gemini://tilde.club/~liamvhogan/spectacle/commodity.gmi

> The commodity can only he understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reificiation produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression... As labour is progressively rationalised and mechanised his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.

In the essential project of the spectacle, that consists of helping itself to all human activity that existed in a _fluid state_, in order to possess it, coagulated, or, as something which obtains value by _inverting_ a lived experience, we recognise our old enemy, which at first seems such a trivial and obvious, but is on the contrary so complex and full of metaphysical subtleties: the _commodity_.

The loss of quality, so evident at all levels of spectacular language, from the things it praises to the rules which drive it, reflects nothing but the fundamental characteristics of the kind of real production that pushes reality aside: the commodity is, from each side to the other, an equivalency to itself, the quantitative. It is the quantitative that develops, and it can only develop quantitatively.

This development that excludes the qualitative is itself subjected, during the development by qualitative processes: the spectacle shows that it has passed the threshold of _its own abundance_; this is not just true locally, here and there, but also achieved at the universal scale that is the original point of the commodity, the practice of turning the Earth into one global market.

The development of productive forces has been the _real unconscious history_ which has made, and changed, human conditions of existence, as far as conditions of survival and of increase in those conditions: the economic basis of all their works. The commodity sector has been, in a natural economy, a constituted surplus from survival. The making of commodities, implying exchange of diverse products between independent producers, was artisanal for a long time, kept in a marginal economic function, where its quantitative nature was disguised. Nonetheless, wherever it has encountered the social conditions of large-scale commerce and capital accumulation, it has taken hold and totally dominated the economy. The commodity has placed itself at the heart of the economy as a whole: a process of quantitative development. This incessant deployment of economic power in the form of the commodity, which has turned human labour into commodity-labour, into _wage earning_, has cumulatively ended in an abundance in which the question of survival has certainly been solved, but in a way that it must refigure itself; it is posed again at a higher level. Economic knowledge freed societies from natural pressures of immediate struggle for survival, but they are not freed from their liberator. The _independence_ of the commodity should be understood in the whole of the economy in which it rules. The economy transforms the world, but only transforms it into an economic world. This pseudo-nature in which human labour is alienated, infinitely wants _servitude_, and this servitude, which can only be judged on its own terms, obtains the efforts of all permitted social projects as its servants. The abundance of commodities, which is to say market relationships, are nothing but _augmented survival_.

The domination of the commodity is, firstly, carried out in a hidden manner, in which the economy itself, as a material base to social life, stays unseen and misunderstood, familiar, but unknown. In societies where concrete commodities are rare, or in a minority, it is obvious domination by money that shows itself as an ambassador, speaking on behalf of unknown powers. With the Industrial Revolution, the division of labour and mass production for the world market, the commodity took over this appearance, as an _occupying power_ over social life. It was then that political economy emerged, as a dominant science and a science of domination.

The spectacle of the is the moment in which social life has become _totally occupied_ by the commodity. Not only is the commodity relationship visible, but one can do nothing outside of it: the world one sees in it is its world. Modern economic production extends its tyranny widely and intensively. In the least industrialised places, its rule is still present in select 'star' commodities, as much as in imperial domination of those zones in the forefront of productive development. In these leading zones, social space is overlaid with geolocial layers of commodities. At this point of the 'Second Industrial Revolution', alienated consumption becomes, for the masses, an additional chore to alienated production. It is society's _sold labour_, which globalises a _total commodity_, that the cycle must obey. To do this, these total commodities must return as fragments to the fragmented individual, completely separated from productive forces as they work as a whole. It is thus here that the specialised techniques of domination must in turn specialise: they break down into sociology, psychology, cybernetics, semiology, etc., which supervise and regulate these processes at all levels.

Whereas in the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation 'political economy sees the _proletarian_ as nothing but a _worker_', who requires only the minimum necessary to conserve their working power, never considering them 'in their leisure, in their humanity', the state of the ruling class's ideas reverse themselves, when and to the extent that abundance in commodity production creates a surplus for the worker. This worker, suddenly released from the contempt in which they were seen by all the powerful organisations of production and surveillance, becomes more and more treated as a very important person, with impressive good manners, in the guise of a consumer. When the _humanism of commodities_ puts the workers' 'leisure and humanity' in charge, political economy simply can, and must, maintain dominance in these spheres, _politically and economically_. In this way the 'total denial of man' has taken over the whole of human existence.

The spectacle is a permanent Opium War to force the acceptance of commodities as goods; and of satisfaction with mere survival growing according to its rule. But if consumed survival is something which must continually grow, it is because it never ceases to also _contain shortages_. If there is no endpoint to augmented survival, no stage at which it could cease growth, it is because there is also no endpoint to its shortages. It is simply privation, but richer.

With automation, at the same time modern industry's most advanced sector, and where which its practices are most perfectly modelled, the world of the commodity must face this contradiction: that the techniques on which work is objectively based must at the same time maintain _work as a commodity_, and as the sole birth-point of the commodity. For automation, and all other less extreme means of increasing productivity, do not effectively diminish the labour time required to go about being social, and it is necessary to create new tasks. The tertiary sector, services, are an enormous lengthening of the front lines of the great army which distributes and markets commodities; a mobilisation of the auxiliary forces which finds a need to organise, at just the right time, to serve the false desires for these same commodities.

Exchange-value could not have come about except as use-value's agent, but victory, with its own weapons, has created the conditions for its autonomous rule. Mobilising all human endeavours, and seizing a monopoly on satisfying them, exchange has ended up _in command of use_. All possible uses are identified as processes of exchange, and are put at exchange's mercy. Exchange-value is the Condottiere of use-value, the bought mercenary who ends up fighting the war for its own sake.

That constant of capitalist economies, the _tendency of the value of exchange to fall_, develops a new form of privation in augmented survival, not an extended version of the classical poverty in which the vast majority of humanity has always lived, but as salaried workers, constantly striving; and in which everyone knows one must submit or die. This is the reality of the confidence trick, it turns out: all of the most basic usages (eating, sleeping), are simply imprisoned in an illusory wealth of augmented survival, which is the basis in reality of accepting the more general illusion of consuming modern commodities. The consumer, in reality, becomes a consumer of dreams. The commodity is this illusion made effectively real, and it manifests itself in the spectacle.

The spectacle is another face to money's coin: a general abstract equivalent to commodities. But if money has dominated societies as a representation of central equivalence, which is to say as a thing exchangeable for multiple different goods, each with completely different, incomparable uses, the spectacle is its modern complement, developed where the whole global market appears as a bloc, as a general equivalence to what the society can be and do. The spectacle is money which can only be looked at, because the whole point of its use is to represent exchange with abstract representations. The spectacle is not just the servant of _pseudo-use_, it is, itself, the pseudo-use of life.

The result of social labour, in a time of _economic_ abundance, becomes appearances, and it submits all reality to appearances, which is its product. Capital is no longer the invisible centre directing this mode of production: its accumulation spreads all the way to the peripheries in the form of tangible objects. The whole extent of society is its portrait.

The victory of the autonomous economy must also be, at the same time, its defeat. The forces it unleashed did away with _economic need_, which was the immovable basis of ancient societies. When economics replaced this with the need to infinitely grow, it could only replace basic human needs, now satisfied, with an uninterrupted creation of pseudo-wants, which all draw from the pseudo-need to maintain its own autonomous rule. But autonomous economy is never separate from the deep need, at the same time, of a kind of _social unconsciousness_, on which it unknowingly depended. 'Everything conscious wears. Everything unconscious remains unalterable. But once set free, will not in turn, fall into ruin'? (Freud)

The moment society discoveres that it depends on the economy, the economy in turn discovers that it depends on societyu. This underground power, which had nearly appeared sovereign, has similarly lost its potency. That which had appeared to be economic _Id_ must become _I_. Nor can this some about except within society, which is to say in the social struggle existing within it. Its existence is possible, and is suspended, as the result of that class conflict which is revealed as the product and the producer of the economic foundation of history.

Consciousness of desire, and the need for consciousness, are identical to that project which, put the other way around, aimed for the abolition of classes, which is to say workers' possession their time and activity. Its _reverse_ is the society of the spectacle, in which the commodity contemplates itself, in the world which it has itself created.

Commodity as spectacle

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