Commodities, Upside Down
by Jamie van der Klaauw
The commodity is a strange concept. It doesn’t refer to anything specific — anything and everything can be a commodity. It just has to be produced for the market, i.e. for its possible exchange value rather than its use-value. Leave it up to the English language to make a verb out of it, commodification: an ever more extending process of making things into commodities. Ultimately, nothing seems safe from this colonization. You can’t make a verb out of the original German ‘Ware’. But the idea of an expanding process is truer to Marx’s ideas than we might recall. In the very first sentence of Capital, Marx hints at such a process of subsumption – wealth can only be expressed in commodities, and increasing wealth, the express aim of economics, equals a process of commodification.
What is this abstract element that all things share in their capacity as commodity? A force or, more specifically, a lure. The commodity imbues a thing, person, or service with a lure that pulls us in and disorients us. This attraction gives the material a spiritual power that makes us forget that we are merely dealing with a relation between objects. We get caught in the commodity, or the commodity catches us. This goes both ways: the buyers see through the material of the commodity an ‘x’ factor, a near metaphysical quality that tells us we are buying more than the materiality alone. Prestige, coolness, or moral dignity. It also holds for the producer, who thinks from the perspective of the commodity. In other words, the ‘what’ doesn’t matter, all that matters is ‘how much’ profit.
In her contribution to the Desire + Capital series, Viola Marchi takes on and pushes forward the model Marx uses to understand this lure of the commodity. Marx says that commodity fetishism, the entanglement with the lure of the commodity, works like a camera obscura. This often-small device controls the amount of light projected into a dark chamber to produce a lifelike image of whatever the light bounced off before entering the chamber. Simply put, it is a predecessor to the camera, but needs natural lighting and a certain position to create the effect of a mimetic image. Per the properties of light, just like when it goes through our pupils and hits the lens in our eyes, the image is flipped. The device differs from our eyes in that there is no human brain to correct the image immediately, we can see the flipped image, almost as if we can look into a production process midway at an unfinished product.
This led Marx to understand the process of commodification like the camera obscura. For, what the abstract lure of the commodity covers over is the (social) labor power required to produce the thing. It is as if the commodity is flipped: instead of the labor cost, we see the element ‘x’ that supposedly justifies its price. This works to such an extent that when we see an unreasonably pricy commodity, we assume that there must be more of this ‘x’ we hope to see redeemed upon purchasing.
Marx uses the model around the 1860s. By then camera obscura is no longer as new or exciting as it once was. We think that certain painters may have been using it as a tool to create art for over two centuries at least. Johannes Vermeer, active in Delft (The Netherlands) from the 1650s to the 1670s, supposedly could have only gotten the specific gradient in his skies if he used a device like the camera obscura which accurately reproduced the shading that he could then trace. As Marchi puts front and center in her contribution, we may want to take seriously the idea that for Marx himself already, the camera obscura was an antiquated model. It didn’t quite do the trick. Instead, Marchi points us to the re-emergence of mystical practices like seances or table-turning, which Marx briefly touches upon. Perhaps there we find a more accurate model for the commodity. Not a mimetic, and flipped, image, but a wholly made up spiritual ‘x’ which nonetheless has supposed real effects, all the while hiding the helping hands which move the table or drop a picture off the wall.
The question is: does such a model still hold today? Marx was an avid reader of Hegel, and in the foreword to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel makes two points: philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, and second, philosophy always comes too late. So, now that we have philosophized about the nature of the commodity, has its time run out? Just as it emerged in the 18th century to become the constitutive element of capitalism, so surely, must it disappear again. And with it, capitalism as well.
Circulation and the Body Politic
by Ryan Kopaitich
Money, not innovation or some other management-ism, is the lifeblood of capital. It is the vehicle that enables consumption, forms clots to prevent further losses, and distributes vital resources (and toxins). But what good is blood if it doesn’t circulate? As the nexus money facilitates between production and consumption, ushering in their final identity, circulation and its management have become increasingly decisive in the economic and political spheres. I want to spend some time focusing on what circulation and its intensification can tell us about the “body politic” today.
David van Putten, in his talk on “The Pores of Debt,” refers to and elaborates on a bodily metaphor invoked by Marx: “the pores of production.”¹ He argues, in the last instance, for the mutual exclusivity of the relations of capitalist production as Marx envisions them and the relations of debt. For Van Putten, focusing on debt (usury in both its definitions) is a return to a relation preceding those identified by Marx under capitalism, creditor and debtor. In other words, centering debt as the economic and social tool of oppression means significantly altering, if not jettisoning entirely, the Marxist framework. This point is well taken, and reminds us that the problems of capital sometimes only take a specific form or appearance, but are not made of capital whole cloth. That said, it should also be noted this does not efface comprehending debt and financial instruments as part of a system of capital that buttresses accumulation. Indeed, these relations of debt may be an overriding human relation, but are transformed nonetheless under the auspices of capital. Moreover, transformed in a very specific way that makes debt a crucial function, rather than pitfall, of capitalist economies. Pores are, after all, a critical part of your largest, and most exposed, organ.
Marx also conjures this corporeal parallel on the topic of circulation.² From a literary point of view, the bodily analogy is nothing new, but it does serve to highlight an (increasingly) important point about political economy. What Marx understood was the primary significance of keeping the machine turning. We can easily see how accumulated capital is “put to work” in mechanisms that allow for that capital, in money/commodity form, to continue to move through the system. This is just one example among an endless stream: commodities markets and collateralized debt obligations, NFTs and Bitcoin, all ways to repackage money and keep it moving, keep it circulating. This includes debt. After all, the best way to maintain good credit is to be indebted and service that debt with cold hard cash (or “leverage” yourself/your corporation if you’re rich), preferring continued circulation rather than debt satisfaction. All this to stop the coagulation, the stagnant and stultifying stillness of accumulated capital. Circulation itself then becomes shorthand for, and occupies the space of, value. But this comes, as everything under capital, at a price.
The hearts of capital have dictated the acceleration and intensification of circulation, replacing any organic circulatory flows with artificial pumps to inflate growth. Whether we look to the advent of global financialization³ or to cryptocurrency⁴ and the rush to NFTs and the “Metaverse,” all of these Ponzi schemes rely on circulation, not any tangible product, to keep their enterprises afloat (usually with a healthy dose of government subsidy, free market be damned).
While Marx provides a template for understanding capitalism, our moment is defined by the dynamic movements of capital in circulation. Once set in motion, circulation drives the constant interplay between abstract social relations and material conditions. In this sense, it is capital’s elasticity and capacity to recuperate these relations that makes it so formidable. In the vertiginous interplay of money and commodities, the socio-material conditions of human life are bereft of more traditional production and turn to the movement itself. Rosa Luxemberg picked up on this 50 years after Marx. For Luxemberg, capitalist production requires overproduction/underconsumption and thus necessarily relies on networks exterior to itself to supplement the realization of surplus value as profit. Much has been made of Luxemberg’s “underconsumption,” though the enforcement of underconsumption through inflationary measures — when demand outpaces supply — provides an interesting avenue for thought there. What she also picked up on in this formulation is that capital requires a constant movement, in her case between an interior and exterior that, due to the demand for growth, will ultimately heighten the functional contradictions of capital. What circulation returns to show is that the resilience capital demonstrates resides not in its ability to grow materially, but to intensify — through increasingly complex mechanisms and technologies — the relations of circulation. In effect, the expansionary paradigms most saliently achieved thought through colonialism require still another outside.
It seems apt to round all of these thoughts out with Paul Virilio, whose “dromology” and reflections on speed and politics remain as apt today as when Marinetti was heralding the car (and Mussolini) as figures of a new age. Speed is an obsession of modernity, but the speed by which commodities and currencies can circulate allows for the introduction of all kinds of nothing parading as economic or financial instruments. In reality, this turn simultaneously enfeebles the structure as a whole, for which the working class and the dispossessed will undoubtedly pay, while strengthening the political, economic, and even ideological character of capital as a transhistoric leviathan. This whole lot of nothing is sped up, seeking capital’s fission: the attempt to create growth ex-nihilo.
We find ourselves at the bed of a patient that, rather than a soothing opiate to calm its hospice hours, reaches for the Adderall, sells it to a journalist, and buys meth. You can get a lot done that way, but you may just destroy everything else in the process.
1 This talk, from the first D+C event, will be the subject of the D+C podcast, episode 2.
2 Marx is, unsurprisingly, obsessed with the circular nature of circulation, but explicitly denies that the circulation of money can be compared to the circulation of blood. What he suggests for blood, in the complex and often conflicting network of his bodily metaphors, is the “content-filled circulation of capital” (GR 517). As this text makes obvious, I dispute the possibility of this distinction today, but the explication will have to wait. Also apt and of interest here is a passage in Capital Vol. 1 ending, “Circulation sweats money at every pore” (208). But this, alas, will also have to wait.
3 See Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing (London: Verso, 2013) for the effects and novelties of this problem.
4 Bitcoin is essentially the child of finance and the internet, and is an almost foregone conclusion in deregulated financial markets.
Introduction
It all begins with an idea.
by Ryan Kopaitich
Here, I plan to catalogue my own research as part of the Desire + Capital working group. As I’m working through the readings and planning with the rest of the committee, I’ll be trying to distill some central thoughts from the topics and other group goings-on. Also, someone else from the group may contribute with some thoughts from time to time. The object is to continually engage with the texts throughout the breaks between specific events, as well as provide a platform for my own and other group members’ hypotheses and proto-papers to germinate. I plan to update it once a month with an extended piece, but hopefully more often including some more stray thoughts on Desire+Capital, the project more generally, as well as guest contributions.