Isabel Sobral Campos

“The value of labor-power was determined by the labor-time needed to maintain both individual adult worker and his family. When machinery thrust every member of a worker’s family into the labor market, the value of the original worker’s labor-power was divided among all those members. Machinery thus devalued his labor-power. Buying the labor-power borne by four individual family members might cost the capitalist more than he had spent for the labor-power of just the head of the family, but in exchange for his outlay, the capitalist gets four working days instead of one, and the price he pays falls in proportion to the amount by which the surplus-labor of four days exceeds that of one. Four people now have to work in order for one family to live.”

on the lyric Ouija board of cold midnights

we lived through wars & wrecks, lived through

then destruction could not stop it, we sounded no alarm

the bells being clipped clearly cut from beating hearts

or because we hadn’t the space to understand it,

being a swarm of infected rivers, a holystone & a thorn

a weeding sprig in the wind plagued syncopated shrouds

in midnights where wars ran still through the ravaged eyes of

all looking things, beholding, leathered in sedatives,

the phenobarbitals of unthinkable truces, we moved on through

the wasteland masticating this compound flesh of universal

graveyard, dormant scrunching calamities carved in the deep tunnels

of collective interment, we lived in the bosom of wars,

in the straitjacket of perfidy, in a growing nest of nuzzled lump

shredding our damp frocks of industry, lived & lived in

the cumulation, the chafed through, the spent & last protection

“Insofar as machinery, renders human strength, superfluous, it facilitates the use of workers who aren’t physically strong or mature, but whose limbs are abundantly supple. When machines were introduced into capitalist production, women and children were therefore immediately put to work! Right away, this powerful means of replacing labor was employed to increase the number of wage laborers, with every member of the worker’s family, regardless of age and sex, being conscripted and put directly under capital’s rule.”

the necromantiar wing of a strained apparatus etching

blisters in a flimsy child’s finger drafted into this hushed war

rule of banners & flag imposed by sundown, wizardry

of fatal fact, lithe & sinuous limbs scoring automated posture as

pigmentation times dearly woosh over lissome cheek

the sorcerers of this demimonde boil a tapestry of chains

in the lips of unpronounceable words, muter than rains

over voids, quieter than rings of spiraling misery scattered

with the fallen, of leaves & sand & sprinkled creatural ash

the alchemy of redundance slaughters by clan & brawn

fetters, barbellate bows over the effaced self, this barbarism

has been immediately emitted to work daggling labor’s flagrant mire

floods arrive with the flesh gleaming piercings of sun spokes

revolutionary engines of combat philology visible

to the nuked selves of this enterprise the savaged children,

may the industrialist’s sleep stand clogged by nightmared incisions

“The moment that shortening the workday is made compulsory, machines are transformed in capital’s hands, becoming objective means that are systematically employed to squeeze more labor out of the worker in the same period of labor.”

it is morning, it is night, it is madrepore

it is albumen, the glow of egg, rupture of shell

it is silk light behind dead light

coffee spark shielding unknown radiance

altered, transubstantiated, growing vermin hair

spider webs sticky in the handprints & a solstitial

burden descending in the crack of clouds

it is escape, it is entrapment, a limicoline

drape over scoliotic line, to be extracted & exist

as a problem of extraction excavated into existence

exhumed by spade, an invisible system

the anti-sabotage ruling produces instruction

manuals, rose-tinted distractions, esurient gadgets

running twitches through dry eyes

fabricate loneliness, delible oases blip inside

brains pillaging some miraged attar