And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon Gods they’d made.
Paul Simon, The Sound of Silence
A commodity appears a trivial thing easily understood but its analysis shows that it is in reality a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. As a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider its properties as capable of satisfying human wants, or as the product of human labour. It is clear that man, by his industry, changes materials furnished by Nature to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it. The table continues to be that everyday thing, wood, but as a commodity is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with feet on the ground but, in relation to all other commodities, stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas far more wonderful than “table turning” ever was.
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, in which the social character of men’s labour appears as an objective character stamped on the product of that labour. The relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented as a social relation, not between themselves but between the products of their labour. This is why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. The value relation between the products of labour as commodities has no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. A definite social relation assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. For an analogy, we must look to religion. In that world the products of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour when they are produced as commodities.
Karl Marx, Capital 1, Chapter 1 – lightly abridged
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In that beautiful song from 1964, Paul Simon shines a torch – probably unwittingly, since art is gestated in the collective unconscious – on an age old propensity to endow the products of our labour with metaphysical properties; much as our ancestors carved out a wood or stone statue, only to kneel before it with head bowed.
Marx’s dialectical analysis of the commodity as a thing, contrary to Aristotelian understanding, both x and not-x – a use value and an exchange value, matter and anti-matter; the material embodiment of a given set of social relations entered into by a species obliged by constraints of physiology to come together to produce and daily reproduce the material conditions of its existence – far exceeds, as the implications unfold over three volumes written when capitalism for all its horrors still had a progressive role in advancing human history, what Paul Simon had glimpsed intuitively, in imagery fleeting and partial but compelling.
We grew up to a discourse of The Economy as separate from and overriding human need. Of The Markets not as a human creation constrained by relations of class but as things outside human control, often presented as such through meteorological imagery. How could such an inversion take us anywhere useful, as opposed to cementing a status quo that grows daily more antithetical to the common good (however we slice that) while overseeing the obscene wealth accumulations of power half hidden yet unbridled?
Marx’s mid to late nineteenth century analysis, and Paul Simon’s lyric genius a century on, have never been more appropriate. Under capitalism, advances in human productivity and ingenuity, capable in principle of freeing us from drudgery, become things to be feared. We still live under a political-economic order which demands that the vast majority of us sell our labour power to a minority defined by ownership of some essential of wealth creation; namely private capital in pursuit of private profit, without which – under the tautological terms which define capitalism – wealth creation cannot and will not take place, regardless of human need.
The relationship was always exploitative, in a way more hidden to the casual eye than was ever the case with feudalism and slavery. Now though, the contradiction is the elephant in the room. Most people must sell their labour power on pain, if not of starvation then of severe ostracism, but The Market for it is shrinking. Never mind that all around we see decay, disrepair and social problems screaming out to be fixed. “Where’s the money?”, is the neoliberal mantra. As though money were not a token printed at will by all economies with a sovereign and fiat currency but a thing, like earth’s resources and human labour, necessitated not by a social order but nature itself.
A thing fetishised like that rock or lump of wood carved into a deity.
The Market for labour power is shrinking for two reasons in the West. One, a creditor oligarchy saw greater profits to be had in offshoring real wealth creation to the global south. Two, the meteoric rise of AI at the service not of humankind but a tiny elite now threatens even the most skilled and highly rewarded of labour sellers.
Over to Caitlin Johnstone, writing today, May 11.
We Are Being Driven To Our Doom By Mindless Machines Of Our Own Making
We are being driven to extinction by the headless horsemen of the apocalypse. And we built those headless horsemen, bolt by bolt, with our own hands.
It’s not impossible to solve our world’s problems, it only looks that way because we’ve created systems which cause human behavior to be driven by mindless mechanisms of our own making rather than by human interest.
We allow the blind pursuit of profit to govern the way the human species behaves on our planet. Corporations which are legally compelled to do whatever maximizes shareholder value are exerting more and more control over the state and its people. And now we’ve got AI being prepped to do whatever it’s going to do.
These are unthinking beasts of our own creation. And we let them rule our world.
Our lives are dominated by gods without brains. And we made the gods.
We are being driven to extinction by the headless horsemen of the apocalypse. And we built those headless horsemen, bolt by bolt, with our own hands.
War. Militarism. Ecocide. Exploitation. Imperialist extraction. These things happen because they are profitable, and we are led by systems and institutions which consistently cause the most profitable thing to happen. They continually slant all movement toward the most profitable outcome, regardless of the negative impact it can have on human beings and the other organisms with whom we share this planet.
That’s why the military-industrial complex exists. That’s why the rainforests and ice caps are vanishing while sprawling data centers spring up all over the place. That’s why ordinary people are getting poorer and more miserable while those who own and operate giant corporations get richer and more powerful.
These things aren’t happening because it’s the way things need to be. They’re not happening because of human nature or because of some immutable characteristic of the way human civilization has to unfold. They’re happening because the mindless forces we put in charge of our society made things that way.
We can dismantle capitalism and set up systems which center human interests instead of profit. We do have the power to unseat the plutocratic institutions which rule our nations and put the people in the throne of power. All we need is the will to do so — which is why so much propaganda indoctrination has gone into undermining our will to do so.
You can tell how unthinking and indoctrinated someone is by how willing they are to go along with the rule of the headless gods. People who reflexively defend the status quo, who defend police brutality and government warmongering, who make excuses for capitalist abuses and inequality. They’re just small reflections of the mindless gods they serve. They are as unthinking and unconscious as the corporations that are devouring our world. Mindless NPCs marching to the drumbeat of mindless corporate power.
Humans do this because it’s easier to give over our power than to accept responsibility for the outcome. We’re scared of getting the blame, so we hand power upwards. We keep handing it up and handing it up until there’s no one to hand it to, so we make empty automatons to hold our power for us.
It is a grave sin for us to abdicate our authority in this way. Humanity does need to take responsibility for the self-destructive trajectory it has set itself on, and reverse course.
It is absolutely within our ability to transcend our propaganda indoctrination and force a dramatic change in the way human civilization occurs. It is absolutely within our ability to make peace, feed and clothe everyone, and move into a collaborative relationship with each other and with our biosphere.
We only think it’s not possible because we’ve never done it before. But we’ve done lots of things we’d never done before until we did them.
We’ve just got to stop letting ourselves be whipped around by unthinking, unfeeling, amoral mechanisms of our own creation. We made them, so we can unmake them.
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