It would appear that there are too many sources of discontent for us to make much sense of them. There are the obvious sources: poverty, hunger, sickness, homelessness, fear, loneliness, disability. Of these most readers will know only fear and loneliness, perhaps one or another disability, but not the others. It is more likely readers will experience racism, sexism, homophobia, or ethnic and national violence or fear. So many are the sources of our discontent, in any case, that to make sense of them it would appear we would have to take them one at a time.
But, here's what I'm thinking. We can narrow down the sources of our discontent by identifying what is unique about our own moment and place in history, by identifying how this moment and place is structured. It is structured by commodity production and exchange.
But, how is this a source of our discontent? Commodity production and exchange isolate value from the surfaces to which it is alleged to give meaning. So, for example, when I purchase a loaf of bread at the local coop, it derives its value from the labor of the bakers, but not only the labor of the bakers. Also in the mix are the other costs of running a business. The value of the loaf bears no relation to the substances out of which it is composed and everything to do with the time — the abstract time — consumed in its composition. Why "abstract time"? Because rent, insurance, taxes, dividends to coop members, transportation, are also measured in the average time consumed supplying these factors. This means, for example, that a decrease in the value of the dollar, or an increase in the prime rate, or the elimination of a whole region, such as Ukraine, from the supply chain, will change the value of the loaf of bread, even though the actual labor time and actual composition of the loaf remain unchanged. This difference between the values of commodities, including the labor commodity, and the substances out of which they are composed, I allege, is the leading cause of our discontent.
But, wait. How else would value be measured? In non-commodity societies value can be measured in any number of ways: kinship ties, authority, provinance, dye, shape, use (sacred or common), origin, size. The point is that all of these are substantive. Only in commodity societies are things valued in terms of the equal units of abstract time consumed in their composition. As Marx pointed out this difference between surface form and underlying value form gives rise to a specific kind of crisis:
Circulation bursts through all the temporal, spatial and personal barriers imposed by the direct exchange of products, and it does this by splitting up the direct identity present in this case between the exchange of one’s own product and the acquisition of someone else’s into the two antithetical segments of sale and purchase. To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to say also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other. Hence, if the assertion of their external independence [ausserliche Verselbstandigung] proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis. There is an antithesis, immanent in the commodity, between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things; the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of the commodity are the developed forms of motion of this immanent contradiction. These forms therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility. For the development of this possibility 'into a reality a whole series of conditions is required, which do not yet even exist from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities.
(Capital I.I.3 §2 (a)). Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1982), 209).
More importantly, this dynamic operates irrespective of whether surface and value form have in fact diverged from one another. In all cases, things are not what they appear to be. Their appearances are not what they are. They are commodities. Under all circumstances it is their abstract value, not their surfaces, that mediates social relations. But, how does this give rise to discontent?
We are, at least, material beings. We rely on our senses. Yet, the forms of domination under which we labor, which pull at us and yank us first in one direction, then the other, are structured around the abstract value form of the commodity. As (at least) material beings, we attempt to make sense of these forces materially. If it is not race, then it is gender. If it is not gender, then it is nationality, or sexual preference, or religion, or ethnicity, or language. But these all are nothing but commodity fetishes: surface forms compelled to assume a value completely divorced from the substances out of which they are composed.
To be clear, difference is not the occasion for our discontinent. Rather is it absolute identity: the identity of abstract value. Abstract value then renders all surfaces enigmatic. Their substantive values are mysteries. We then misrecognize their failure to conform to the absolutely identical as a fault, an imperfection, a failure; when, in fact, non-identity is their true identity, their substantive value.
So, yes, there are many sources of our discontent. But it is the two-fold form of the commodity that best explains the socially and historically specific causes for our discontent.
But, without a religious twist this would not be my blog. For ultimately it is also the commodity that explains why Christians have so completely and finally disavowed their faith in the Palestinian Jew Jesus, whose surface is not identical, not The One, or the Cosmic Christ, or the ineffable, or the hidden God. "Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead, and buried" is highly specific. So too was the Buddha and the Holy Prophet. But the commodity makes an abstraction of all agents of emancipation.
But, that is another blog.
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