The Pseudo-Reunification of the Product with the Laborer as the Spectacular Commodity

Leo Deng

10/13/22 (Revised 10/16 on Professor’s edits)

PHIL493 Marxism and Critical Theory Paper 1

Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 formulates his theory of alienation in the chapter “Estranged Labor.” This theory of alienation, among most of Marx’s ideas, has progressed through history in ways that their applicability somehow become stronger than before. On the worker’s alienation, the product or commodity is inextricably tied as the labor that is extracted from the worker (causing such alienation) is necessary for the creation of said product.[1] However, in modern capitalism (say a century and a bit since the Manuscripts), the commodity whose starting point or conception is that of alienated labor, strangely, becomes a primary source of an individual’s meaning-making. This latter argument is fleshed out by Guy Debord in his Society of the Spectacle on his idea of the Spectacle (a worshipped image) and commodity as Spectacle. Through the mass commodification of all products in the modern era, humans have begun to worship the commodity itself as commodities are improved to the point where humans derive meaning and intimacy from them, and in Debord’s lens, worship them religiously. Thus, the product that the worker is alienated from is reunified with them as the commodity, that is, a pseudo-reunification rendered by the messy, dangerous proxy of the circulation and industry of commodity production. I will buttress this argument by using Debord to critique Marx and analyze the reunification.

Marx’s theory of alienation describes the estrangement of labor with a strong sense of externality, that is, the objectification of one’s labor that gives it the capacity to be bought, commodified, etc. by the capitalist. One still must account for the context that makes it so—capitalist societies are structured in a way that the majority of people have nothing but their labor power to sell and thus, the capitalist needs the “army of the unemployed.”[2] Since all workers are subordinated to the process of alienating their labor through selling the potency of their labor (labor power) as a commodity to earn a wage to live, the worker is always interacting with their alienated labor or the alien object that is their labor—but most importantly—the externality of their labor. So, by focusing on this externality and moving on to Marx’s more concrete analyses of commodities in Capital Vol. 1, we can treat “estranged labor” as that which has been poured into the bigger object or totality (like Capital or religion) to the point where labor itself is alien to the worker–labor has come to exist outside of the worker that confronts the worker as being outside.[3] This idea of alienation is important to Marx because he assigns the starting point of human meaning-making as labor—the most meaningful thing one can do is labor something, that is, to transform an object by congealing one’s labor in it to become a product. For Marx, the human is the laboring animal.[4] However, the necessity for people to sell their labor power[5] results such that their labor is no longer being theirs and makes them lose their humanity. That is precisely why in the next chapter in the Manuscripts, Marx theorizes communism as the reunification of man and labor—transcendence of self-estrangement is how Marxian communism will complete this reunification: the return of “man to himself.”[6]

Nevertheless, we are still living in capitalism almost two centuries after Marx’s analysis where his ideas are still ever-so applicable. Labor is still external to the worker: they feel themselves outside their work, and in their work, they feel outside themselves.[7] Workers still hate their bosses. Workers only work to savor the moments where they are not within work. The fact that these statements can be so universally accepted as metaphysical conditions for the majority of people says multitudes about the utter estrangement our species has undergone in the last two centuries. If meaning is only derived outside of work and capitalism requires the existence of not only workers (sellers of labor) but consumers (buyers of congealed labor),[8] then workers are subjugated to buy products outside of work as well as create meaning. It is then laughably inevitable that the consuming of commodities and meaning-making would clash, merge, and become one. The ironic humor is that Marx could never have even imagined the degree to which this self-estrangement paradox would go; just imagine his attempting to grasp people’s reaping meaning from new cars, homes, washing machines, etc. that Debord talked about 100 years later, let alone the silly commodities of pet rocks and packaged “nothing”[9] of the 21st century. Thus, we must look towards a more applied theorizing of estranged labor.

Guy Debord attempts to embody the idea of alienation into an object itself in a more modernized capitalist society through the idea of the Spectacle. The Spectacle is a worshipped image of an object that society interacts with (like a celebrity or the Marvel cinematic universe), similar to the prior dominant entity of religion. In terms of alienation, “In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. [...] The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”[10] Thus, when we consider what Marx argues is the product of human’s alienated labor—the commodity—in terms of its place in society now, an unexpected irony emerges. We worship the commodity now as a spectacle that we derive immense meaning from as Debord pushes in the chapter “Commodity as Spectacle,” that “The fetishism of commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism.”[11] This quote was used to concretize an analysis of collections, that is, commodities made in order to be collected (an utter perversion of genuine collecting of a special category created by the collector, which is now presupposed with a collection-commodity made in order to profit); commodified collections create a false sense of reification to prove one’s intimacy with the commodity. Jean Baudrillard also touches aptly on commodities being tied to meaning-making, specifically on the consumption of commodities becoming the identity of the subject under consumer capitalism.[12] The endless amount of the appearance of differentiation in brand names allows people to perform the ultimate worship of the spectacular commodity, making the culmination of one’s false sense of choice in these appearances of differentiation an all-consuming, totalizing identity. The question arises, then, of the utter contradiction of the laborer’s reunification with the product through consumption (which occurs outside of work) and Marx’s theory of communism as the laborer’s reunification with the product inside of work.

In a sense, the congealed alienated labor of man is lost in the circulation of the totality of Capital and commodity production to be ejected out again as “useless”[13] commodities that provide most with deep senses of meaning. In the words of Debord, this phenomenon is the spectacle itself: “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”[14] The capitalist mode of production, the very economic system predicated on its starting point being alienated labor (labor without meaning), has evolved and intensified its technical composition[15] to the point where commodities are congealed with anything and everything one can even imagine—including meaning itself. These fetters of capitalism, momentarily,[16] show how the structure of this mode of production and thus, also a mode of existence for humankind, asserts the laborer as also the consumer, forcing them to be reunified with the product in the form of the commodity. It does not matter what product the laborer specifically makes; centuries of estranged labor confirms this as no McDonald’s worker today will think of the burger they just made as theirs. Selling of labor power is merely a means of subsistence for most, alienated labor is thus only poured into the bigger totality of capital, and only by the laborer’s position as a consuming actor in society gives them even a remnant of a non-alienated product when they buy and consume it out of their own willed choice.

Thus, through my choice of the silhouette of my shoes, the aesthetic of my clothes, the color of my phone, the brand of my watch, the model of my car, and so on are both our worshipping of commodities as intimate entities that we project our own sense of meaning onto, but they are also entities themselves with meanings assigned by the very social contexts and social necessity that dictates their exchange value, which is then consumed and internalized by us to constitute our identity. There then remain two questions: (1) what do we do about this sudden revealing of what feels like the disingenuity of the commodities we care about so deeply? And (2), what does this epoch-making phenomenon say about capitalism as a necessary precondition for socialism and communism? Debord additionally talks about the “pseudo-ness” that is amplified in the things that become spectacles; it is pseudo because we are only worshipping an image of the thing and no longer the thing itself—the signifier instead of the signified (we worship the social clout of the brand we wear, not the clothing itself, the nice matte-finish and font of a book, not the content itself, etc.). The commodity undergoes an amplification of a partial image of itself to become the spectacle. However, if this phenomenon changes according to the socialization (transitioning to socialism, giving the workers ownership of the means of production) of production, the spectacle would disintegrate, at least in the commodity. Then, the social necessity—fully dependent on the existence of a free market—of commodities collapses; the spectacle collapses when communism is reached.

Strangely enough, the spectacle could be seen as an optimistic foreshadowing of the reunification of humankind and its labored product, despite its contradictions. If the progress of capitalism is supposed to better set up the distribution of goods under communism, the intensified technical composition of capital is only better setting up the reunification of products to laborers. Even if the image is being worshipped, it can definitely function as an extremely great hook into worlds that humans have built for enjoyment among each other and thus, meaning-making (think about the infinite amount of interests people can have now, the endless array of stories and possibilities in video games, books, music, fashion, and their respective communities and especially subcultures). Thus, our[17] mission remains to figure out how we shall socialize our style of production, a much less violent revolution, but nevertheless, a revolution.[18]

Bibliography

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1967. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm.

Jean Baudrillard: The System of Objects, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhaBDY3nz4&ab_channel=EpochPhilosophy.

Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Swindal, James. “Class on the Commodity.” Presented at the PHIL593/493 Marxism and Critical Theory, Duquesne University, September 27, 2022.

[1] “The labor is exploited: thus though labor is necessary for the product the laborer neither enjoys the fruits of his labor or is paid for some of the value he puts into the commodities he produces.” -James Swindal (any comment by my professor when he evaluated this paper will be quoted in such form). [2] See Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, “Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” Section 3 on the “Industrial Reserve Army.” [3] This is my paraphrasing from the Manuscripts—the specific parts of the text they come from. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 72. [4] James Swindal, “Class on the Commodity” (PHIL593/493 Marxism and Critical Theory, Duquesne University, September 27, 2022). [5] Which is unfortunately confused for the need to work for survival, that is, the universalizing of capitalistic operations of society as ontological ones rather than recognizing the means of subsistence as a separate entity that takes on a completely different position in capitalism. [6] Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 83-84. [7] Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 74. [8] And workers obviously cannot consume or buy during work. [9]https://www.amazon.com/Jay-JA0027-Gift-of-Nothing/dp/B019HDSCPU/ref=asc_df_B019HDSCPU/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=191951420828&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=11615793360220601400&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9005929&hvtargid=pla-355821411527&psc=1. [10] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Black & Red, 1967), 29, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm. Citation number correlates the way Debord numbered is paragraphs in the book. [11] Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 67. [12]Jean Baudrillard: The System of Objects, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhaBDY3nz4&ab_channel=EpochPhilosophy. [13] By useless, I mean devoid of innate use-value in Marx’s sense in Capital, where exchange-value has completely consumed the value of the commodity, and the exchange-value (based on social necessity) actually constitutes the use-value—think luxury goods. “The technical composition involves the material products and processes used in the construction of the commodity.” -J. Swindal [14] Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 34. [15] See Marx’s Capital Vol. 1, “Chapter 25: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” [16] If one believes in capitalism’s inevitable self-destruction, that is. [17] As people in the paramount capitalist country. [18] Of course, many other issues remain besides transitioning the style of production in the paramount capitalist country; put simply, we live in the belly of the beast and imperialism and the war machine is also of utmost importance.