Personifications of social power seem to animate the world. Only expected, official activity is experienced as real activity. The unofficial projects of an individual human being seem to happen in a social vacuum, cut off from the real life of humanity; they are pastimes, hobbies, wastes of time; they are experienced as empty intervals of inactivity. Estranged power of community—the State, government—is experienced as the only real community. Estranged productive power—Capital, money—is experienced as the only real productive agent. Personified power is internalized as the only form of human power. In other words, generations of human beings on all parts of the globe are convinced that State offices fight wars, that money works, that inanimate objects animate social activity. Without the aid of hallucinatory drugs, several generations of human beings experience a hallucination. Furthermore, it is not known that these individuals are more prone to hallucinations than earlier generations. The hallucination, the impression that personified power is the only form of human power, cannot easily be explained in terms of the individual psychology of generations of human beings. However, the hallucination can be explianed in terms of the social relations these individuals are born into. Although money, either as paper or as coin, has not in fact been seen to build, produce, repair, speak, or entertain itself, it is in fact through the mediation of money that producers relate to each other and to the productive forces. Although a State office has not in fact been seen fighting wars or building roads, it is only through the mediation of an office that wars are fought and roads are built. The impression that the representatives, the personifications of human powers actually perform social activities is a hallucination. However, it is not a hallucination but a fact of modern life that individuals relate to each other and to the material environment only through the mediation of personified powers. Although the money and the offices do not possess social powers, they are universally accepted as equivalents or substitutes for the social powers. Money is not labor power or productive forces, but is accepted as their equivalent. The State is not the community of individuals which it rules, but is accepted as the equivalent of the community. Although money or social offices do not perform society's activities, social activities can only take place through them. Since individuals are social, namely human beings, only to the extent that they take part in social activity, and since they can engage in social activity only by wielding the dominant forms of social power represented by money and wielded by offices, individuals become social beings by estranging their human self-powers and by wielding the estranged human powers represented by money and wielded by offices. As a result individuals are social, human beings, only in an inverted form, as wielders of personified powers.
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