“One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn’t understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I’d heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on “commodity fetishism,” “the fetishism of commodities.” I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, “Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds.” People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat’s price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. “I like this coat,” we say, “It’s not expensive,” as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, “I like the pictures in this magazine.”A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn’t see it anymore.”
—
Wallace Shawn, The Fever
(To understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.)
“Now, a decent person cannot be a person who’s gotten away with something. A decent person cannot have what it’s not appropriate for them to have. And this understanding of yourself gives you the basis for a view of the world. And so you can look out at the way the world works, and sure, there are many many things that of course disturb you—the situation of your Knut, who loves Wagner, but who’s so badly paid by his publishing house that he can’t even afford to go see the operas he so deeply loves, or all the examples of man’s inhumanity that you see on your television every single night, like that terrible overseer on that rubber plantation in southern Malaysia—but still you can say that the way the world works is fundamentally not unjust, because you’ve received a share of things which you know it’s appropriate for you to have, and it’s appropriate for all the people who are like you all over the world to have the share that they have, that means that it’s not inappropriate for all the others to have the share which remains.
You know that what you have is what you deserve, and that means that what they have is what they deserve. They have what’s appropriate for them to have. And you must admit it. The chambermaid is repulsive, ignorant—it’s not inappropriate that she should live in hell, because to you she really seems like a creature from hell. She spends her life wallowing in dirt, doing sickening things, disgusting things. Can you picture her returning at night to a sparkling apartment?—or going out later to a meticulous performance? No—impossible. What would she do with a beautiful hairbrush, a beautiful comb? She wouldn’t know how to appreciate them. What would she do with beautiful bath oils, beautiful towels, beautiful soap? Can you imagine her serving her children beautiful dinners, with fat green vegetables, fat red tomatoes? No—it’s appropriate for the chambermaid to go home at night to that particular hallway on that particular street, just as it’s appropriate for you and your friends to spend their lives deciding which products you would like to buy and upholding high standards of performance in art. The way the world works is fundamentally not unjust, so the people who want to preserve the world are basically good, and the ones who want to tear it apart, the ones who steal on the street, the thieves, the destroyers, are basically bad. You—because of your intelligent comments on current films and the thoughtful notes you wrote to your mother’s aunt, and because of how upset you were when the waiter in that restaurant brought right up to your table the living lobster that was going to boil in the kitchen for your dinner—have to be defined as the highest and most admirable type of human being, while Juana the follower of Marx, who, out of some desperate devotion to the people she loves, offers up her body to the torturer’s knife, con only be defined as the lowest and most reprehensible type, one who deserves the punishment of death.”
