Peaceful Property and Marx
A couple years ago the tumblr discourse in longer-winded corner of the QL fandom erupted over the economics in Peaceful Property. From my perspective, I saw an extremely thorough evocation of Marx and Engel's critique of capitalism--at least parts of it that I knew about--in the series. I wanted to do my best to lay out a simple explanation using Peaceful Property to help guide myself and other fans.
Admittedly I'm no economist and, like a majority of the population, have not read all four volumes of Das Kapital. Instead, I'll be pulling liberally here from The Jacobin. Whether you agree or disagree with the authors, you must acknowledge they tend to have read Marx intently and work to make it accessible to general audience. If you know something I don't know, feel free to add on or share. If anything, this has been an exercise for me to try and dive a little deeper and learn a bit more.
First, Peaceful Property takes some effort to distinguish a commodity from other goods and services. Commodities are goods and services produced to serve a use for others and are therefore exchanged at a set price in a broader societal market. They have a "use value," the actual material used and the effort put in to provide a necessary service for the consumer, and they have an "exchange value," the price set on the market based not solely on use value but the supply, demand, and calculations of social values for private property owners to gain the most profit from their selling. I should go ahead and define private property here as something distinct from property any individual owns. Private property, as Marx and Engels discussed it, was the property owned to generate passive wealth, like land ownership that could be rented out, or ownership of factories or farms and machines that others could labor over to produce commodities the owner would then sell. In the first few episodes we get a variable survey of commodities: the house, the wigs, delivery services, entertainment, and, if you're paying attention, sex. All are produced by workers in the series to be sold.
The series from the start blurs one key area, however. Because he is haunted by the ability to see ghosts, Peach is unable to transform his cooking into a commodity. He still cooks food that provides "use value" to the people in his life, but he can't turn that service into a good with an "exchange value" that could earn him an income, let alone a profit. As professor Michael Lazarus puts it in "A Guide to Reading Karl Marx for the First Time," "Commodities are not defined or valued by their use alone but by their sale on the market as commodities. For example ,a meal cooked for friends certainly meets a human need — but it is not a commodity. Rather, commodities possess “exchange value,” which names their worth in prices" This contrast lays at the heart of Peaceful Property and our return to the shared table at the end of each episode reminds us of human connections that exist beyond the exchange of commodities. Why is this important?
One of Marx and Engel's chief concerns was the way capitalism severed the production of goods and services from the producers of those goods and services. Capitalism had both a material impact--who gets to claim the good or service as their own commodity to sell and profit from--and a psychological impact--how do the creation of goods and services connect the creator, the good and service itself, and the consumer of the good and service and how does commodifying things alienate people from those social connections.
In the Das Kapital chapter called “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret," Marx described how capitalism renders commodities not “as direct social relations between persons . . . but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things.” Drawing on studies on religious beliefs about idol objects with their own supernatural powers, Marx and Engels explain how an item within capitalist belief structures becomes imbued with a separate social meaning all on its own, divorced from the person or people who made it and the people who set the prices for it. Marx scholars shorten this to the term "commodity fetishism."
On one end we can look at Home and his meals. He orders take-out and eats alone. The food does not come with a social relationship attached to it. He doesn't know who makes it. He doesn't know who delivers it the way Jennie's character, Thansai, gets to know Ride, her delivery driver. And, likely, he either consumes it with the expectation that it's made to please him immediately without any alteration, conversation, or effort required of him because he has paid for the commodity of food. If he was a fine diner like Pompam's character, Chai-un, he might pay extra for finer quality and the expectation that the currency exchange gives him privileges of better quality goods and more esteemed service, and any disappointment would be a betrayal of the exchange value.
With a less commodified view, however, the consumer is also expected to be contributing their own efforts in crafting an experience for themselves through the use of the product, acknowledging that the producer is a human like them capable of mistakes and their own personal tastes and interests that might not perfectly match the consumers. Their differences unite and interact as they exchange the product. Expectations of mutual input and creation allow the consumer to psychologically render themselves more socially human instead of an automaton, capable of acting for themselves, just as Chai-un can speak back to the conservative pressures of his deceased family.
Peach brings Home to labor over the meals, and the make-shift family at the Cok Long table add their own seasonings and toppings based on their preferences. I think this is why the Chef's Table model, where more intimate interaction gets prioritized, emerges as a counter-example to the commodification of dining. And in a culture where cooking takes such a high priority that the entire language of personalities and aesthetics revolves around the language of 'flavors,' that's no small thing.
Art and performance, in fact, take quite a central role in the series as they emphasize the need for a social commitment, a suspended belief, from their audiences to engage, demonstrating how even a service without a concrete good, in fact, serves a meaningful social function when seen outside of the capitalist framework of "exchange value." If the audience can put in a similar effort as the creators to imagine, more than just consumption of the entertainment is possible. This mutual creation between laborer and audience/consumer allows for transformation even if the "use" of that transformation cannot be adequately quantified.
That's all well and good for the consumer, but what about the laborer? Commodity fetishism impacts them more materially, because if the products of their labor don't have a social connection to them, then someone else--a property owner, a capitalist--can own it, determining its sale and how the profit of its sale is redistributed. They are alienated at multiple levels. On this alienation, Marx biographer, Marcello Musto, writes,
"Marx listed four ways in which the worker is alienated in bourgeois society: (1) by the product of his labor, which becomes “an alien object that has power over him”; (2) in his working activity, which he perceives as “directed against himself,” as if it “does not belong to him”; (3) by “man’s species-being,” which is transformed into “a being alien to him”; and (4) by other human beings, and in relation “to their labor and the object of the labor.”
No where do we see this more clearly in Peaceful Property than Rak, the ghost at the wig factory (and I welcome anyone to come up with any depictions in the history of fiction that evoke the concept as clearly).
Rak is made alien to the wigs she produces, unable to use the very products of her labor even as she loses her hair. She would need to make enough money to buy the wig, which she doesn't. The wig is the sole property of the property owner. The argument goes that they provided the raw material, the equipment and space to craft the good, the management to oversee its creation, and the pay for the laborer's time and efforts. Without unions or democratic state regulations, the laborer has no little say in whether that pay or the working conditions are adequate.
Rak is alienated from her work activity through the micro-management of her time by the foreman and policies. She might see her own methods for organizing her time that could be a better fit for her particular person, especially as she gets sick. She might have her own ideas about what could make the wigs better. Her pleasure and and drives in creation are not the point here, the uniform commodity is.
Rak is alienated from own humanity: her needs for adequate healthcare and drives to explore aesthetic composition;
Rak is alienated from those she loved, her coworkers, and dynamic (rather than hierarchical) relations with leadership. Until she is fully made into a ghost.
Many of the ghost laborers in the series demonstrate these issues, but Rak's representation of it is particularly striking as she attempts to bring back to her body the very product she's been alienated from in order to reconnect with it and the world of full humanity it represents. She shows that the segmenting of society into producers and consumers hides the fact that anyone who works for their income is always both. Labor and the buyer are one in the same, not two alien groups battling it out.
One of the big arguments for capitalism is its more meritocratic format (relative to feudalism, slavery, and Stalinism, and tbf many communist scholar to agree capitalism has some major advantages over those models). Fans say capitalism rewards skill, intelligence, determination, adaptability, strategy, etc. You must prove your worth, with the invisible parenthetical at the end of that statement being (against other people). Competition is key. Peaceful Property returns us to this theme again and again like a chorus in a song.
The first episode involves a former fellow sous chef named Best who has grown into a career as Peach flounders. The capitalist structure has seemingly played its game. Best was the best, and Peach was not. Engels did not mince words about competition under capitalism,
"Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society. This battle, a battle for life, for existence, for everything, in case of need a battle of life and death, is fought not between the different classes of society only, but also between the individual members of these classes. Each is in the way of the other, and each seeks to crowd out all who are in his way, and to put himself in their place. The workers are in constant competition among themselves as are the members of the bourgeoisie among themselves. The power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver, the unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other.
Competition lies at the core in every level of capitalism. Peach, under this notion, should suit up and battle it out to reclaim his role. He should feel the antipathy revealed to be in the heart of Home's uncle towards his brother. That's not what Peach does.
Peaceful Property rejects the impetus to compete. Peach helps with Best's house-warming, exorcising the space with a warm meal so he can live comfortably. The episode that some complained lost the plot, a tragic queer love story between Khon dancers Vicha and Phoom, subtly revisits the theme. Their dance work is collaborative rather than competitive, and their love is, too. It offers an alternative model for Peach and Home to replicate (literally through dancing) even if they are not mimicking the romantic elements (yet!).
Because of their elevated place in patriarchal societies, when men are allowed to exist as true partners rather than competitors, it offers the possibility to reject the one-upsmanship that puts marginalized groups at so much more risk as pawns in their games. It's been a theme throughout queer men's literature, from Whitman to Wilde to Forster. Competition isn't simply an individual issue, though.
The difference between Home and Peach was not the same as Best and Peach or Vicha and Phoom. Peach and Home existed in radically different classes--and I don't mean that in a poor versus rich way! Peach had to work for an income. Marx and Engels would've called him a proletariat. Home and his family from which he inherited his wealth (which means more than just money here) had a passive income through their ownership of property, so they're bourgeoisie. The series hinges its narrative on the shift in episode 8 from the proletariat to the bourgeoisie followed by an episode centered around what many might most imagine class warfare to look like.
In episode 9, we find out Kan's father was a radical labor organizer in an exploited community, and she's carrying on the good fight in his name despite the violent targeting of the group by the property owners. Many misinterpret Marx as advocating for an impending violent overthrow when, in fact, he was describing what he saw as a constant dynamic throughout history. From the "Bourgeois and Proletarians:"
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
The class struggles are not an inevitability but a defining fact of having differentiated classes, and the revolution is not inherently violent in and of itself (although many of the revolutions in Marx and Engel's time and place were), merely a reshaping of the classes at a fundamental level. Kan must reconstitute her understanding of the world, how being born into and relegated into a lower class has forced her to struggle out and upward and against, as those above struggled to repress her and her class.
The tough pill to swallow here is that both groups have been dehumanized by capitalist impulses. Yes, one group has power and control and the other doesn't, but the capitalism is not the power one has, it's the structure that determines and maintains class roles, but everyone involved is still human, each is just merely feeding into baser urges that capitalism encourages. It takes a lot to find one's way out of the invisible system one's born into.
Here's where the discourse over the series really diverged. In episode 6, 7, 8, and 9 (third act territory) our two protagonists find their way out. Peach refuses the millions he's offered to keep away from Home. Some lambasted the lack of working class realism--anyone who's ever been poor knows how fast you'd lick that up, they argued. Perhaps, but realism is hardly a strong argument in a show about the supernatural, and more importantly that ignores how individualistic that action would've been.
Peach's refusal is the first step of the narrative revolution within the show: the story wheel turns from the problems of the proletariat to the problems of the bourgeoisie because he refuses to accept the competitive bargaining tool the wealthy property owners use to keep the proletariat in line, risking his well-being to do so. He forces us to face the competition of the upper class instead of mourning the woes of the workers any longer. He pans the camera toward Home to start reflecting on himself instead of waiting for his workers to do it for him. No more of the wage relationship and therefore unspoken class struggle that underlay their relationship.
The End of Private Proverty
After the equalizing story of Vicha and Phoom, Home truly faces the realities of his existence. Again, some called what happened an easy out meant to build sympathy rather than deal with the hard reality of privilege. However, Home's car crash mirrors the one he committed earlier perfectly. It's an extreme narrative representation of empathy, and afterwards Home works tirelessly to upend the passive wealth of his family.
The last episodes of the series focus on tearing away the cruel power of his family's property holdings including an enslaved housekeeper, but the resolution doesn't come at the apex of capitalism's cruelest form. It comes from its most mundane, a home, a bank, shattered, spilling out all the hidden funds. Marx and Engels wrote,
"Modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property."
The ultimate Marxist expression here is not simply an overrunning of the wealthy by the poor. The system of private property itself must be shattered and the private property owners can participate in that dissolution with the recognition that many will resist as part of their own class antagonism toward the people they regard as a separate class. Home gives up the ghost of capitalism and and the ghost of his grandfather who embraced it before realizing it was its own curse.
There's a lot to be explored about the linking of America and capitalism versus Thai culture here, but I'm just sticking to the Marxist tenets as a primer. Hopefully, I've mostly described what I see rather than advocating for a certain perspective (I have my own thoughts, but I wouldn't necessarily say they're Marxist). I might've misrepresented something, missed something obvious, or made some other kinds of mistakes. Like I said at the top, I'm no expert, but please feel free to chime in with your thoughts and additions! Checking this off my list of meta WIPs now. Enjoy <3
And tagging some people who I think have been interested this lol @mocknot @doublel27 @ginnymoonbeam @dekaydk @justagirlwaiting @plantaagomaajor and there was an anon ask forever ago towards whom i hope the internet winds of fate blow this
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
yousharknotpass
titsay
discoholicmusic
amandla
gummygunk
romaincrisis
