Bro, you wrote a thesis... was it necessary? Did the universe need it? Can we do without so many melodious simplifiers like them? With their influencer faces, those damn millennials of mine? Ask yourself these questions and answer them. So if we want to get all wordy, all philosophical at the bar, do you think this album by nerds from albioplastik is worth the investment, essential for the Eustachian tubes? Or just toss the silver disc into the sea, or the mp3 into the bin if you prefer, take a deep breath and hang onto the metaphysical bumps of Marx's balls or his beard:
In Capital, the philosopher writes:
“A commodity seems, at first glance, an obvious, banal thing. Its analysis, however, reveals that it is a very tangled thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological quirks. As long as it is use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether it is considered in terms of its properties that satisfy human needs or whether those properties are received as a product of human labor. It's as clear as day that man, through his activity, modifies in a useful way the form of materials found in nature. For instance, the form of wood is altered when it is made into a table: nevertheless, the table remains wood, just an ordinary sensible thing. But as soon as it presents itself as a commodity, it transforms into something both sensible and supersensible. It not only stands on the ground but also turns upside down in front of all other commodities, unraveling from its wooden head crickets more astonishing than if it started to dance by itself.”
Therefore, it is fitting that today more than ever the Marxist conception of commodity fetishism appears truthful: the commodity is not sold for what it truly is but for the image through which it is made to appear, for the promise of happiness and enjoyment behind it:
“Forms of this kind constitute precisely the categories of bourgeois economy. They are forms of thought that are socially valid, thus objective, for the production relations characteristic of this historically given mode of social production: the production of commodities, all the enchantment and sorcery that envelop the products of labor on the basis of commodity production, suddenly vanish when one retreats into other modes of production.”
Sure, I agree with you that a society devoid of phantasmagorical images is inevitably a society lacking consumption, devoid of the fetishistic and experiential value of the commodity, in which man would finally be the master of himself, no longer possessed by the totems that the great producers constantly raise to sell. But these, like all historical declinations of communism, have always failed until now. They have proven to be regimes that, in the name of equal dignity and social equality, have flattened all individuals into misery and party slavery. Because of this, Marx and his theories appear, quite rightly, as something mad and dangerous. However, this can help to focus, to give the right emphasis, and to take a step back even from the false Arcadian world of the computerized post-modern song form. For this reason, it is legitimate to be aware that the current society, with its frantic and alienating division of labor and modes of exchange, is not, like all the others that have been surpassed in history, the definitive society.
Did you like it? Give it a like, I did it for you at home.
