Thoughts about Our World – Part I:
Religion, Capitalism, and Commodities

By Kyle Van Horn

Most, if not all, religions are present and instilled within individuals starting at birth. Starting at a very early age, populations are taught the ideas of their respective religion, to accept it as truth, and ostracized if they do not. As people grow older within their societies, they learn that not only is this belief predominant within their own family, but also the common belief of the majority of their society. The fill-in-the-blank religion is really just a question of region combined with history. This strength in numbers, this status quo, leads people to feel uncomfortable with, and often disgusted by, the presence of another inferior system of beliefs.

Further, (the diversity of) religion has been the leading cause of death and suffering throughout history. People have been laughed at, judged, banished, ridiculed, persecuted, enslaved, and even burned at the stake (or other murder le jour)… time and again… in the name of… religion.

When faced with such accusations, adherents to the religion in question hold on to their beliefs vigorously even when one can demonstrate the irrationality of the basis of them. Followers believe that the inevitable result of letting go of their convictions will be chaos. Society as they know it will crumble. Anarchy and rebellion will ensue. They believe that if everybody were to reject the status quo, then essentially, we would all be banished to “Hell” in some form or another.

People believe that their religion is the only rational way for individuals and populations as a whole to progress and succeed. It is the only way in which to procreate, teach and evolve as the human race. It is the only way to attain paradise, Heaven, Nirvana, or any other version of the pinnacle of religion. On the other hand, the absence of their religion is viewed as immorality and barbarism.

America, however, loves freedom. We the People will never persecute someone because of their religious orientation or superstitions. The land of the free, and the home of the brave! People of any nationality, skin tone, and yes, religion are welcomed with open arms because it is this pure and righteous belief system upon which our country was founded! God Bless America! Gosh, it brings a tear to every John Doe’s eye.

John Doe is American, after all. He was born in a hospital. He was too young to remember, obviously, but he has heard time and again how kind, though overpriced, the medical staff was who welcomed him into the world. Hey, good medicine isn’t cheap, right? He still has the pictures taken on that day. The warm, friendly doctor standing at his mother’s bedside. Man, was she a happy new mommy!

The other picture is his favorite; it’s the one of newborn Johnny in his father’s arms. Dad was wearing a New Balance T-Shirt. There was a bottle of Coke on the table beside him. Those bottles sure have come a long way! Like mom, dad was gay, glad, and gleeful. He had a new baby boy and a soon to be wife. In a couple years, he’d have enough money to buy that orange Chevy Nova he’d wanted for so long. He’d fill up at the Shell where mom worked for less than a buck a gallon a couple times a week. Looking back, those were the days!

John didn’t really care too much about things for a few years after birth. To a baby, everything is normal despite how hard times may be for the adults who are trying to give it a life. No frills mac-and-cheese every day for lunch was where it was at! Sometimes, he even got ketchup and hotdogs to put in the dish!

Little John’s first vivid memories are when his parents were going through their divorce. Yeah, just like so many other couples, the difficulty of balancing finances finally, and decisively, took their toll on his parents’ marriage after a few short years. Admittedly, those times weren’t all that bad for John. Each one of his parents always tries to outdo the other in order to gain their boy’s affection. That was when little John got his first taste of commodities. Happy Meal toys. GI Joes, even an Atari!

The next major event: school. School was the first time John really learned the concept of money. It was kind of a drag once he got to the age where material possessions really mattered. First, it was the cool eraser. Then a Trapper Keeper. How could you be cool if you had to get free lunch? Material possessions worth having elevated to sneaks, jeans, shirts, and hats. John never got a pair of real Jams, but his mom made a pair with some fabric she picked up at the linen store. The kids laughed him all the way home. He will never forget that day. New school clothes every September? Yeah, right. The prized possession of a high school kid was not the eternal knowledge of what Columbus did in 1492, but a car... until he became older and realized that a free university education would have been much better.

Nowadays, when some of his friends talk about the atrocities that his country causes around the world, John gets irritated. Actually, John gets downright angry at times. He loves the image of the Pilgrim and the Indians sharing that first merry Thanksgiving together! He argues to the freedom haters that life would be far worse if we all had to live under terrorism sponsoring regimes. John likes his Lil’ Wayne CD. He loves the rags to riches stories he hears on Jay-Z’s albums. He is strangely drawn to the latest Britney Spears gossip on the E! channel. People in those other countries live under the yokes of strong arm dictators. They can’t worship whichever God they choose, a freedom John values immensely despite the fact that John belongs to no specific religious order and hasn’t attended church since last Easter. There’s no way the people of the Third World will ever have the opportunity to pursue the American dream like James Evans, Sr. (John Amos’ character in Good Times).

You see, despite John’s religious practices (or lack thereof), John is religious. He just doesn’t yet realize it completely. The official title of his religion? Capitalism. His God? Money. His idols? Well, they are probably much the same as yours are if you live within the borders of the dominant global economic system. Watch the television for twenty minutes. Listen to the radio. Listen to children talking to each other. Read a popular magazine. Walk down the street or think about a friend and imagine all the things you see that you would like to attain. Those are John’s idols, too.

Capitalism isn’t a religion, John argues, but I beg to differ. If we refer once again to all of the characteristics of organized religion mentioned above, we will see that capitalism has become just that.

Indoctrinated from birth? Check. Unwavering beliefs of a majority of the society? Check. Causes poverty, war, and death? Check. Without it, its adherents have no chance of attaining the pinnacle, which, according to the Capitalist doctrine, is global dominance at the expense of others? Check.

The more I learn about how Capitalism works and what it needs to thrive, the more and more… and more I see it glaring in my face everyday – everywhere I go – in everything I see – within nearly everyone I meet. Don’t you? For a limited time only! Purchase our “Gargantuan Mega Bacon Spider Burger with Cheese” and for only 99 cents more, you can take home our collectors’ edition, one-of-a-kind, hologram Spiderman hero super mug! Offer valid while supplies last! Collect all four!

Some folks actually collect all four.

People of the world, be warned. Be aware. Do not worship these false idols.

***

The following is an excerpt from an article by Canadian Socialist, Michael A. Lebowitz entitled The Knowledge of a Better World. I think this excerpt sums up perfectly the reality of the “fetish” we consumers have for commodities in today’s world. http://www.monthlyreview.org/0705lebowitz.htm

The Knowledge of Commodities
This, as is well-known, is what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities” in the first chapter of Capital. It is a powerful concept. In my view, no one has ever communicated this idea better than an artist—Wallace Shawn, an actor and playwright from the United States. In his play The Fever (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), Shawn’s protagonist at one point finds a copy of Capital and begins to read it at night. He thinks about the anger in this book, and then he goes back to the beginning, which he had initially found to be impenetrable. Here I’ll quote a long passage from Wallace Shawn:
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.
In this quotation from Wallace Shawn a certain type of knowledge is described—price. Price is the form in which that chain of human activity and human relationships appears to us. This knowledge comes in monetary units. We know the prices of the things we need. We know the price we have ourselves received. And, now we must take that knowledge and make individual rational decisions...as consumers, as capitalists—we’re all the same, maximizers on the basis of the knowledge we have, maximizers on the basis of money.
Think about the knowledge we do not have in this world where money is the medium of knowledge. We know about nothing that does not come to us with a price—the natural environment around us, our own needs for the development of our potential; we know nothing about the lives of all those people who have produced the things we purchase, all those people with whom we have entered into a relationship by buying the results of their activity. Our situation is one of social ignorance, and that very ignorance is what permits us to be divided, turned against each other, and exploited by the owners of commodities, the owners of the chain of human activity.
When our knowledge is the price of things, how can we avoid being divided? When we don’t recognize our unity, how can we avoid competing against each other to the benefit of the owners of knowledge?
***
What it will take to rid the world of this horrible, widespread sickness is education. It starts in the home. We, leading by example, need to teach our children on a mass scale that the value of one’s possessions does not accurately assess the value of a human. We must counter mass media’s barrage of advertising and educate the youth about the necessity to think of society first rather than one’s self. It must no longer be acceptable for millions of people to live in dire straits in order for a few elite to live in luxury. Further, we must change our definition of “elite” to include ourselves as we are the ones who have the luxury of turning on a computer and reading articles like this. We are the ones who have the power to spread information like this. We are the ones who, with mass cooperation, can change the world into a place with suitable living conditions for all people, a place where all people have the opportunity to chase what is now only a dream of happiness.