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This Halloween season, I’m reading Marx’s Capital. In a nutshell, the titanic volume is concerned with demonstrating the idea that the primary, inviolable directive of capital is its own expansion (namely, capitalism). In a typical market of commodities this works a little bit like a magic trick: making money out of money. But in Marxist theory, it’s quite obvious that in a closed system, the surplus value has to come from somewhere. If the materials and machinery that go into a product can be said to have relatively fixed, or constant values that are re-represented in the price of that product, then the human labor that also goes into making that product is a part of the equation that has variable value: that is, the amount of time spent producing it. In other words, Value = Parts + Labor. A capitalist is one who would seek to exploit this variable equation for personal gain, i.e. to extract more from the system than what they themselves put in. This exploitation has taken different avenues over the years, but the most salient example is simply time: work a little before your shift starts, maybe stay ten minutes late to wrap something up, maybe work through lunch… all of this represents unpaid labor that has quantitatively no benefit for the worker but generates exponential gains for the capitalist if his whole workforce can be convinced to participate in such a work culture.
Per Marx, capital is literally vampiric—its only function being to generate more of itself, capital will always seek its own expansion at the expense of all living beings around it. The unavoidable tension between this fundamental drive of capitalism, which seeks to churn 24/7/365, and the necessarily limited resource that is human labor, which needs to eat, rest, procreate, etc. is played out in the form of a class struggle between the capitalist class (bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat).
In Marx’s time, which is to say the greater middle part of the 1800s, this dialectical struggle was most observable in the day’s industrial revolution. Machine technology had demanded that much of the available labor be turned into manufacturing labor, and capitalists (who could only sell as much product as they can produce) were in constant search of new exploitative ways to keep the machines running as much as possible. It’s a not far-off time in human history that is pretty grim (picture children as young as 8 years old employed by the factory) and yet is briefly punctuated by landmark regulatory wins for workers, bringing the British working day from 12 to 10 to 9 hours. These changes (which capitalists are quoted at length as arguing against, of course—let me tell you why we need the child workers) would ultimately be the seeds of the most critical 20th-Century organized labor movements—movements that guaranteed things like safety on the job and fair compensation for time spent working. These victories, Marx would be quick to point out, are not guaranteed in any way, shape, or form by the capitalist mode of production, and in fact would never manifest automatically if the class struggle did not demand them.
As a writer Marx is anything but indirect. He writes exhaustively, sometimes spending pages to revisit—and re-prove—an earlier point. But he’s also both erudite and dramatic, a sassy combination. He tosses petty daggers at other economists, calling their theories “childish” and quoting them directly only to mock them in parenthetical asides (like this one, how clever!). In fact, his enthusiasm for making a point so frequently eclipses his poise that he often delivers lurid exclamations like this one, commenting on the 24-hour non-stop relay of day and night shifts: “The prolongation of the working-day… into the night… quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour.” This is purple prose of a hue that could well line even Dracula’s cloak. It surely fits the season! Marx is a difficult but very entertaining writer. But it’s also a testament to his ideas that basic concepts like “the means of production” and “surplus labor” are still clear, concise, and understandable even in their original English translation from some 150 years ago.
Marx is living and writing in a world of physical, tangible products, and as such he starts his argument with hundreds of pages worth of discussion about “commodities,” or objects that have been manufactured with the express purpose to be sold at market (like the one in the title of this essay). In the simplest example, commodities like cotton, iron, and umbrellas are seen as the objectified embodiments of the labor that has gone into their creation, which labor in turn forms part of the determination of their price in the market (along with the material costs, the cost of the tools used, etc.). People bring commodities to market in order to realize this value (i.e. to sell them) and use the money to buy other commodities that they need or want. People who don’t have the means or materials to produce a commodity of their own nevertheless need money to buy life-supporting commodities like food, and so they bring their own labor power to the market to be sold as a commodity. The capitalist, seeing an opportunity to fulfill the prime directive of capitalism, brings neither product nor labor to the market but money itself. The capitalist, hoping to extract more money from this closed system than he puts in, must manipulate the game pieces on the table (read: the commodities), the most ephemeral and flexible—and exploitable—of which is the human labor. When money is used in this way, it is become capital. Cue the next 900 pages of why this is bad.
Capital, despite its personality flaws and Marx’s unshakeable, guilty-by-association reputation on behalf of irresponsible Russian and Chinese dictators, is a relevant text in the 21st Century. And not least of all because his predictions about inequality and wealth accumulation have largely been borne out by over a hundred years of financial data, or because the modern waning of labor rights and the general disinterest in organizing appears to have invited back through the window the very type of vampiric exploitation that Marx observed in British factories. This is a great time to pause and remind you that modern workers in America have less leisure time than did medieval European serfs. “Rise and grind,” indeed!
If the building blocks of Marx’s critique are commodities and the markets that regulate their circulation, I can only imagine the horror he would experience at our gigantic, modern, global economy. Its gargantuan size obscures many of its internal mechanisms, the exploitation of workers notwithstanding. Capitalists have found such unique ways to make money out of our own unpaid labor that they’ve had to coin new words to describe them: we have economies of attention, of data, and so on. The factory is now in our pockets at all times of the day, on our nightstands next to our beds while we sleep, lurking in wait to buzz us with a notification of an e-mail or a text: “There’s work to be done!” The commodities themselves have been abstracted; we still need to buy things like clothing and food, but now we can do it online and marvel at the appearance of these goods at our doorstep (without thinking too hard about the workers and resources that are expended to get them there in less than 24 hours). We also buy things like access to digital goods (say a piece of licensed software, or a streaming film) that have no tangible, real-world object-form, and indeed which we don’t even really own after paying for them. We buy ephemeral things that the government mandates—think car insurance. By participating in the out-of-control tipping economy made worse by iPad cash registers and the commodified software that runs in all of them (in America at least), we collectively buy the capitalists more time to avoid raising the wages of service workers. Marx would puke.
The ravenousness of capital and the exploitation that is its method, we now know, goes much deeper than labor: down to the very environment on which we rely to survive. In David Attenborough’s latest documentary Ocean, Chinese fishing trawlers are seen wreaking havoc off the coast of Liberia, not only destroying a centuries-old fishing economy belonging to the Liberians who live there, but laying complete waste to the ocean floor and all but ensuring that fish cannot grow there anymore. The capitalist’s greatest magic trick is obfuscating this exploitation, giving his sterling success the sheen of a self-made, righteous quality. He’s making things that people desire, he’s providing jobs, he’s changing the course of human history, and so on—the capitalist has a bottomless well of grandiose, self-important apologetics.
And capital’s “magical” reduplication of itself has found a host of new, digital smokescreens. Far from the rather simple concept of a single worker making a single object (say a coat), the modern workforce comprises hordes of digital laborers working in the abstracted realm that is the Internet, manipulating “value” on behalf of their capitalist employers in ways that are increasingly harder for any one person to conceptualize. Just observe the unprecedented amount of capital boiling in the AI “industry,” the products of which, compared to the resources they consume, are still comparatively useless, however good they may be (for now) at stimulating capital’s prime directive. Workers are more disconnected from the fruits of their own labor than they’ve ever been. To us, a direct deposit of wages to a digital bank account appears to happen overnight and doesn’t resemble any real fruit as much as it does the score in a video game that we are constantly made to play.
Which brings me to the point of my own interest in commodities: art. I’ve long been fond of the expression that the crossroads between art and commerce is a necessarily cursed one (and not in the way that can bequeath you excellent guitar shredding powers). I find it interesting that in the 1000+ pages of Capital, Marx does not speak of art at all. It could be that art had just not become very commodified in his time—that most artists relied on private patronage or independent wealth—but I don’t totally buy that since Marx himself was somewhat of a lifelong freelancer, writing hundreds of articles over the course of his life to provide what, by all accounts, was a very meager existence for his wife and constantly dying children. He knew intimately what it was like to be a sole producer of sorts and to bring your product to market. He does quip occasionally that people have to want to buy what you’re selling; any seller knows that just putting a price on something doesn’t mean that you have realized that value.
But now there are tens of thousands of us or more, independent artists who have seen the glimmer of a possibility of a career in the arts at some point in our lives, and who, for better or worse, have tried to chase it down within a capitalist system. Because we know that capitalism’s existence hinges on some form of exploitation or another, I think it’s helpful to continue to point it out where we can see it.
To my mind, the capitalist’s wet dream would be to get rid of all this complicated commodity business and go straight from point A to point B, or straight from capital invested to capital realized. This is perhaps the real definition of a “venture capitalist.” Anyway, it turns out that digital art makes for a very convenient lever. Because it’s ephemeral, there is no physical inventory to track; because it’s art, people (laborers) are driven to create it, oftentimes by an urge or impulse that the artists themselves don’t entirely understand; and because it’s emotional, it has variable value depending on who’s buying.
Remember that the part of the value equation that is variable is that part which can be best exploited to maximize the capitalist’s return on investment. The greatest damage done by the streaming model bar none has been to grossly de-value the art objects that had been previously fully commodified in the 20th-Century market of analog goods and which had found somewhat of an equilibrium in terms of their market value: think records, CDs, tapes. The shift started around 2004, when digital songs were suddenly made available to consume in their entirety and not just as 30-second samples in the marketplace (in fact the open music model was first proposed in an academic context in 2002). In my house we were early users of the Rhapsody platform, now owned by Napster (which is/is no longer the notorious peer-to-peer file sharing network).
This decision, to offer all music in its entirety for a flat fee, was made arbitrarily by the capitalist platform owners—at least, no one asked me about it—and it happened right under everyone’s noses, producer and consumer alike. Although it appears to have been a blatant violation of copyright and intellectual property rights, it’s too late: once a new floor has been established for the perceived value of an object—in this example, music—then it’s a race to the bottom to secure the most customers, especially if your business model relies on loyalty-via-subscription, and most especially if you don’t even own what you’re selling.
Ah, there we’ve found it: the rub. Make no mistake, if you are a subscriber to Spotify, you are not paying Spotify for their music. They don’t own it, and the busted and unenforceable systems of copyright and royalties are what allowed them to offer access to it in the first place without having to make an investment in it themselves. In fact, government legislation on the matter (which Marx insists is critically necessary to combat the vampire) has been so slow to react and adapt that there has been more than enough time for the capitalists to pervert the market so totally—to rig the scales in their favor—that it’s now the case that we the artists pay to have it placed on the platform at all! Forget about a career in the arts, at $0.003/stream, few of us will ever even recoup our own capital investment in the form of the $50 we paid to play the game, much less what was spent on creating our product.
No, the lion’s share of your subscription fee goes directly to Spotify in order to access their platform (which is, granted, a glossy product into which they did invest capital and labor). But because Spotify has comparatively low expenses, at least part of which they cover by selling advertisements, any payment rendered unto them increasingly takes the form of a latent capital investment in other things—things that I guarantee that none of us regular people would agree to support. In June of this year, The Fader magazine reported that Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, had invested 600 million Euros (about $700m USD) in an AI military drone company. Per the article, this capitalist is “not concerned” about consumer backlash, and why should he be? He’s already got the money, and he’s “convinced this is the right thing for Europe,” just as the many capitalists of Marx’s time were convinced that without the 8-year-olds working in their factories, they wouldn’t be able to turn a profit.
No reasonable person can draw a compelling and logical argument as to why the money produced by the uniquely human act of creation—by art—should be spent on developing tools for the destruction of other humans. Of course, it’s not Spotify that is making the investment—it’s Prima Materia, an investment company co-founded by Ek. But where do you think he got the capital for it? What we’re looking at here is nearly $1 billion that has been extracted from the market of music commodities—money that, in a balanced and just system, should be circulating among the producers (i.e. the artists) of these commodities as money, not as capital per se. And because markets are closed systems, because they are manipulable, because we operate under capitalist pretenses, there is zero-to-no chance that this extracted money will ever return to the ecosystem of producers that generated it. Once it is extracted, it is not even mere money. It is capital, and it has only one, cancerous, prime directive: to accumulate.
Marx’s communist call to arms is to return the means of production to the producers themselves and let workers realize the value that they create—no, rather the value that they donate, that they transmute from their living blood into the objects they create. It’s difficult to say exactly what that looks like in modern times, but a few compelling examples have been given: imagine if, every time Facebook sold your data to an advertiser, you got a cut of the sale. You did generate that data, even passively; they admit that it’s unique to you, which is why it has value in a marketplace of data; why shouldn’t it be yours to sell? Communism is a simple but profound idea of a systemic inversion that would benefit the majority of human beings who work for a living (that is to say more than 99% of the population), and it’s supported by the fact that small-c “communism,” that is the communal sharing of available resources within a community, has been observed by anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians in nearly all versions of human societies that have ever existed (see Davids Graeber and Wengrow’s brilliant Dawn of Everything). But as it turns out, even more than 170 years after Marx first proclaimed that “a spectre is haunting Europe” in his and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, the idea is still quite blood-curdling to the few and the powerful. ’Tis the season.
What Am I Watching?
Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) is a fantastic film. Set in a near-future NYC ten years after a Democratic-Socialist “revolution,” the particulars of which are unknown to us, the film intersperses cinematically-staged drama with a critical mass of mixed communication media: TV broadcasts, radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, posters, flyers, marches. Like Peter Watkins’s best work (Punishment Park, Culloden, etc.), it’s docu-fiction of the highest order in that it is frequently totally believable.
But this new world is no leftist utopia. The film concerns itself with an underground group of women—the Free Women’s Army—who are still struggling against a system which erodes their rights, all while newscasters, pundits, and other talking heads prepare exuberantly for the 10-year anniversary of the revolution. It’s a dialectic which plays out in this collaged, mixed media format and which is frequently justified by those in power, who never fail to remark that things are just so much better than they used to be, and isn’t that worth something? That the FWA is in rhetorical conflict with the prominent women editors of the left’s official print mouthpiece mirrors feminism’s historical struggle to captivate and recruit women who would prefer to remain within the imbalanced, sexist status quo.
Most of the actors are amateurs appearing under their real names, and all characters of consequence are women. Men exist either on the edges of the frame or through the veil of a television screen, spouting leftist propaganda on behalf of the state. While the women organize, one of them becomes radicalized and travels to West Africa to broker an arms sale for the “real” revolution. She is, in realistic fashion, outed and arrested almost immediately upon returning stateside.
That the film was made during the beginning years of the Reagan era, which would come to be definable by the erosion of labor rights, union busting, and the full-throated endorsement of “trickle down” economics, doesn’t appear to be a consideration whatsoever to the rhetoric of this film. In fact, Borden’s main thesis comes across as truly revolutionary: that all power structures (even the “good” ones like democratic socialism) necessarily structure power, and because power and its concomitant expressions of force (money, violence) are zero-sum, there will always be people on the bottom. Unsurprisingly, these people tend to occupy the marginalized crossroads of race, gender, and sexuality. In short, the truth of this fictional world is the truth of our own world: none of us is free until all of us are free.
In my opinion, the film has an unfairly low rating on IMDB (6.5/10) and other sites, and I think some of this can be unfortunately attributed to congealed sexist attitudes about a particular type of woman, especially one who might have identified as a feminist in the early ‘80s. The same reviewers who wouldn’t think twice about a brash, mean group of criminal men planning a violent revolution seem to ding the film because of its female personalities. It is rough around the edges; it is a punk film. And although the film features nearly 100% women characters, if you watch the credits roll, there is what appears to be a very well-balanced mix of women and men involved in the whole production. To me this simple virtue elevates the film’s feminist message, allowing for that message to reach its highest, truest version, which is ultimately a humanist one.