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The Age of Commodity

Part of a series on Postmodern Abyss: Black Mirror

This post is highly based on [1] and Marxism Today content about commodity.

Unlike my previous post, this one is being written while in my travels, I expect it to be less comprehensive but I believe I’ve some thoughts that deserve to be shared.

Karl Marx described capitalist societies as following: “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.”[2], it should be noted that “wealth” also imply “value” in Marxism sociology, and not much has changed as of today.

But what’s a commodity anyway? Marx described the state of a capitalist society as to be in a “commodity fetishism”, the term fetishism here means that an object that appears to have some kind of magical or mystical, supernatural powers within it, which might sound similar to the sexual term as well, when we describe something as a sexual fetish we usually mean that it gets that unexpected (if sexual standardization is a thing) interest in a non-genital human part sexually.

Let’s take for example a magic ring as an object. The object somehow contains a power or value that’s perceived to be inherent within it.

The question of where this power or value has come from is obscured, hidden behind a veil of mysticism. Questions regarding where the ring came from, under what conditions it was produced, what its molecular composition is, why it has appeared at this specific moment in time, etc. are all brushed aside. We instead just see a static object that exists with power and value which appears to emanate from the object itself – rather than from complex processes of production among people which have actually given rise to it.

In a capitalist society we are more expected to think of everything as a commodity, no maters what is behind it from production relationship, it’s just a commodity that’s exchanged with other value commodity, that is money.

In Fifteen Million Merits, Bing works to live, and in order to live he must buy, infinite cycle that even an attempt of breaking it will trigger a rough “resume watching”, or he might even get incarcerated. Although the type of commodified life sounds extreme, it’s the same kind of society that we live in currently, you can imagine yourself how everything around has been commodified, even the methods you use to read these words are extremely commodified.

One can argue that a commodified life is not that bad, which is usually the counterargument for the free market, however, what about commodified people?

With a historical context, commodification was never the case. Hunter‐gatherers did not have prices for their goods. As societies developed technologically, they often engaged in trade, but there was no system of universalized pricing. For instance, a serf could trade her apples for more chickens, cows, tools, or money. The apples had no normalized universal price stamped on them. But in a capitalist society, eventually one unit of pricing congeals around all objects of use. In Fifteen Million Merits as also in real life (with the concept of international dollars for example) we see the apples are stamped “5000M,” the bananas “2000M,” and the soda “500M.” In principle then, two apples are worth five bananas, or twenty sodas, which infact sounds as a normal thing to us.

No, it’s not. As Marx noted, the concept of universalized pricing – where all commodities, including human ones, can theoretically be equated with a single unit of measure – is a relatively recent development. Once established, it appears natural and timeless. As capital expands, it increasingly needs to create markets and commodify goods. This is how capitalism functions to generate more profits, ultimately turning everything into a commodity.

In his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Georg Lukács argued that the commodity fetishism inherent in capitalist society was transforming human consciousness. Lukács supported Marx’s claim that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” The term “reification” in Lukács’s essay refers to a dual phenomenon: people are viewed as objects, like apps and apples, and objects—whether they are people, apps, or apples—take on social relationships.

Reification results from living in a society obsessed with commodity fetishism. “Fifteen Million Merits” offers compelling examples of this, showing how humans are turned into objects and how commodity relationships overshadow human life. One example is Oliver the Lemon, and another is Glee, the silver-haired girl who waits a week for her chance to perform on “Hot Shot.” When she finally performs, her voice is found lacking, and she is viewed as unlikable. As a result, Glee is labeled “quite worthless.” Her human worth is directly linked to her ability to produce value for exchange.

Abi also tries to create personalized artwork in the form of a papier-mâché penguin, but the janitor throws it away, calling it “detritus” (trash). However, Abi gains value because she can provide sexual gratification in purchasable Wraith Babes episodes. When she makes objects for use rather than for sale, they lack the commodity form and are treated as disposable as trash. Disturbingly, Bing’s fellow cyclist, Dustin, consistently sees humans as objects, making it easier for him to accept their physical and psychological abuse on Wraith Babes and Botherguts (see also Industry and Consumption of Pornography) .

The Real Plot

After Bing is able to get his One Shot he is able to give a speech there, which is regarded the end of the episode. While much of his speech is garbled and nonsensical, it is also insightful and true, both for the world of “Fifteen Million Merits” and our own:

All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That’s how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves is buying shit. …Show us something real and free and beautiful, you couldn’t. It’d break us, we’re too numb for it, our minds would choke. There’s only so much wonder we can bear, that’s why when you find any wonder whatsoever you dole it out in meager portions, and only then till it’s augmented and packaged and pumped through ten thousand pre‐assigned filters, til it’s nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day‐in, day‐out–going where? Powering what? All tiny cells in tiny screens and bigger cells in bigger screens and fuck you…fuck you all, for taking the one thing I ever came close to anything real about anything! For oozing around it and crushing it into a bone, into a joke, one more ugly joke in a kingdom of millions… fuck you!

What really interests me about this episode, especially this scene, is how it’s actually is about the previous episode and I think about the show at whole. In my past post about the The National Anthem, I mentioned that what made the plan of the kidnapper successful is that he knew that everyone would be focused in watching the Prime Minster having an intercourse with a pig rather than watching for the princess appearance, although she appeared in the most evident place, the most one that could be noticed, London bridge.

This scene shows us a similar analogy, Bing gave a very strong speech that should affect everyone who’s listening to it, to question their life, morals, principles and policy, however, what happens instead is that he gets an offer from the comity to have this performance commodified! That even the message resisting commodification can get commodified itself, and get consumed in that context instead of looking inside the moralities that it reflects. This concepts apply mostly to every episode in Black Mirror where there a great exciting plot that attracts everyone, similar to Bing’s story and speech, however, to most of the consumers, it’s just a commodity formed in a video that they purchased from a streaming platform. It’s a self-referencing scene.

Bibliography

[1]
C. Byron and M. Brake, “Fifteen million merits and fighting capitalism,” in Black mirror and philosophy, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2019, pp. 20–28. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119578291.ch2.
[2]
K. Marx, Capital volume i. New York, NY: Penguin, 1990, p. 125.

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