From Commodity Fetishism to Teleological Positing: Lukács’s Concept of Labor and Its Relevance

By Wang Pu

Republished from Monthly Review.

The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years. His 1922 essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”—the central piece of his work History and Class Consciousness, famously opens with the phrase phantom objectivity. The idea of phantom (or phantom-like) objectivity derives from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodity and labor in Capital. The question of labor becomes especially crucial in the third section of History and Class Consciousness, where the young Lukács argues that the proletariat will become conscious of being the object-subject of history. On one hand, labor is reduced to the pure abstractness of labor-time, which marks the nadir of capitalist reification; on the other, it is within the immediate experience of reified labor that the proletarian consciousness is rendered possible. In this sense, labor under capitalism not only determines the lowest point of reification, but also forms “the vantage point of the proletariat.” [1]

Lukács’s later criticism of History and Class Consciousness revolved around the issues of labor and human praxis in general. In his preface to the 1967 edition, he wrote that “the purview of economics [in History and Class Consciousness] is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labor as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing.” Thus, labor refers not only to the historical phenomenon of reification (that is, wage-labor), but also stands for a more general, even ontological, question. In the same preface, Lukács later wrote that labor, characterized by its “teleological system,” should be taken as “the original form and model” of all human praxis. [2] He described his own development in the following way:

Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach in History and Class Consciousness, this search became a plan to investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came early in the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book The Young Hegel (which was not completed until autumn 1937). Only now, thirty years later, am I attempting to discover a real solution to this whole problem in the ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged. [3]

The first attempt produced his book The Young Hegel, in which the discussion of labor is associated with his reading of G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and his encounter with Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The outcome of this project, on which he was working in the 1960s, was The Ontology of Social Being, one chapter of which was devoted to the question of labor. In that chapter, labor is philosophically defined as the fundamental teleological positing that forms the model for social praxis.

His 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and later works, The Young Hegel and TheOntology of Social Being, constitute a trajectory in his theorization of labor. Here, we trace emergence of the question of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” and the ambiguity it causes in the Hegelian-Marxian tradition.

Dualism of Wage-Labor: Labor-Time and the Soul

It is no accident that the issue of the of labor emerges in third section of essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in which Lukács discusses immediacy and mediation. The reification confronting the proletariat differs little from the rigid immediacy imprisoning the bourgeoisie. However, the proletariat contains the potential of unveiling and overcoming the “opposition of subject and object.” For the proletarian consciousness to emerge, both the immediacy and the mediating force must consist of reified labor. When writing this essay, Lukács was highly concerned with “the Marxist analysis of labor under capitalism.” What he referred to as labor was wage-labor, rather than labor per se. He conceived of wage-labor as the point of departure for the identity of immediacy and mediation for the proletariat. [4]

Above all, Lukács wrestled with the issue of labor-time. While bourgeois thought always assumes a rigidly double form, “for the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form.” To substantiate this thesis, Lukács followed Marx’s abstraction of labor into labor-time in the first volume of Capital. This abstraction is identical to the historical “process of abstraction of which [the proletarian] is the victim.” Yet Lukács also went on to claim that it is this very fact of quantification into labor-time that “forces [the worker] to surpass the immediacy of his condition.” At this point, the young Lukács’s eloquence and ambiguity become intertwined. He continued thus: “the quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.” The emergence of this consciousness hinges on the fact that “the worker is forced to objectify his labor-power over against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity.” In this sense, labor-time is not merely considered the immediate social existence of reification and abstraction in which the worker is dehumanized; it is also the mediation for class consciousness. [5]

A presupposed duality, however, is already discernible, for the commodification of both the worker’s labor-power and “total personality” coexist in the same labor-time. Lukács then raised the question of the “work-situation” as the concrete experience of dualism within wage-labor, abstract labor-time versus “the soul”:

This enables us to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man’s achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness. It is true…that the basic structure of reification can be found in all the social forms of modern capitalism… but this structure can only be made fully conscious in the work-situation of the proletarian. For his work as he experiences it directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this is hidden behind the facade of ‘mental labor.’… The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man… the more deceptive appearances are. Corresponding to the objective concealment of commodity form, there is the subjective element. This is the fact that while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanizes him and cripples and atrophies his ‘soul.’… It remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities.

Here, the word soul is especially worth pausing over. Lukács indicated that it is the coincidence of the reifying manual, machine-like labor and the resisting soul in the same work-situation that determines the proletariat’s “vantage point,” from which to grasp historical totality. [6]

To this point, we can summarize that Lukács’s dualism assumes two corresponding, yet incongruous, forms: the first, as shown above, is the dual meaning of labor-time, that is, that labor-time is simultaneously recognizable as the pure quantity and the determining category of personality. The second is a kind of internal division of the “total personality.” The worker is divided into two antagonistic parts: the commodified labor-power and the soul resisting dehumanization. To some extent, the second seems to be developed to mediate the first, but at any rate, the two forms highlight the ambiguity in the identification of immediacy with mediation. Between the two forms arises Lukács’ ambivalence. [7]

The reference to “the soul” reminds us of Lukács’s pre-Marxist aesthetic endeavor; his invocation of experience also is reminiscent of the Diltheyian categories and the Neo-Kantian atmosphere of German so-called spiritual sciences in the early twentieth century. We must also bear in mind that, as Harrt Liebersohn has tried to demonstrate, the young Lukács’s pre-Marxist conception of labor was in dialogue with Weber’s and Simmel’s discussions of work in the context of bourgeois life and Christian-Protestant culture. Yet what characterizes Lukács’ dualism on the issue of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” is his radical move from German sociology and Neo-Kantianism to revolutionary Marxism. The mediation for this move was nothing other than his turn toward Hegel. [8]

One of the philosophical origins for such correlation between labor and self-consciousness is found in Hegel’s “lord-bondsman dialectic.” According to his work The Phenomenology of Spirit self-consciousness springs from the triangular relationship among the lord, the bondsman, and the object on which the bondsman is working. Hegel asserted forcefully that “through work… the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.” Thus, Hegel assumed the activity of labor as the “middle term” and concluded that “it is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.” What lies hidden the bondsman’s work is the issue of objectification. That is to say, the bondsman’s spiritual freedom is objectified in the “permanent independence” of the product of his labor, and thereby is made conscious. [9]

Though Lukács certainly drew upon Hegelian logic in the discussion concerning labor and consciousness, it is evident that his case was complicated by the fact that he wedged commodity fetishism into this context. The worker’s objectification through wage-labor is interlocked with the commodification of labor-power. [10] As quoted above, wage-labor is shaped by the “compulsion to objectify [the worker] himself as a commodity.” Lukács then argued:

Above all, the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked object into the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital. [11]

Here, the mediating role of work in Hegel’s dialectics is repeated, yet reversed: while the Hegelian bondsman recognizes his freedom in his objectification, the Lukácsian worker recognizes his imprisonment. If the product of work attests to the bondsman’s humanity, as is shown in Hegel’s case, then the capitalist history in the Lukácsian sense is the opposite: the worker himself is commodified as the “pure, naked object.” To translate this into Marxian language: what the bondsman recognizes in the object is his own objectification; what the worker recognizes in the object/commodity, according to Lukács, is actually his own “phantom-like objectivity.”

Moreover, though this step forms a parallel with Hegel’s idea of labor as the “middle term,” in Lukács this very mediation itself is dualized—at least implicitly—corresponding to Marx’s fundamental insight about labor’s duality under capitalism (that is, use-value/value, objectivity/phantom-like objectivity). The antithesis between the qualitative objectivity and the quantitative “phantom objectivity” cannot be solved by a Marxian version of the Hegelian notion of labor that mediates self-consciousness. Rather, what is at stake here is how, in the crude immediacy of the “work-situation,” can commodity fetishism dissolve in the experience of the worker, rather than devour the worker’s whole humanity and absorb it into phantom objectivity? Despite Lukács’s theoretical vigor, the chasm between objectification (as found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit) and phantom objectivity (from the penetrating analysis offered by Marx) remains unbridgeable. [12]

Vergegenständlichung and Entäusserung [13]

It is interesting to note that, when writing History and Class Consciousness, Lukács, like V. I. Lenin, had no access to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In formulating his revolutionary labor theory of Entäusserung (or alienation, also translated as estrangement and externalization), the young Marx placed Entwirklichung (“the loss of realization”) in opposition to Vergegenständlichung (objectification), thereby launching a profound critique of Hegel’s phenomenology:

The object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. [14]

Concerning the alienation of labor, Marx went on to say:

The fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his worker, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself…does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. [15]

This striking account, with no doubt, marks a Marxian subversion of Hegel’s dialectics of labor: the independence of the product does not testify the bondsman’s freedom, but stands as an alien power governing the worker’s existence. While the Hegelian concept of work humanizes the bondsman and realizes his being as self-consciousness, Marxian wage-labor dehumanizes the worker totally and alienates the worker from his or her own “essential being.”

Marx’s critique turned out to be a crucial intervention into Lukács’s theoretical practice following the debate about History and Class Consciousness. In his preface to the 1967 edition he recollected one of his “unexpected strokes of good luck” in the 1930s: “the text of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts had just been completely deciphered and I was able to read it.… In the process of reading the Marx manuscript all the idealist prejudices of History and Class Consciousness were swept to one side.” [16] This encounter with early Marx therefore helped initiate his study of early Hegel. The same passage from the young Marx was used in The Young Hegel to lay the foundation for Lukács’s analysis of the difference between Hegelian Entäusserung and Marxian Entäusserung. Lukács’s emphasized Hegel’s “confusion” concerning alienation: the young Hegel equated alienation (Entäusserung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung), while the young Marx drew a “precise distinction between objectivity and alienation in human praxis.” [17]

Only when it comes to the question of labor can the relevance of such confusion or distinction be fully manifested. In the chapter “Hegel’s Economics During the Jena Period,” Lukács dealt with the young Hegel’s labor theory in relation to Entäusserung. Correspondingly, in the concluding chapter, “‘Entäusserung’ as the Central Philosophical Concept of The Phenomenology,” Lukács elaborated on this concept in relation to Marx’s labor theory. Through a close reading of the bondsman’s labor, Lukács believed that Hegel’s discovery of the origin of self-consciousness concerned labor as the universal mode of human existence. Whereas in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” Lukács focused on wage-labor under capitalism, this time, Lukács wanted to seize the interpretation of labor (in a universal sense) found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. [18]

Here arises the problem of Entäusserung. In short, at least two interrelated points made by Lukács are significant at this juncture. First, since Hegel had no insight into the “specifically capitalist form of ‘externalization’ (alienation or Entäusserung), i.e. what Marx would later call ‘fetishism,’” Hegel tended to equate Entäusserung with objectification. [19] Second, as the alienation of labor was beyond his sight, Hegel made a “false equation of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) and ‘thinghood’ or objectivity.” [20] This led to his central theme that “all alienation (Entäusserung) of the human essence is therefore nothing but alienation of self-consciousness.” [21] As a consequence, alienation can always be superseded by returning to the subject-substance identity. Hegel’s characterization of labor as the origin of self-consciousness, therefore, conceals the starting point of what Lukács called the “mystification of alienation.” Drawing upon Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Lukács summarized Hegel’s confusion in a schematic manner: “on the subjective side, there is the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness demonstrated and criticized by Marx; on the objective side, there is the equation of alienation and objectification in general.” [22] Meanwhile, Lukács’s distinction between alienation and objectification is built solely upon a distinction between two modes of labor itself. The following passage, as a part of Lukács’s cross-reading of Hegel with Marx, is particularly lucid:

For alienation is sharply distinguished from objective reality, from objectification in the act of labor. The latter is a characteristic of work in general and of the relation of human praxis to the objects of the external world; the former is a consequence of the social division of labor under capitalism, of the emergence of the so-called free worker who has to work with the means of production belonging to another and for whom, therefore, these means of productions as well as his own product exist as an independent, alien power. [23]

One can even go so far as to say that if the act of labor is the universal mode of human praxis, objectification is the alienated labor under capitalism.

While Lukács asserted that “the socialist critique of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) has exposed the real alienation contained in the capitalist form of work, an alienation that has to be annulled in reality,” he nevertheless gave much credit to Hegel for uncovering labor as the origin of human essence: “the decisive factor…was that Hegel thought of work as the self-creating process of man, of the human species.” Rather than point out the road toward the supersession of alienation of labor (so-called bad labor), Lukács seemed more concerned with laying the philosophical foundation of labor as the genesis and model of praxis, that is, the universal and humanizing labor (or good labor). [24]

Between these two chapters of The Young Hegel, there is a chapter devoted to labor and the problem of teleology. There, Lukács turned to Marx for a definition of labor as “an exclusive characteristic” of human beings. He quoted from Marx: “at the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” By linking it with Hegel’s philosophy, Lukács tried to elevate this Marxist insight into labor as a “purposeful activity” to a kind of teleology of labor, and, therefore, a teleology of history. Since labor is posited as the objective realization of purpose, Lukács’s teleology of labor comes back to Hegelian alienation/objectification and use-value. What he attempted to demonstrate is that “Hegel’s concrete analysis of the human labor-process shows that the antinomy of causality and teleology is in reality a dialectical contradiction in which the laws governing a complex pattern of objective reality become manifest in motion.” For the young Hegel, the bondsman’s labor—associated with a pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal economy—is a phenomenological agent; in early Marx, the worker’s labor testifies to the alienation of labor under capitalism. But in grounding labor as the model of human praxis, Lukács now reached a point of further generalizing labor as an ontological category. [25]

The If… then of Teleological Positing Versus the as if of Commodity Fetishism

In his post-Hungarian Uprising magnum opus, The Ontology of Social Being—written in the 1960s and still under revision until the last days of the author’s life—Lukács addressed the issue of labor in the first chapter of the second volume. His elaboration of labor teleology was a direct continuation of his discussion of the relationship between labor and teleology in The Young Hegel. [26]

In the section on “teleological positing,” Lukács came to focus on what he found missing in his early writings (such as “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”): labor as immediacy and mediation; as the metabolism between man and nature; and as a condition for human social being. In this way, he proceeded from the so-called general characteristic of labor to “elementary labor” in its “essential original nature.” In this chapter, most of Lukács’s examples come from primitive forms of labor, such as the making of a knife or an axe from stone. This generalization was undertaken by Lukács in order to fill the gap left by what he called the “leap” from nature to humanity. Again, labor is posited as the “genuine humanization of man.” [27]

At the beginning, Lukács cites Marx’s definition of labor as purposive activity: “labor, then, as the creator of use-value, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” Central here is use-value/objectivity in labor teleology. Lukács then articulated his ontological category of labor:

Through labor, a teleological positing is realized within material being, as the rise of a new objectivity. The first consequence of this is that labor becomes the model for any social practice, for in such social practice—no matter how ramified its mediations—teleological positings are always realized, and ultimately realized materially. [28]

Clearly, the Hegelian ideas of objectivity and realization again resurface. Here, the later Lukács reverts to the Hegelian/pre-Marxist idea of Entäusserung (alienation/objectification), which, according to Lukács’s interpretation, initially meant the positing of the object in the German idealist tradition. [29] Ultimately, the “teleological positing of causality” is supposed to contain the “ontological kernel of freedom.” Consequently, every social practice, no matter how developed or complex it is, can be ontologically reduced to the original nature of labor, which, he maintained, is as elementary as everyday experience. Its basic rationality, as Lukács contended, can be formulated as if… vthen. [30]

Though Lukács often said that he would deal with the question of capitalist labor in subsequent chapters, one cannot help but realize that what is missing on this ontological landscape is precisely the phantom objectivity of capitalist labor, or commodity fetishism. According to Slavoj Žižek, commodity fetishism centers on the fantasy of as if rather than if… then For Žižek, the problem of fetishism happens on the side of objective reality: people act as if the money-form is the embodiment of the objective Universal; “they are fetishists in practice, not in theory.” It is in the sense of as if that the objectivity of capitalist labor becomes phantom-like at best. Interestingly enough, both the Žižekian as if and the Lukácsian if… then hinge on the famous Marxian formula to which both Lukács and Žižek frequently referred: “they do not know it, but they do it.” Žižek considered Marx’s formula to be a definition of ideology and related it to the “fetishistic illusion” Žižek attempted to demonstrate that commodity fetishism is “at work in the social reality itself, at the level of what the individuals are doing” and that it is in the reality of doing that people “are guided by the fetishistic illusion.” He then drew the following conclusion:

The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.

In this light, we can say that phantom-like objectivity is presupposed and performed as if it were the Universal the objective necessity. [31]

Yet for Lukács’s ontology, Marx’s formula means that, even though humans do not consciously recognize the causality of objective necessity, the teleological positing of causality is still constantly practiced in basic human labor. In this labor, objective causality is directed to human ends, and in turn contains the genesis of science and human knowledge. However, a closer look reveals that this rationality is not purged of as if. Above all, if labor teleology is indeed ultimately determined by social being itself, then objective necessity (the internal necessity of nature; the chain of causality; the logic condition of if… then; and so on) can be viewed as if it were necessity. The formula of if… then seems to be drawn closer to the “bourgeois philosophy” that had been criticized by the young Lukács in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In the labor process of if… then, an illusion has to be presupposed as the internal necessity of nature in order to structure labor (doing/reality) itself. Under capitalism, a new layer of phantom-like objectivity is added upon the layer of presupposed objective necessity in order to structure capitalist labor. This is what Lukács depicted as the “doubly intensified” alienation (or objectification) of labor or, in Žižek’s language, the “doubled” illusion. [32] At this point, Žižek came much closer to the critique of bourgeois idealism developed in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Žižek wrote that “the roots of philosophical speculative idealism are in the social reality of the world of commodities; it is this world which behaves ‘idealistically.’” In this light, the later Lukács’s ontology of if…then has idealized—if not fetishized—labor per se with a concealed, yet presupposed, as if. Thus, if then actually represents an elementary level of fetishistic as if. [33]

While raising the question of teleology in The Young Hegel, Lukács cited Lenin: “in actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it… but it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world.” [34] This is a Leninian version of Marx’s formula, a version in favor of Lukács’s labor teleology. However, Lenin’s as if should be reversed to a Žižekian one. To translate it into Žižekian language: as if happens precisely on the side of presupposition; on the side of actual human activity. The presupposition of the objective world is an as if, which engenders the chain of if…then. The idea of teleological positing betrays the imprint of positing as if. [35]

All this leads us to the issue of the fundamental leap from nature to human. As we have seen, Lukács’s labor teleology is formulated in order to address this leap ontologically. Although—and also because—this leap cannot be historically reconstructed, Lukács believed that his labor teleology could fill the unfathomable chasm between nature and human beings. As he wrote: “the leap remains a leap, and in the last analysis it can only be made clear by intellectual comprehension.” [36] Here, by “intellectual comprehension,” Lukács meant the Marxist method of abstraction. Yet his ontological abstraction—from every social practice to the elementary realization of use-value—runs counter to Marx’s historical abstraction which, following the abstracting power of capital itself, moves from use-value to phantom objectivity. Nevertheless, this ontologization/de-historicization is itself a structural positing, or presupposition like as if, in the understanding of human nature.

Conclusion and Further Questions

From the “phantom objectivity” of labor-time to “useful labor” as teleological positing, this theoretical trajectory can be sketchily characterized as a reversal in development of the historical abstraction from use-value to value that opens Marx’s Capital. Moreover, this counter-movement should be examined alongside the historical context in which Lukács was writing. As Lukács himself noted, History and Class Consciousness was related to the high tide of Bolshevism and Messianism in Central Europe, as well as his determination to become a communist in the wake of the catastrophic First World War and triumphant October Revolution. His study of Hegel was associated with his reflections on his early work, but also on the changed situation of European communist politics. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and the controversy of his Blum Theses, he had to reorient himself amid a series of party struggles toward the new historical task of antifascism. This turn should be viewed as an effort to renew the linkage between Marx and Hegel under Stalinism. One should bear in mind, finally, that The Ontology of Social Being was undertaken in a post-1956 situation; it was written between his Specificity of the Aesthetic (finished in 1963) and his long-planned (yet constantly suspended) Ethics. When he dealt philosophically with the realization of freedom modeled on elementary labor, he was, practically speaking, concerned with the deterioration of everyday ethical life under socialism as it existed at the time.

This outline of Lukács’s theoretical development is not immune to doubt, for the theology of labor was not intended to be the final chapter of Lukács’s The Ontology of Social Being. His philosophy of labor was written in preparation for subsequent chapters on reproduction, ideology, and alienation. Yet the other side of the story is also worth noting: according to his student István Mészáros, when Lukács began writing his Ethics, he realized in the process that it was necessary to write an introductory ontology. Not only did this introduction turn out to be a manuscript of more than two thousand pages, but the protracted writing of this social ontology “procede[d] very slowly” up until his death. [37] The difficulty for our philosopher might be this: there is always an idealistic short-circuit in any materialistic ontology, just as in Žižekian sense, reality presupposes a fetishistic as if. Lukács’s theory of labor attains particular significance in that it shows how he was caught between historicization and ontologization—a structural yet symptomatic tension of his Marxist theory.

But we will not end this essay merely with this critical note. Criticism of a similar kind, in fact, have already surfaced in internal debates between Lukács himself and his disciples. “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology”—a document prepared by his students Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, György Márkus when Lukács requested critical feedback in the late 1960s—records their discontent with their mentor’s manuscript. The first sentence of their commentary to the labor chapter reads thus: “In our view, the greatest defect of this chapter is that the problem of objectification remains unsolved—indeed, is not even posed—which is the same reproach that Comrade Lukács leveled against his own History and Class Consciousness.” [38] In this, his students touched upon the ultimate aporia of Lukács’s lifelong philosophical inquiry. As they indicate in their notes, they became inclined to believe that a project of Marxist ontology may be a dead end. Upon receiving these critical yet insightful comments, the ailing Lukács submerged himself in painstaking revisions and suspended publication of the work. In “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Heller laments the futile effort–though “not a complete failure” of The Ontology of Social Being while lauding The Specificity of the Aesthetic as the true masterpiece of later Lukács. [39]

But should we simply consign the ontological issue of labor to the trash bin of the history of philosophy? I contend that precisely because of this aporia of ontologization that the role of the concept of labor in Lukács’s philosophical development should not be overlooked, and that his problematic conceptualization of labor spurs us on to re-problematize this classic Marxist category in a vastly changed historical context. Marxism holds that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the antinomy between capital and labor. Yet it seems to me that our current perception of labor—both as a concept and as human experience—has become ever-more confusing; vague and pallid. On one hand, the idea of labor has degenerated into a common positivistic word for sociology or economics, losing philosophical and political relevance. On the other hand, wage-labor has penetrated into every corner of social praxis and everyday life, becoming more amorphous and pervasive. Its contemporary dominant form is immaterial labor, which has less to do with the mediation between nature and humanity and more to do with the constant reconfiguration of effects within commodity fetishism itself. As a result, even the machine-like labor of industrial age seems backward and primitive, receding into the remote horizon. In this fully fetishized world, is an ontology of social being possible? To what extent can we revive and redeem the category of labor as a part of our de-fetishization and as a reflection of social praxis and its future? If we deny the possibility of the socio-anthropological-ontological issue of labor, we will surely avoid the idealistic abstractions we see in Lukács. At the same time, we risk giving up a task of critical philosophy and unintentionally succumbing to vulgar sociology, which is yet another product of bourgeois, limited consciousness. Therefore, Lukács’s conceptualization of labor, with all its insights and limitations, is not yet a closed case.

Wang Pu is associate professor of Chinese and chair of the comparative literature program at Brandeis University. He attended Peking University and received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. He is author of The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018). He is also the translator of the Chinese edition of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.

Notes

1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage), 128.

2. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xvii, xviii, xx.

3. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxiv.

4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 167.

5. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 165, 166, 167–8.

6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 171–2. Not only can one detect the duality between the dehumanization of labor power and the soul that resists such dehumanization, but there is also some trace of the latent division between the manual, mechanical labor and mental labor, the latter of which is doomed to fuller fetishization and therefore penetrates the soul. For the question of fetishism of intellectual labor, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: MacMillan, 1978), 13–16.

7. For one thing, the idea of “total personality” or “soul” seems to be too subjective to be historically grounded. In this respect, the soul is more like an enclave of overwhelming reification, further exposing an intense duality. This might account for what Lukács, in his later self-criticism, called subjectivism. More important, while labor-power can be reduced to the totalizing abstractness of labor-time, the “total personality” cannot be restored to the level of the historical totality. The furthest point Lukács could reach is labor’s daily experiential or phenomenological confrontation, or in his own language, appearance: the labor-time or work-situation “appears to the worker” as a qualitative category. Meanwhile, for the “mental laborer,” the appearance is too deceptive to be demystified. After all, according to the duality of capacity and personality that Agnes Heller, one of Lukács’s disciples, proposed in Everyday Life, the daily activity of work under capitalism does not necessarily involve any historical experience or historical consciousness. See Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, 60–70 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). In other words, while in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” the abstraction of labor is sufficiently formulated alongside historical abstraction, the mediating force of wage-labor turns out to be an invalid leap (or rebound) from the immediate work-situation to revolutionary consciousness, which itself remains unmediated. In short, rather than illustrate the identity between immediacy and mediation, Lukács became enmeshed in ambiguous dualism.

8. Harry Liebbersohn, “Lukács and the Concept of Working German Sociology,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, ed. Judith Marcus et al., (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 63–71.

9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118, 114. Here arises the question of recognition, or, in Hegel’s language, “recognition as an independent self-consciousness,” a question that has been (over)developed by Alexandre Kojève and others. When Kojève marked the lord-bondsman dialectic (which he translated as “master-slave”) as the starting point of so-called recognition politics, he downplayed the relationship between the bondsman and the object was downplayed, thus missing the point of labor in his account.

10. Whereas Hegel’s lord-bondsman anecdote bears reference to feudalist conditions.

11. Lukás, History and Class Consciousness, 168; emphasis added.

12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 128.

13. I leave the two terms untranslated because people have translated Entäusserung into different words. For instance, Martin Milligan, the translator of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English, translated Entäusserung as estrangement. Rodney Livingstone, a major translator of Lukács, translated Entäusserung as alienation when related to Marx, and as externalization when related to Hegel.

14. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1984), 108.

15. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 110.

16. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxvi.

17. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 561. Also see Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxiv.

18. Elsewhere in the book, Lukács was critical of Hegel’s myopic observation of labor under capitalism. Though the young Hegel, a reader of Adam Smith, was sensitive to the phenomena of labor division, abstraction or mechanization of labor, exchange of labor, and so on, his era simply did not allow for a dialectical understanding of capitalist labor. (See Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, 329–31.)

19. Livingstone explained why he translated Hegelian Entäusserung as externalization in his Translator’s Note: “I have preferred to translate it as ‘externalization’, since in Hegel’s usage it has a broader application than the current term.” See Luckács, The Young Hegel, i.

20. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 540, 542.

21. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 178.

22. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 551.

23. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 549

24. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 570, 553.

25. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 338–64; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 284, 346.

26. This chapter includes sections of “Labor as a Teleological Positing” and “Labor as a Model for Social Practice,” translated into English as an independent volume entitled Labor.

27. Marx, Capital, vol 1, 133; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin, 1980), 42.

28. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133; Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 3.

29. See Lukács, The Young Hegel, 538; especially Lukács’s etymological survey of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s use of this term.

30. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 39.

31. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989), 31

32. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 18; The Young Hegel, 549.

33. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 32.

34. Cited in Lukács, The Young Hegel, 350

35. The disagreement between István Mészáros and Jean Hyppolite concerning Entäusserung can be viewed as a similar case. What was at issue was whether the transcendence of Entäusserung, which Mészáros insisted is a myth, or the “insurmountable otherness” (central to Hyppolite’s Hegelian version of Entäusserung), is a mystification. See Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1972), 243–44.

36. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, iii

37. István Mészáros, Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic (London: Merlin, 1972), 6–7

38. Ferenc Fehér et al., “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology,” in Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 141.

39. Agnes Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 190.

What is the Fetishism of Commodities?

By Carlos Garrido

I was asked by a few comrades to explain Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities, and with that, the main ways it has been misunderstood by both mainstream bourgeois academia and by well-meaning Marxists. The following short reflection attempts to do just that.

Marx begins section four of the first chapter of Capital by saying that “a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing;” however, “its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx, 71). I can imagine ‘bourgeois’ political economists reading this in 1867 wondering what the hell is ‘queer’ about a commodity? I can envision them asking “what in the world does a commodity, a category of political economy, have to do with metaphysics and theology?” Before I analyze what Marx means, let us look at some of the things he doesn’t mean, but which, as usual, people think he does.

There are a few ways the commodity fetish is misunderstood, but the most prominent misunderstanding describes the fetishism of commodities as a sort of ‘false consciousness’ which takes us over when we engage in the market; a sort of ‘illusion’ that occurs when we idealize the products we consume, or the products we are faced with the opportunity to consume. The commodity fetish is understood here as a sort of libidinal connection to products. It is as if one could watch Confessions of a Shopaholic and retrieve the same message Marx is proposing in this section.

This is not, in my view, what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities. It is not an illusion which functions as a filter to distort our view of the world. If that were the case, as Michael Heinrich notes, “false consciousness must disappear once the real conditions have been explained” (Heinrich, 71).  This is not, however, the case. We don’t become immune to the ‘false consciousness’ of the commodity fetish after reading Marx’s Capital. Instead of thinking of the commodity fetish as a subjective experience of ‘false consciousness,’ Marx holds the fetish is in the world itself. It has an objective presence in the social relations of capitalist commodity production.

Marx uses the example of the construction of a table. When wood is formed into a table, there is no mystery present. We have a “common, every-day thing” (Marx, 71). However, “so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (Ibid – my italic). Notice here how he is very explicit that it is the object itself that is changed into something transcendent when it becomes a commodity. It isn’t, again, simply a matter of a mental illusion or false consciousness.

“The mystical character of a commodity,” Marx will go on to say, “does not originate, therefore, in their use-value” (Ibid). If it was simply a result of the use value of the good, all things – regardless of whether they were commodities or not – would have ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ Instead, what makes a commodity such a queer thing is the relation which makes a good into a commodity in the first place –  its exchangeability. It is here where a good becomes a sinnlich übersinnliches ding (sensuous extrasensory thing). As Marx says: “whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself” (Ibid, 71-2).

For a good to carry an ‘exchange value’ means that the specific type of concrete labor and materials which were necessary to create that good have fallen to the background. What matters in exchange value is not the type of work, but the socially necessary time it takes for that work to produce its product. In essence, qualitatively different forms of work, producing objects with qualitatively different utilities, are all homogenized and differentiated only quantitatively, that is, by the amount of socially necessary labor time materialized in the work. The homogenization of the human element of the commodity creates the conditions where “the social relations of the producers… and the social character of their labour” takes “the form of a social relation between products” (Ibid, 72). The human source of the commodity disappears, it becomes absorbed and metamorphized into the thing itself, appearing “as an objective character stamped upon the product” (Ibid). In the commodity a “definite social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Ibid).

A good analogy to such a queer relation can be found in the religious fetish, wherein human creations (the Gods) are disconnected (in their being and in their qualities) from their human creators. The relationships are seen not as relations between human constructions, but relations between “independent beings endowed with life” (Ibid). A prominent example of this phenomenon can be seen in the religious alienation Ludwig Feuerbach depicts in The Essence of Christianity. Nonetheless, the point is that because this fetishism “attaches itself” to the “products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities,” in a system of commodity production, this fetish has an objective character (Ibid).

For instance, in the movie ‘They Live,’ the protagonist John Nada finds a box of glasses which when worn show the real message behind social symbols (e.g., advertisement for vacation reads ‘reproduce and consume,’ the dollar reads ‘this is your God,’ etc.). In his reaction to the film, Slavoj Žižek’s The Perverts Guide to Ideology provides a helpful analysis of these “ideology critique glasses,” which aids our understanding of how the commodity fetish has been misunderstood. Ideology, Žižek states, is usually thought of as a set of glasses distorting our view of the real world. Therefore, ideology critique is usually framed as the removal of these glasses, an act which allows a spontaneous and direct engagement with the real world. Similarly, the central misunderstanding of the commodity fetish is that it is merely an illusion we hold, once we remove the illusion from our understanding the fetish disappears. This way of thinking about ideology critique is, as Žižek notes, ideological as well.

Instead, as the movie rightly depicts, ideology is objectively in the world. The task of critique is beyond the commonsensical and spontaneous. Critique is an often-painful addition which mediates between us and the world in such a manner that provides us with insights into the objective limitations of the objective world. The commodity fetish is not a distorted view of the world. It is not ‘fixed’ through easy liberal consumptive practices; through knowing where your cow died and where your eggs came from. The commodity fetish is an objective reality in a world dominated by commodity production. It takes critique to see this, but a revolution to change it.

Bibliography

Karl Marx (1867), Capital Vol. I, International Publishers (1974).

Michael Heinrich (2004), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, Monthly Review (2012).

A Mad World: Capitalism and the Rise of Mental Illness

By Rod Tweedy

Originally published at Red Pepper.

Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants every year. ‘What greater indictment of a system could there be,’ George Monbiot has asked, ‘than an epidemic of mental illness?’

The shocking extent of this ‘epidemic’ is made all the more disturbing by the knowledge that so much of it is preventable. This is due to the significant correlation between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders. Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Kinderman, president of the British Psychological Society, have written compellingly about this connection in recent years, drawing powerful attention to ‘the social determinants of our psychological wellbeing’. ‘The evidence is overwhelming,’ notes Kinderman, ‘it’s not just that there exist social determinants, they are overwhelmingly important.’

A sick society

Experiences of social isolation, inequality, feelings of alienation and dissociation, and even the basic assumptions and ideology of materialism and neoliberalism itself are seen today to be significant drivers – reflected in the titles of a number of recent articles and talks on this subject, such as those of consultant psychotherapist David Morgan’s groundbreaking Frontier Psychoanalyst podcasts, which have included discussions on whether ‘Neoliberalism is dangerous for your mental health’, and ‘Is neoliberalism making us sick?’

Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Jay Watts observes in the Guardian that ‘psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering. Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkers as opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic’.

There are clearly very powerful and entrenched interests and agendas here, which consciously or unconsciously act to conceal or try to deny this relationship, and which also makes the recent willingness amongst so many psychoanalysts and therapists to embrace this wider context so exciting and moving.

Commentators often talk about society, social context, group thinking, and environmental determinants in connection with mental distress and disorders, but we can I think actually be a bit more precise about what aspect of society is mainly driving it, is mainly responsible for it. And in this context it’s probably time we talk about the c word – capitalism.

Many of the contemporary forms of illness and individual distress that we treat and engage with certainly seem to be correlated with and amplified by the processes and byproducts of capitalism. In fact, you might say that capitalism is in many respects a mental illness generating system – and if we are serious about tackling not only the effects of mental distress and illness, but also their causes and origins, we need to look more closely, more precisely, and more analytically at the nature of the political and economic womb out of which they emerge, and how psychology is fundamentally interwoven with every aspect of it.

Ubiquitous neurosis

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this intimate connection between capitalism and mental distress is the prevalence of neurosis. As Joel Kovel, a former psychiatrist and professor of political science, notes: ‘A most striking feature of neurosis within capitalism is its ubiquity.’ In his classic essay ‘Therapy in late capitalism’ (reprinted in The Political Self), Kovel refers to the ‘colossal burden of neurotic misery in the population, a weight that continually and palpably betrays the capitalist ideology, which maintains that commodity civilization promotes human happiness’:

‘If, given all this rationalization, comfort, fun and choice, people are still wretched, unable to love, believe or feel some integrity to their lives, they might also begin to draw the conclusion that something was seriously wrong with their social order.’

There’s also been some fascinating work done on this more recently by Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud), and Bruce Cohen (author of Psychiatric Hegemony), who have both written on the relations between the family, sexuality, and capitalism in the generation of neuroses.

It is significant, for example, that one of the most prominent features of the psychological landscape that Freud encountered in late nineteenth-century Vienna were the neuroses – which, as Kovel notes, Freud saw as being entirely continuous with ‘normal’ development in modern societies – with much of these, he adds, being rooted in our modern experience of alienation. ‘Neurosis,’ Kovel says, ‘is the self-alienation of a subject who has been readied for freedom but runs afoul of personal history.’

It was of course Marx who was the great analyst of alienation, showing how capitalist economics generates alienation as part of its very fabric or structure – showing how, for instance, alienation gets ‘lost’ or ‘trapped’, embodied, in products, commodities – from the obvious examples (such as Nikes made in sweatshops, and sweatshops embodied in Nikes) – to a wider and much more pervasive sense that the whole system of production and creation is somehow alienating.

As Pavon Cuellar remarks, ‘Marx was the first to realise that this alienation actually gets contained and incarnated in things – in “commodities”‘ (Marxism and Psychoanalysis). These ‘fetishised’ commodities, he adds, seem to retain and promise to return, when consumed, the subjective-social part lost by those alienated while producing them: ‘the alienated have lost what they imagine [or hope] to find in what is fetishised.’

This understanding of alienation is really the core issue for Marx. People probably know him today for his theories of capital – how issues of exploitation, profit, and control continually characterise and resurface in capitalism – but for me the key concern of Marx, and one that is constantly neglected, or misunderstood, is his view on the centrality and importance of human creativity and productivity – man’s ‘colossal productive power’ as he calls it – exactly as it was in fact for William Blake, slightly earlier in the century.

Marx refers to this extraordinary world-transformative energy and agency as our ‘active species-life’, our ‘species-being’ – our ‘physical and spiritual energies’. But these immense creative energies and transformative capacities are, he notes, under the present system, immediately taken from us and converted into something alien, objective, enslaving, fetishised.

Restructuring desire

The image he evokes is of mothers giving birth – another form of labour perhaps – with the baby immediately being taken away and converted into something alien, something doll-like — a commodity. He considers what effect that must have on the mother’s spirit. This, for Marx, is the source of the alienation and unease, the sort of profound dislocation of the human spirit that characterises industrial capitalism. And as Pavon Cuellar shows, we can’t buy our way out of this alienation – by producing more toys, more dolls – because that’s where the alienation occurs, and is embodied and generated.

Indeed, consumerism and materialism are themselves widely recognised today as key drivers of a whole raft of mental health problems, from addiction to depression. As George Monbiot notes, ‘Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive’. Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt has written very compellingly on this association, suggesting that in modern societies we often ‘confuse material well-being with psychological well-being’. In her book The Selfish Society she shows how successfully and relentlessly consumer capitalism reshapes our brains and reworks our nervous systems in its own image. For ‘we would miss much of what capitalism is about,’ she notes, ‘if we overlook its role in restructuring and marketing desire and impulse themselves.’

Another key aspect of capitalism and its impact on mental illness we could talk about of course is inequality. Capitalism is as much an inequality-generating system as it is a mental illness producing system. As a Royal College of Psychiatrists report noted: ‘Inequality is a major determinant of mental illness: the greater the level of inequality, the worse the health outcomes. Children from the poorest households have a three-fold greater risk of mental ill health than children from the richest households. Mental illness is consistently associated with deprivation, low income, unemployment, poor education, poorer physical health and increased health-risk behaviour.’

Some commentators have even suggested that capitalism itself, as a way of being or way of thinking about the world, might be seen as a rather ‘psychopathic’ or pathological system. There are certainly some striking correspondences between modern financial and corporate systems and individuals diagnosed with clinical psychopathy, as a number of analysts have noticed.

Robert Hare for instance, one of the world’s leading authorities into psychopathy and the originator of the widely accepted ‘Hare Checklist’ used to test for psychopathy, remarked to Jon Ronson: ‘I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.’ ‘But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths?’ the interviewer asks. ‘”Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Bob. “Corporate and political … psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”‘

Pathological institutions

These traits, as Joel Bakan brilliantly suggested in his book The Corporation, are encrypted into the very fabric of modern corporations – part of its basic DNA and modus operandi. ‘The corporation’s legally defined mandate,’ he notes, ‘is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.’ By its own legal definition, therefore, the corporation is ‘a pathological institution’, and Bakan helpfully lists the diagnostic features of its default pathology (lack of empathy, pursuit of self-interest, grandiosity, shallow affect, aggression, social indifference) to show what a reliably disturbed patient the corporation is.

Why should all of these contemporary social and economic practices and processes generate so much illness, so many disorders? To answer this I think we need to look back at the wider Enlightenment project, and the psychological models of human nature out of which they emerged. Modern capitalism grew out of seventeenth century concepts of man as some sort of disconnected, discontinuous, disengaged self – one driven by competition and a narrow, ‘rational’ self-interest – the concept of homo economicus that drove and underwrote much of the whole Enlightenment project, including its economic models. As Iain McGilchrist notes, ‘Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.’

We now know how mistaken, and destructive, this model of the self is. Recent neuroscientific research into the ‘social brain’, together with exciting developments in modern attachment theory, developmental psychology, and interpersonal neurobiology, are significantly revising, and upgrading, this rather quaint, old-fashioned view of the isolated, ‘rational’ individual – and also revealing a far richer and more sophisticated understanding of human development and identity, through increased knowledge of ‘right hemisphere’ intersubjectivity, unconscious processes, group behaviour, the role of empathy and mentalisation in brain development, and the significance of context and socialisation in emotional and cognitive development.

As neuroscientist David Eagleman observes, the human brain itself relies on other brains for its very existence and growth—the concept of ‘me’, he notes, is dependent on the reality of ‘we’:

We are a single vast superorganism, a neural network embedded in a far larger web of neural networks. Our brains are so fundamentally wired to interact that it’s not even clear where each of us begins and ends. Who you are has everything to do with who we are. There’s no avoiding the truth that’s etched into our neural circuitry: we need each other.

Dependency is therefore built into the fabric of who we are as social and biological beings, hardwired into our mainframe: it is ‘how love becomes flesh’, in Louis Cozolino’s striking phrase. ‘There are no single brains,’ Cozolino observes, echoing Winnicott, ‘brains only exist within networks of other brains.’ Some people have termed this new neurological and scientific understanding of the deep patterns of interdependency, mutual cooperation, and the social brain ‘neuro-Marxism’ because of the implications involved.

Capitalism is, it seems, rooted in a fundamentally flawed, naive, and old-fashioned seventeenth-century model of who we are – it tries to make us think that we’re isolated, autonomous, disengaged, competitive, decontextualised – an ultimately rather ruthless and dissociated entity. The harm that this view of the self has done to us, and our children, is incalculable.

Many people believe, and are encouraged to believe, that these problems and disorders – psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, self-harm – these symptoms of a ‘sick world’ (to use James Hillman’s terrific description) are theirs, rather than the world’s. ‘But what if your emotional problems weren’t merely your own?’, asks Tom Syverson. ‘What if they were our problems? What if the real problem is that we’re living in wrong society? Perhaps Adorno was correct when he said, “wrong life cannot be lived rightly”.’

The root of this ‘living wrongly’ seems to be because we live in a social and economic system at odds with both our psychology and our neurology, with who we are as social beings. As I suggest in my book, we need to realise that our inner and outer worlds constantly and profoundly interact and shape each other, and that therefore rather than separating our understanding of economic and social practices from our understanding of psychology and human development, we need to bring them together, to align them. And for this to happen, we need a new dialogue between the political and personal worlds, a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics.

Rod Tweedy is an author and editor of Karnac Books, a leading independent publisher of books on mental health and therapy. His edited collection, The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness, is published by Karnac.

Identity Theft and the Body's Disappearance

(Art by Steve Cutts)

By Robert Bohm

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

- Allen Ginsberg from his poem " Howl "

Identity theft, at least the most familiar type, is possible because today the individual exists not merely as flesh and blood, but as flesh and blood spliced with bank account numbers, user names, passwords, credit card chips, etc. These added parts aren't secondary to the individual's overall identity, they're central to it. Sometimes they're all there is of it, as in many banking and purchasing transactions. In such instances, the data we've supplied to the relevant institutions doesn't merely represent us, it is us. Our bodies alone can't complete transactions without the account numbers, user names, passwords, credit card numbers, and ID cards which have become our identity's essence. Without them, in many ways, we don't exist.

In a worst case scenario, if someone gets hold of this private data, they can become us by possessing the data that is us. Following this, who or what we are is no longer a question. We don't exist, except in the form of a stolen dataset now under someone else's control.

In such a case, an unknown proxy has eliminated us and become who we once were.

Although problematic, the above form of identity theft is relatively minor. A worse form is one we all know about, yet chronically underestimate because we think of ourselves as too canny to be conned. Nonetheless, this other form of identity theft frames and limits everything we do. In the process, it fleeces us of the fullness of our identities and subjects our lives to a type of remote control. This remote control consists of the combined influence on us, from childhood onward, of society's major institutions and dominant activities, which seed us with a variety of parameters for how to acceptably navigate society and and its particular challenges.

This process is usually called "socialization." However, it's better seen as a sorting procedure in which society sifts us through a citizenship sieve in order to eliminate supposed defects, thereby guaranteeing that, despite each of us possessing unique characteristics, we share an underlying uniformity. Ultimately, this process is a kind of identity eugenics which strives to purify the population by eliminating or weakening troublesome qualities - e.g., an overly questioning attitude, chronic boundary-testing, a confrontational stance toward authority, a fierce protectiveness toward whatever space the body inhabits, etc. Such traits are frowned upon because they're seen by the status quo as a likely threat to society's stability.

Such indoctrination is much subtler yet, in many ways, more pervasive than outright propaganda. Its theater of operations is everywhere, taking place on many fronts. Public and private education, advertising, mass culture, government institutions, the prevailing ideas of how to correct socioeconomic wrongs (this is a "good" form of protest, this a "bad" one), the methods by which various slangs are robbed of their transgressive nature through absorption into the mainstream, the social production of substitute behaviors for nonconformity and rebellion - each of these phenomena and others play a role in generating the so-called "acceptable citizen," a trimmed down (i.e., possesses reduced potential) version of her or his original personality.

Make no doubt about it, this trimming of the personality is a form of identity theft. It is, in fact, the ultimate form. Take as an example the African slave in the U.S.: abducted from her or his homeland, forbidden from learning to read or write, denied legal standing in the courts, given no say over whether offspring would be sold to another owner or remain with them. The slave was robbed of her/his most essential identity, their status as a human being.

In his book, The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. Du Bois described this theft in terms of how slavery reduces the slave to a person with "no true self-consciousness" - that is, with no stable knowledge of self, no clear sense of who she or he is in terms of culture, preceding generations, rituals for bringing to fruition one's potential to create her or his own fate. As Du Bois correctly argued, this left the slave, and afterwards the freed Black, with a "longing to attain self-conscious manhood," to know who she or he was, to see oneself through one's own eyes and not through the eyes of one's denigrators - e.g., white supremacists, confederate diehards, "good" people who nonetheless regarded Blacks as "lesser," etc. Du Bois understood that from such people's perspectives, Blacks possessed only one identity: the identity of being owned, of possessing no value other than what its owner could extract from them. Without an owner to extract this value, the slave was either identity-less or possessed an identity so slimmed and emaciated as to be a nothing.

The point here isn't that today socialization enslaves the population in the same way as U.S. slavery once enslaved Blacks, but rather that identity theft is, psychologically and culturally speaking, a key aspect of disempowering people and has been for centuries. Today, because of mass culture and new technologies, the methods of accomplishing it are far more sophisticated than during other eras.

How disempowerment/identity theft occurs in contemporary society is inseparable from capitalism's current state of development. We long ago passed the moment (after the introduction of assembly line production in the early 20th century) when modern advertising started its trek toward becoming one of the most powerful socialization forces in the U.S. As such, it convinces consumers not only to purchase individual products but, even more importantly, sells us on the idea that buying in general and all the time, no matter what we purchase, is proof of one's value as a person.

To accomplish this end, modern advertising was molded by its creators into a type of PSYOP designed for destabilizing individuals' adherence to old saws like "a penny saved is a penny earned" and "without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor." Once this happened, the United States' days of puritan buying restraint were over. However, modern advertising was never solely about undermining personal fiscal restraint. It was also about manipulating feelings of personal failure - e.g., dissatisfaction with lifestyle and income, a sense of being trapped, fear of being physically unappealing, etc. - and turning them not into motives for self-scrutiny or social critiques, but into a spur for commodity obsession. This wasn't simply about owning the product or products, but an obsessive hope that buying one or more commodities would trigger relief from momentary or long-term anxiety and frustration related to one's life-woes: job, marriage, lack of money, illness, etc.

Helen Woodward, a leading advertising copywriter of the early decades of the 20th century, described how this was done in her book, Through Many Windows , published in 1926. One example she used focused on women as consumers:

The restless desire for a change in fashions is a healthy outlet. It is normal to want something different, something new, even if many women spend too much time and too much money that way. Change is the most beneficent medicine in the world to most people. And to those who cannot change their whole lives or occupations, even a new line in a dress is often a relief. The woman who is tired of her husband or her home or a job feels some lifting of the weight of life from seeing a straight line change into a bouffant, or a gray pass into a beige. Most people do not have the courage or understanding to make deeper changes.

Woodward's statement reveals not only the advertising industry's PSYOP characteristic of manipulating people's frustrations in order to lure them into making purchases, but also the industry's view of the people to whom it speaks through its ads. As indicated by Woodward's words, this view is one of condescension, of viewing most consumers as unable to bring about real socioeconomic change because they lack the abilities - "the courage or understanding" - necessary to do so. Consequently, their main purpose in life, it is implied, is to exist as a consumer mass constantly gorging on capitalism's products in order to keep the system running smoothly. In doing this, Woodward writes, buyers find in the act of making purchases "a healthy outlet" for troubled emotions spawned in other parts of their lives.

Such advertising philosophies in the early 20th century opened a door for the industry, one that would never again be closed. Through that door (or window), one could glimpse the future: a world with an ever greater supply of commodities to sell and an advertising industry ready to make sure people bought them. To guarantee this, advertisers set about creating additional techniques for reshaping public consciousness into one persuaded that owning as many of those commodities as possible was an existential exercise of defining who an individual was.

In his book The Consumer Society , philosopher Jean Baudrillard deals with precisely this process. He writes that such a society is driven by:

the contradiction between a virtually unlimited productivity and the need to dispose of the product. It becomes vital for the system at this stage to control not only the mechanism of production, but also consumer demand.

"To control ... consumer demand." This is the key phrase here. Capitalist forces not only wanted to own and control the means of production in factories, it also wanted to control consumers in such a way that they had no choice but to buy, then buy more. In other words, capitalism was in quest of a strategy engineered to make us synch our minds to a capitalism operating in overdrive ("virtually unlimited" production).

The way this occurs, Baudrillard argues, is by capitalism transforming (through advertising) the process of buying an individual product from merely being a response to a "this looks good" or "that would be useful around the house" attitude to something more in line with what psychologists call "ego integration." It refers to that part of human development in which an individual's various personality characteristics (viewpoints, goals, physical desires, etc.) are organized into a balanced whole. At that point, what advertising basically did for capitalism was develop a reconfigured ego integration process in which the personality is reorganized to view its stability as dependent on its life as a consumer.

Advertisers pulled this off because the commodity, in an age of commodity profusion, isn't simply a commodity but is also an indicator or sign referring to a particular set of values or behavior, i.e. a particular type of person. It is this which is purchased: the meaning, or constellation of meanings, which the commodity indicates.

In this way, the commodity, once bought, becomes a signal to others that "I, the owner, am this type of person." Buy an Old Hickory J143 baseball bat and those in the know grasp that you're headed for the pros. Sling on some Pandora bling and all the guys' eyes are on you as you hip-swing into the Groove Lounge. Even the NY Times is hip to what's up. If you want to be a true Antifa activist, the newspaper informed its readers on Nov. 29, 2017, this is the attire you must wear:

Black work or military boots, pants, balaclavas or ski masks, gloves and jackets, North Face brand or otherwise. Gas masks, goggles and shields may be added as accessories, but the basics have stayed the same since the look's inception.

After you dress up, it's not even necessary to attend a protest and fight fascists to be full-blown Antifa. You're a walking billboard (or signification) proclaiming your values everywhere. Dress the part and you are the part.

Let's return to Baudrillard, though. In The System of Objects , another of his books, he writes about how the issue of signification, and the method by which individuals purchase particular commodities in order to refine their identity for public consumption, becomes the universal mass experience:

To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign. That is to say: it must become external, in a sense, to a relationship that it now merely signifies ... Only in this context can it be 'personalized', can it become part of a series, and so on; only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference.

This "difference" is what the product signifies. That is, the product isn't just a product anymore. It isn't only its function. It has transitioned into an indicator of a unique personality trait, or of being a member of a certain lifestyle grouping or social class, or of subscribing to a particular political persuasion, Republican, anarchist, whatever. In this way, choosing the commodities to purchase is essential to one's self-construction, one's effort to make sure the world knows exactly who they are.

The individual produced by this citizen-forming process is a reduced one, the weight of her/his full personality pared down by cutting off the unnecessary weight of potentials and inclinations perceived as "not a good fit" for a citizen at this stage of capitalism. Such a citizen, however, isn't an automaton. She or he makes choices, indulges her or his unique appetites, even periodically rebels against bureaucratic inefficiency or a social inequity perceived to be particularly stupid or unfair. Yet after a few days or few months of this activity, this momentary rebel fades back into the woodwork, satisfied by their sincere but token challenge to the mainstream. The woodwork into which they fade is, of course, their home or another favorite location (a lover's apartment, a bar, a ski resort cabin, a pool hall, etc.).

From this point on, or at least for the foreseeable future, such a person isn't inclined to look at the world with a sharp political eye, except possibly within the confines of their private life. In this way, they turn whatever criticism of the mainstream they may have into a petty gripe endowed with no intention of joining with others in order to fight for any specific change(s) regarding that political, socioeconomic or cultural phenomenon against which the complaint has been lodged. Instead, all the complainer wants is congratulations from her or his listener(s) about how passionate, on-target, and right the complaint was.

This is the sieve process, identity eugenics, in action. Far more subtle and elastic than previous methods of social control, it narrows what we believe to be our options and successfully maneuvers us into a world where advertising shapes us more than schools do. In this mode, it teaches us that life's choices aren't so much about justice or morality, but more about what choosing between commodities is like: which is more useful to me in my private life, which one better defines me as a person, which one makes me look cooler, chicer, brainier, hunkier, more activist to those I know.

It is in this context that a young, new, "acceptable" citizen enters society as a walking irony. Raised to be a cog in a machine in a time of capitalistic excess, the individual arrives on the scene as a player of no consequence in a game in which she or he has been deluded that they're the game's star. But far from being a star, this person, weakened beyond repair by the surrender of too much potential, is so without ability that she or he has no impact whatsoever on the game. Consequently, this individual is, for all practical purposes, an absence. The ultimate invisible person, a nothing in the midst of players who don't take note of this absence at all. And why should they? The full-of-potential individual who eventually morphed into this absence is long gone, remembered by no one, except as a fading image of what once was.

This process of reducing a potentially creative person into a virtual non-presence is a form of ideological anorexia. Once afflicted, an individual refuses nourishment until they're nothing but skin and bones. However, the "weight" they've lost doesn't consist of actual pounds. Instead, it involves a loss of the psychological heftiness and mental bulk necessary to be a full human being.

One can't lose more weight than that.

Human life as we once knew it is gone, replaced by the ritual of endless purchasing. This is existence in what used to be called "the belly of the beast." Our role in life has become to nourish capitalism by being at its disposal, by giving of ourselves. Such giving frequently entails self-mutilation: the debt, credit card and otherwise, that bludgeons to death the dreams of many individuals and families.

This quasi-religious self-sacrifice replicates in another form: the Dark Ages practice employed by fanatical monks and other flagellants who lashed themselves with whips made from copper wires, thereby ripping their flesh and bleeding until they descended into a state of religious hysteria. The more we give of ourselves in this way, the thinner and more weightless we become. Meanwhile, the god whom Allen Ginsberg called Moloch grows more obese day after day, its belly is filled with:

Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!...

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

What capitalism wants from us, of course, isn't merely self-sacrifice, it's surrender. Hunger for life is viewed negatively by the status quo because it nourishes the self, making it stronger and more alert and, therefore, better prepared to assert itself. The fact that such an empowered self is more there (possesses more of a presence) than its undersized counterpart makes the healthier self unacceptable to the powers that be. This is because there-ness is no longer an option in our national life. Only non-there-ness is. If you're not a political anorexic, you're on the wrong side.

Wherever we look, we see it. Invisibility, or at least as much of it as possible, is the individual's goal. It's the new real. Fashion reveals this as well as anything. It does so by disseminating an ideal of beauty that fetishizes the body's anorexic wilting away. Not the body's presence but its fade to disappearance is the source of its allure. The ultimate fashion model hovers fragilely on the brink of absence in order not to distract from the only thing which counts in capitalism: the commodity to be sold - e.g., the boutique bomber jacket, the shirt, the pantsuit, the earrings, the shawl, the stilettos, the iPhone, the Ferrari, and, possibly most of all, the political passivity intrinsic to spending your life acquiring things in order to prove to others and ourselves that we've discovered in these things something more useful than Socrates' goal of knowing thyself or Emma Goldman's warning , "The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."

What is true on the fashion runway is also true in politics. Just as the best model is one thin enough to fade into non-presence, so our democracy, supposedly ruled "by and for the people," has thinned down so much that "the people" can't even be seen (except as stage props), let alone get their hands on democracy except in token ways. No matter how often we the people are praised rhetorically by politicians, we aren't allowed as a group to get in the way of the capitalist system's freedom to do whatever it wants in order to sustain commodity worship and guarantee capital's right to permanent rule. If the military-industrial complex needs another war in order to pump out more profits, then so be it. We have no say in the matter. The identity theft built into society's structure makes sure of this. It's stripped us of our "weight" - our creativity, our willingness to take political risks, our capacity to choose action over posturing. After this forced weight loss, what's left of us is a mess. Too philosophically and psychologically anemic to successfully challenge our leaders' decisions, we, for all practical purposes, disappear.

As a reward for our passivity, we're permitted a certain range of freedom - as long as "a certain range" is defined as "varieties of buying" and doesn't include behavior that might result in the population's attainment of greater political power.

So, it continues, the only good citizen is the absent citizen. Which is to say, a citizen who has dieted him or herself into a state of political anorexia - i.e., that level of mental weightlessness necessary for guaranteeing a person's permanent self-exclusion from the machinery of power.

***

Our flesh no longer exists in the way it once did. A new evolutionary stage has arrived.

In this new stage, the flesh isn't merely what it seems to be: flesh, pure and simple. Instead, it's a hybrid. It's what exists after the mind oversees its passage through the sieve of mass culture.

After this passage, what the flesh is now are the poses it adopts from studying movies, rappers, punk rockers, fashionistas of all kinds, reality TV stars, football hunks, whomever. It's also what it wears, skinny jeans or loose-fitting chinos, short skirt or spandex, Hawaiian shirt or muscle tank top, pierced bellybutton, dope hiking boots, burgundy eyeliner. Here we come, marching, strolling, demon-eyed, innocent as Johnny Appleseed. Everybody's snapping pics with their phones, selfies and shots of others (friends, strangers, the maimed, the hilarious, the so-called idiotic). The flesh's pictures are everywhere. In movie ads, cosmetic ads, suppository ads, Viagra ads. This is the wave of the already-here but still-coming future. The actual flesh's replacement by televised, printed, digitalized and Photoshopped images of it produces the ultimate self-bifurcation.

Increasingly cut off from any unmediated life of its own, the flesh now exists mostly as a natural resource for those (including ourselves) who need it for a project; to photograph it, dress it up, pose it in a certain way, put it on a diet, commodify/objectify it in any style ranging from traditional commodification to the latest avant-garde objectification.

All these stylings/makeovers, although advertised as a form of liberation for the flesh (a "freeing" of your flesh so you can be what you want to be), are in fact not that. Instead, they are part of the process of distancing ourselves from the flesh by always doing something to it rather than simply being it.

When we are it, we feel what the flesh feels, the pain, the joy, the satisfaction, the terror, the disgust, the hints of hope, a sense of irreparable loss, whatever.

When we objectify it, it is a mannequin, emotionless, a thing that uses up a certain amount of space. As such we can do what we want with it: decorate it, pull it apart, vent our frustrations on it, starve it, practice surgical cuts on it, put it to whatever use we like. It isn't a person. It is separate from our personhood and we own it.

In fact we own all the world's flesh.

We live, after all, in the American Empire, and the Empire owns everything. As the Empire's citizens, we own everything it owns. Except for one thing: ourselves.

***

The flesh is both here and not here. Increasingly, it is more an object that we do things to - e.g., bulk it up, change its hair color, mass-kill it from a hotel window on the 32nd floor, view in a porno flick - than a presence in its own right (i.e., self-contained, a force to be reckoned with). In this sense, it is a growing absence, each day losing more of its self-determination and becoming more a thing lost than something that exists fully, on its own, in the here and now. Given this, the proper attitude to have toward the flesh is one of nostalgia.

Of course, the flesh hasn't really disappeared. What has disappeared is what it once was, a meat-and-bones reality, a site of pleasure and injury. Now, however, it's not so valuable in itself as it is in its in its role as a starting-off point for endless makeovers.

These makeover options are arrayed before the consumer everywhere: online, in big box stores, in niche markets and so on. Today, it is in these places, not at birth, that the flesh starts its trek toward maturation. It does this by offering itself up as a sacrifice to be used as they see fit by the fashion industry, the gym industry, the addiction-cure industry, the diet industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the education industry, etc. Each body in the nation reaches its fullest potential only when it becomes a testing site to be used by these industries as they explore more and better ways to establish themselves as indispensable to capitalism's endless reproduction.

In the end, the flesh, the target of all this competition for its attention, has less of a life on its own than it does as the object of advertisers' opinions about what can be done to improve it or to reconstruct it. Only to the extent that the flesh can transcend or reconstitute itself can it be said to be truly alive.

This last fact - about aliveness - represents the culmination of a process. This process pertains to the visualization and digitalization of everything and the consequent disappearance of everything behind a wall of signification.

A televised or computerized image, discussion, commentary, conjecture, etc., becomes the thing it meditates on, depicts or interprets. This happens by virtue of the fact that the thing itself (the real flesh behind the televised or computerized image, discussion, commentary, conjecture, etc.) has disappeared into the discussion or into the image of it presented on the computer or TV screen.

In the same way, an anorexic model (her/his flesh and blood presence) disappears into the fashions she or he displays for the public.

In each instance the thing (the flesh) now no longer exists except in other people's meditations on it; it has become those other people's meditations. The ultimate anorexic, it (the thing) has lost so much weight it's no longer physically there except as an idea in someone else's mind or in a series of binary codings inside computers.

This is the final victory of absence over there-ness, of the anorexic ideal over the idea of being fully human (i.e., "bulging with existence," "fat with life"). The self has been successfully starved to the point of such a radical thinness that it can no longer stand up to a blade of grass, let alone make itself felt by the powers that be.

This originally appeared at realprogressiveusa.com

Invisible Chains: Consumerism, Debt, and Consciousness

By Colin Jenkins

Critical analyses regarding the effects of "consumerism" have been a staple of Leftist theory for the past century. The Situationist International, appearing in the 1950s as an extension of Lukacs' unique brand of social analysis from the 20s, famously ridiculed the "western lifestyle" as a "fake reality which masks the capitalist degradation of human life."[1] The Situationists viewed the "spectacle" as the process for which people's desires are shaped and molded towards consumerist tendencies through mass media, marketing and advertising, and advanced techniques like "recuperation." This counter-cultural examination quickly became synonymous with a Left that had already come to terms with the "economic injustice" which characterized "the predatory phase of human development."[2] In opposition to this "rigged game," a determined and conscious working class countered with radical unionism and activism, direct action, stacks of polemics, studies on socio-economics, and avant-garde artistic techniques that fell under the banner of "culture jamming." "Detournement" turned the act of recuperation upside down by attempting to radicalize and politicize the corporate slogans and logos that flooded the "spectacle," leading to modern alternative media outlets such as Adbusters, the unsung catalysts of Occupy Wall Street and Rolling Jubilee, and street artists like Banksy, who combines detournement techniques with urban graffiti to send powerful counter-cultural messages via concrete canvass.

Naturally, any opposition to consumerism, especially from within those societies historically classified as "western" or "industrialized," is counter-hegemonic and proto-revolutionary. After all, the cultures derived from them have come to be dominated by ideals rooted in capitalism and market economies, naturally leading to intense daily routines that consist of celebrity worship at the altar of reality television and a multi-billion dollar "gossip industry." And when considering the dominant culture is one of superficiality, where our identities are based on what we own, wear and drive - in other words, consumerism - any stance in opposition to this is naturally "against the grain." The current counter-culture is one that not only recognizes the inherent dangers of a society where meaningful human concerns like impoverishment, homelessness, ever-increasing militarism, racism and misogyny take a backseat to Reality Housewives, American Idol and Jersey Shore; but also one that dares to make conscious lifestyle decisions which run contrary to this domination, while also working to break the collective trance that derives from such. Despite the obvious legitimacies found in this stance, and assuming we haven't conceded to nothingness, it's important to consider (1) how this opposition affects the Left's ability to function as a real alternative to the embedded socio-political hegemony, and (2) how it affects the Left's relationship with a working class that has embraced much of this culture as its own. The inherent risks of elitist-like diatribes against what have essentially become "cultural norms" beg for a re-evaluation which must recognize the need to accommodate both scathing cultural critiques and working-class political means. And while this seemingly half-assed approach to addressing such reactionary psychology may be debatable, the dangerous effects and continued escalation of consumerism clearly represent a powerful barrier to reaching any semblance of a collective working class consciousness. Its roots are not always as clear.

In 1901, following the conquest of Madagascar, French General Joseph Simon Gallieni immediately introduced a franc-based currency in order to impose an "educational tax" on the native population. This move had three implied purposes: "To teach the natives the value of work;" to create an immediate and effective monetary form of debt; and to instill consumerist tendencies within the population. While the first "function" followed the typical blueprint of colonialism by creating cheap forms of "human resources" to exploit, the latter two incorporated tangible debts to "legitimize" servitude (a tactic that would soon take hold in the "modern international financial system") and a culture of consumerism as the psychological means to establish and maintain what Antonio Gramsci once referred to as "cultural hegemony." As David Graeber explains, "The colonial (French) government was quite explicit about the need to make sure that (indigenous) peasants had at least some money of their own left over, and to ensure that they became accustomed to the minor luxuries - parasols, lipstick, cookies - available at the shops."[3] Understanding the connection between alienation, debt and consumerism - and how each may be used as a form of control - goes beyond the "inferiority complex" that Fanon once attributed to colonized populations which are "physically and symbolically destroyed, and in their place the colonizer produces a people who deserve only to be ruled."[4] Essentially, these are tools that transcend international and inherently racist relations between the "core" and "periphery" - making class analyses absolutely vital in regards to the "forced dependency" created by the architects of the dominant culture, not only from the perspective of an indigenous population, but also from that of the domestic working classes. "It was crucial that they (the colonized) develop new tastes, habits and expectations; that they lay the foundation of a consumer demand that would endure long after the conquerors had left, and keep Madagascar forever tied to France."[5]

Establishing a "cultural hegemony" runs analogous to principles that drive the market business model, which relies solely on individual "desires" to sell products. Since most of these desires do not constitute basic needs in the Maslovian sense, advertising and marketing must convince consumers that they need big screen televisions, new clothes, technological gadgets, and so forth. With such a task at hand, the business community had to look no further than the colonizers' experience in establishing control over its subject population. In a 1955 edition of The Journal of Retailing, Economist and Marketing Consultant, Victor Lebow, urged business "leaders" and marketers to cultivate and exploit this consumerist mentality with full force:

(Our economy) demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.... We require not only "forced draft" consumption, but "expensive" consumption as well. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing pace. We need to have people eat, drink, dress, ride, live, with ever more complicated and, therefore, constantly more expensive consumption.[6]

To them, the ultimate challenge was not merely establishing a monetary system which allows for widespread consumer spending (fiat-based, supply-side economics) - a task that is handled in conjunction by the "financial wizards" of the hegemonic class - but rather creating the psychological desire to drive such spending. Essentially, as Lebow implied, this may only be accomplished by deflating the "meaning" out of life and replacing it with artificial "spiritual and ego satisfactions" that are achieved through false consciousness and "forced draft consumption." In a scene from the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden famously rails against the effects of this conditioned psychology on the working classes:

I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables - slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit that we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose of place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war; our Great Depression is our lives.

While Durden's underground sermon accurately characterized the nihilistic decadence of America's Generation X - a generation born at the pinnacle of this consumerist assault - he was merely echoing the theoretical basis of "commodity fetishism" espoused by Marx nearly a century and a half prior:

(With the spread of markets) there will come a time when everything that people consider as inalienable will become an object of exchange, of traffic, and can be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged, given, but never sold, acquired but never bought - virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience - when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality. It has left remaining no other nexus between man and man other than naked self-interest and callous cash payment. [7]

As predicted, this commodity-consumer paradigm has dominated life for much of the past century. Just as workers are commodified and alienated by their role within the labor-capital relationship, they are doubly commodified and exploited in the consumer-capital relationship. Marx recognized this; western imperialists recognized this; and the corporate business community recognizes this. Hence, the appearance of an extensive "propaganda model" that is carried out in the form of a multi-billion-dollar marketing and advertising industry - which is controlled to a large extent by "a relatively concentrated network of major corporations, conglomerates and investment firms."[8] And while there are certainly examples of acute organization within this corporate community (i.e. The Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce, etc…), the maintenance of its hegemony ultimately falls on a loosely connected arrangement of entities that share one powerful commonality: the search for profit. It is this very dynamism that makes it such a formidable foe for the Left in its attempt to deploy class-conscious politics.

Long before the onset of industrialization, capitalism, and even market economies, there were many examples of cultures partaking in the act of accumulation for reasons other than need. Therefore, it seems such "gathering" is likely inherent in our DNA. So what's the problem? Well, first of all, it's important to differentiate between a superficial condemnation that borders on envy, and an analytical assessment that attempts to identify and deconstruct mindless, narcissistic and reactionary societal tendencies. By doing so, it brings much needed legitimacy to the latter purpose, while avoiding further alienation from folks who find natural enjoyment in the acquisition of things. In other words, it's not the act of "wanting" that's inherently bad, it's the totality of a "consumerist" society that intensifies the process of degradation and dehumanization which has already been established within the realms of capital, labor and property relations. And while the battle against exploitation via labor and property is complex, multi-layered and formidable, especially when considering its collective nature and the multitude of external factors involved, the battle against anti-consciousness perpetuated by consumerism can be won on an individual basis, from within. Ultimately, it is this compounding "superstructure" which houses many aspects of superfluous want, where the transition from a civil society to a "surface society" has been made complete; and ironically, where the reversal of such may begin. Therefore, juxtaposing "superficial condemnation" and "analytical analysis" is absolutely vital when breaking down this inherently destructive process. Secondly, it is important to identify such characteristics of a "surface society," with the most dangerous of those coming in the form of personal identity, whether internally through the self or externally through the perception of others. Historically, this process of "self-worth through accumulation" and its reciprocal effect on public perception has blurred the lines between consummation for personal enjoyment and "conspicuous consumerism" as a means of establishing human value. Thorstein Veblen's observations of more than a century ago, though somewhat obvious, still ring true:

Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit."[9]

As if the illegitimacy and consequences of personal fortune and unequal distribution are not enough, the cultural norms that are created through consumption and public display serve to compound and further entrench such inequity on a social scale. As such, the "cultural hegemony" becomes a self-sustaining phenomenon that persists without the need for direct manipulation. "This principle has had the force of a conventional law," explains Veblen. "It has served as the norm to which consumption has tended to conform, and any appreciable departure from it is to be regarded as an aberrant form, sure to be eliminated sooner or later in the further course of development."

A civil society is one that recognizes the collective nature which exists within a community and realizes the inherent connection between a common good and the individual "pursuit of happiness." The essence of civility was captured by Peter Kropotkin in his historical work, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution:

The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace and prosperity; but when even the greatest calamities befell men --when whole countries were laid waste by wars, and whole populations were decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke of tyranny --the same tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes in the towns; it still kept them together, and in the long run it reacted even upon those ruling, fighting, and devastating minorities which dismissed it as sentimental nonsense. And whenever mankind had to work out a new social organization, adapted to a new phase of development, its constructive genius always drew the elements and the inspiration for the new departure from that same ever-living tendency.[10]

A "surface society" is one that ignores this commonality and replaces it with narcissistic tendencies that are centered within a false sense of identity - one that constantly pursues wealth or, at the very least, the appearance of such. In Prosperity without Growth, Tim Jackson writes, "The profit motive stimulates a continual search for newer, better or cheaper products and services. Our own relentless search for novelty and social status locks us into an iron cage of consumerism. Affluence itself has betrayed us."[11] This society, in sharp contrast to its civil counterpart, has been intensified by the maturation and successive mutations of capitalism, a system that has far outlived the spotty improvements it once offered to its ancestral systems of feudalism and mercantalism.

The development of a "surface society" is as much intentional as it is incidental. On one hand, it represents a regression to what Kant once referred to as "man's self-imposed infancy." On the other hand, it represents a product of invention - the intended result of a social and economic system that is manipulated and shaped through intensely concentrated power structures and profit-seeking motives. The latter brings us back to the French subjugation of Madagascar, where a noted "strategy" used to gain control of the indigenous population was to mold them into consumers who become "accustomed to the minor luxuries available at the shops." Thus, by doing so, they are not only assimilated into the "western mindset," but also dependent on the perceived need for otherwise worthless commodities. Post-industrialized societies are marked by similar dynamics, some of which are natural byproducts of the corporatized market system, and others which are products of design through hierarchical decision-making and political and monetary policy. Ultimately, if the interests of the "ruling-class" (the super minority) not only differs from that of the "working-class" (the super majority), but actually runs adversarial to such, then the need to "manipulate a culturally diverse society so that the ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm," like Gramsci once suggested, is logical on face value.

As we embark well into the 21st century, debt has officially replaced "labor surplus value" as the fundamental tool used by "the rich to extract wealth from the rest of us."[12] However, below its tangible use for "extracting" and funneling wealth to the top lies a crucial weapon in the battle for consciousness and working-class servitude. One of the most notable instances of "assimilation through policy" is reflected within America's love affair with home ownership, which has been intensely subsidized by the federal government for the past century. Interestingly enough, the push for home ownership was rooted in two essential motives: to quell the radical working-class uprisings of the early 1900s, and to serve as a subtle avenue for transferring public funds to private finance. Federal support of home ownership "began as an extension of anti-communist efforts in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; as on organization of realtors put it at the time, "socialism and communism do not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly embedded in the soil of America through homeownership."[13] The working-class angst that had begun to surface, both internationally with the events in Tsarist Russia and nationally with the groundswell of union activity and workers' strikes, presented the need to ramp up capitalist intervention in domestic policy. What followed were the federally-backed "Own Your Own Home" campaign, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (better known as "Fannie Mae."). The consensus among the "owning-class" was that indebted homeowners do not go on strike. The subsidization of private home ownership through tax incentives (where the federal government actually pays homeowners a portion of their expenses at the end of the year) allowed for the manipulation of working-class interests, and were eventually fortified by modern advents of the same, such as consumer debt (rampant through the 1980s and 90s) and student loan debt (dominant from the 1990s to present). It is no surprise that this "control by debt" mantra has intensified during an historical macroeconomic transition from tangible production economies to highly abstract "financial" economies. In contrast to the potentially negative perception of debt, the introduction of seemingly positive forms of class connections have been deployed in the form of "privatized" retirement plans, company "profit sharing," 401Ks and "deferred compensation" plans - all of which urge workers to give portions of their earnings to Wall St. in the promise of long-term returns. Yet another artificial creation of vested (in the form of a direct monetary medium), though contradictory, interest in the owning-class' well-being. The result: A working-class that cheers on the Dow, Nasdaq and S & P 500 under the false impression of inclusion and mutual interest, all the while being fleeced.

Naturally, as "financialization" has sprung up as the dominant paradigm, so has the near-complete fusion of what C. Wright Mills once referred to as "The Power Elite." Graeber writes:

Financialization is not just the manipulation of money. Ultimately, it's the ability to manipulate state power to extract a portion of other people's incomes. Wall Street and Washington, in other words, have become one. Financialization, securitization and militarization are all different aspects of the same process. And the endless multiplication, in cities across America, of gleaming bank offices- 
 spotless stores selling nothing while armed security guards stand by-is just the most immediate and visceral symbol for what we, as a nation, have become.[14]

So, where does consumerism fit into this bleak reality? It's rather simple. Without a constant effort to ensure people remain "accustomed to the minor luxuries - parasols, lipstick, cookies- available at the shops," the potential reach of debt is limited. Of course, basic necessities like housing, health care, food, clothing, and even water can and have been commodified in this fashion - but this isn't enough. Without creating and maintaining an insatiable "need" for luxuries, immense avenues of profit (on one side) and debt (on the other side) are essentially shut down. Furthermore, beyond the basic pursuit of monetary gain (profit) and wealth extraction (debt) lies the foundation of the status quo: the struggle for consciousness. A working class that remains ignorant to its role in this struggle; that remains indignant towards members of its own class through artificial divisions (race, gender, nationality) or false consciousness (by foolishly blaming the poor, homeless, welfare recipients, etc..); that buys into the Weltanschauung established by the "owning-class," is one that stands idle in the face of its own collective disenfranchisement. It allows "the norms of gender, class, and culturally circumscribed behavior, the requirements of work, the pressures of seeking status through consumption, and, in the absence of viable social alternatives, the need to find almost all enjoyment from private commodities" to dictate human life.[15] In this sense, consumerism is the enemy of solidarity; and solidarity is the catalyst of social awareness. Because if and when genuine class consciousness takes flight, society runs the risk of offering a meaningful human existence - an inevitable death to the status quo and the collective realization that "you're not your fuckin khakis."

Notes

[1] Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle.

[2] Albert Einstein. Why Socialism? Monthly Review: May 1949. (Paraphrasing Thorstein Veblen)

[3] David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011)

[4] Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967)

[5] Graeber, Debt.

[6] Karl Marx. The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847.

[7] Victor Lebow. Journal of Retailing, Spring of 1955.

[8] Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988)

[9] Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1902), pp. 68-101

[10] Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. 1902

[11] Is rampant consumerism ruining our lives? The Guardian, March 17, 2011.

[12] "Can Debt Spark a Revolution?" David Graeber. The Nation, September 5, 2012.

[13] Vincent Cannato, A Home of One's Own, National Affairs, Spring 2010.

[14] The Nation.

[15] Michael Albert. Parecon: Life After Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2003), p. 205.