A New Look at the Left Wing

criticalculture:minorjive:claytoncubitt:

This is common practice for large retailers. When I was a (poor) child one of my early defining memories is of my mother attempting to retrieve a perfectly good discarded Big Wheel knock-off toy from a dumpster behind a large department store for her boys to play with, and being physically threatened, demeaned and chased off by an irate store manager, who then smashed the toy with a hammer in front of us.

Later, when I was a teen, every retail store I worked for had similar policies. Sad to see nothing’s changing.

Marx writes about the theoretical basis of this practice somewhere in the second book of Capital, but I’ll be damned if I can remember which chapter.

As we know, these things that we call commodities have an exchange value (what we can get in exchange for it) and a use value (what the damn thing is actually good for, or what immediate value it has to you), and something even more convoluted and ideological called a price.

Whenever the market fails to provide the owner of a commodity, or in most cases a surplus of a given commodity, with the sort of price that they were hoping for, they can sell at a loss, and hope that next time they can gauge the market better and produce, purchase or price accordingly.

However, if the owner’s imperative is to maintain their rate of profit, with the goal of actually growing it in either the near or long term, selling off perfectly good commodities for next to nothing is, as some ideologues would say, irrational. The availability of, to make a connection between Marx and the article, cheap wool coats would distort the prices of not just wool coats, but all winter coats. In the future, consumers would be less likely to pay prices that earn commodity owners with tidy profits, because the prices of all would need to be lowered to avoid being “priced out of the market.” Consumers would either choose the cheaper wool coats most of the time, or wait for sales. Of course, the capitalist can look for greater “efficiencies” in production, typically meaning cheaper labour and materials, to make up for such losses in profits, but let’s not get too far off track.

Now let’s bring this modern idea of the brand into the equation. As someone protested to Socrates in Republic, one cannot have a democratic (city-)state based upon constitutional equality without luxuries that distinguish the privileged from everyone else. If H&M, or any other hip brand for that matter, were to donate their surpluses to charity, the ownership of its goods would no longer be a sign of economic and/or cultural distinction and people with more money than good sense would no longer be willing to pay $300 for a coat with the same use-value (and most likely material and labour cost) as a $50 one. It’s just good “marginal thinking” to destroy all of these clothes, because not doing so would harm present and future profits.

Of course when Marx was writing, he was only thinking theoretically. The vast production capacity needed to make “throwaway” commodities didn’t exist yet and global trade took care of most surpluses. Nevertheless, like most his thinking, it was terribly prescient. The joint compulsions of profit seeking and overproduction which guide this supposedly rational system — the best, we are told, at providing all who work with a good quality of life through its efficient handling of scarce resources — invariably lead it to make economic choices which operate directly counter to human life and dignity. When people need access to the very basic material things of life, which are here valued strictly for their use-value, capitalists and their apologists see only means to the singular end of profit.

And so, while people starve, edible foodstuffs are discarded. While people go homeless, homes that have never been inhabited are razed. While people freeze, clothing is shredded. And in the grand scheme of things, we are told that such practices are rational, equitable and commensurate with the amorphous aim of “prosperity.” Such fanaticism is odious and nonsensical.