The Hangover and Life as a Commodity

We have a common and stark expression of what it might feel like to be a commodity, and to have our past dominate our present: a really, really bad hangover.

Capitalism is a system where the past dominates the present, where “the tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Alongside occupying brain space, the past rules us in a much more direct way in Marx’s account. Past labor (in the form of capital) dominates present, living labor (i.e., of all of us). This layering…