defined not as one who simply engages in making money but one who does so as an end-in-itself and also, inevitably, ad infinitum. In this, I think Marx is uncovering the pathology of our time: the tendency toward absolutism; toward excess. Whereas Marx reveals that commodity exchange has its end goal in the usage of the commodity sought after (a finite exchange) the capitalist has no 'end' in sight. The accumulation of money is not therefore strategic in the Machiavellian sense espoused below. Rather, money for the sake of money, power for the sake of power, torture for the sake of torture is the rationale behind Marx's "rational miser" (98). Here lies the 'law' of excess which permeates the banality of existence.

Furthermore, this process sees the dissolution of the end and the prioritizing of the means. Marx points out that money was designed as a means to facilitate exchange of commodities. The 'ham' in the commodity sandwich (commodity-money-commodity). In the case of the capitalist, the sandwich is reversed to money-commodity-money. Money, the previous means, become the ends which is itself nothing but another means for another end, etc. In Worthington, instead of torture being cautiously advocated (and hopefully investigated) as a means to an end, it takes on a whole new form, as the final solution. Torture will reveal a potential truth (more often a pain-induced lie or hallucination) but more torture for more potential truths. In the "war on terror", itself a vaguely described struggle whose enemies can morph into anyone, Worthington's blank cheque encourages losing ourselves within an abyss of excesses.

The solution must be the reconstitution of these "means" as means. In the sense of capitalism, money can only take the back seat when the person or society begins to posit concrete values for which to strive. Similarly, torture - if it is indeed even strategically worthwhile - can only find a place within a war that is defined realistically (a slightly meaningless word but meant to conjure the tenets of the Machiavellian method outlined below and reappropriate the term from Realism), not vaguely as a war on terror. Unfortunately, if the war is read simply as an outcropping of capitalism, which it very much appears to be, then it will not be able to be defined realistically. It will not be able to curb its tendency toward excess because its very essence is excess. It is simply an embodiment of the money-commodity-money pursuit, in which torture, murder, rape and general strife (all excesses that will beget their own excesses) are the 'ham' in the sandwich of dollars. In this way, originary excess spreads its seed wherever it goes and finds its most worthy accomplices in those 'students of realism' who advocate for curing our present quagmires with more of the same.