Wayne describes, amongst other things, how the product of one’s labour – comes back at you to appear alien-like – yet the ghostly presence of the labour that went into it is still there, exactly like, a ghostly presence. I love Wayne’s critique of the movie, Dark City as an allegory of alienation and reification – the imagery of labour power which is not our own. Here are some snippets.

The Strangers then can be seen as the collective embodiment of human alienation and their power to tune, to alter physical reality at will, is nothing less than an allegory of value and its idealistic materialism, the fantasy of capital to endlessly possess material life as if that materiality had no substance, no ‘resistance’.

That is, as if its objectification could ever be complete. Further…

The emphasis which the film places on time…and on the grinding down of time as midnight approaches, recalls Marx’s startling metaphor of deadening, hollowing posession when he writes of man as time’s carcass.

… and on the other hand, a reflection of capital’s constant drive to control labour, to make it more efficient, convert into machine, in the endless drive to save time. But instead freezing time (freezing the temporary saving of production time by turning it into a fixed ojbect, a machine), because machines cannot work faster and faster, they only be worked upon faster, by labour.

OK, clock’s ticking, back to work.