At the start of Capital Vol.1, Marx writes that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’.”[1] In this paper we will argue that, much as material commodities are essential to the capitalist mode of production, political commodities are essential to capitalist hegemony. More specifically, we will argue that political commodification is a process through which the products of subversive political concepts are alienated from concrete political movements, appropriated by capital, and then used to neutralize political action. First, we will analyze the structure of political concepts to understand why and how they can be commodified. Then, we will argue that political commodification tends to channel all political action through consumption, which is itself rebranded as a political act. Lastly, we will explore how political commodification constructs an elusive reality in which we find ourselves isolated, confused, and unable to build a collective struggle.

In this first section, we will describe the process of political commodification. To this end, we must start by defining the ‘concept’. Although this work may seem tedious, clarifying the structure of the concept will help us understand what part of it gets commodified, and what the consequences are. In the Hegelian sense,[2] the concept is a living entity: it is the dialectical relationship between a concrete phenomenon and the representation of this phenomenon. The existence of the concept is the worldly being of the concept, the way it manifests itself in specific objects, events, actions, relationships etc. The form of the concept is a unifying understanding of all these manifestations. The concept in motion is the dialectical relationship between form and existence, through which the concept realizes and maintains itself. It is important to realize that a concept is not a mere thought or theory, it is something grounded in reality; as such, naming a concept means making sense of a process that is actually unfolding in the world.

Many concepts have implications for the way that we, as humans, will come to relate to ourselves, to one another, and to the world at large. We say that these are political concepts. For example, a political movement can be understood as a political concept. The form of the concept is the name of the movement, and the theory that names and unifies its activities. The concrete existence of the concept is all the ways in which the political work of the movement manifests itself in the world: a new jargon, symbols, artistic products, a political party, protests, communities, and much more. The concept in motion is the process through which the movement brings its world into existence.

Capitalism, too, can be understood as a political concept. The capitalist concept in motion is the process through which the capitalist mode of production perpetuates itself, evolves, and adapts. This means maintaining the stability of capitalism as an economic system, but also maintaining its legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects, that is, maintaining capitalist hegemony. Capitalism manifests itself in various ways but we are mainly interested in the commodity, perhaps the most ubiquitous manifestation of capitalism. In Capital, the commodity refers to the material products of labor under a capitalist mode of production. The characteristic of the commodity is that it is equivalent to all other commodities through the medium of money, that is, it was made to be bought and sold. The primary purpose of commodity production is not to meet human needs, but to create profit. As such, the material commodity is a specifically capitalist form of existence of material products: it is made possible by, and at the same time plays an essential role in, the capitalist mode of production.

In this essay we argue that, in a similar way, political commodities are a specifically capitalist form of existence of political objects. Political objects are all the things, material and immaterial, which constitute the appearance of a political concept in motion. A political object could be a material thing, like an item of clothing, or something less tangible, like jargon, a slogan, or the image of a leader. It could even be a general shape or aesthetic: the organizational structure of a community, the aesthetics of a protest. Insofar as it contributes to the concept, a political object contains the concept in motion. Yet, in itself, a political object belongs to the world of appearance. As such, it does not have an inherent meaning, and is not inextricably linked to a single concept. This is precisely what makes political commodification possible.

The starting point of political commodification, then, is a political concept, and more specifically the political objects it has generated. Political commodification is the name of the process through which a political object is alienated from a given political concept, appropriated by capital, and subsumed into the concept of capitalism as a political commodity. It is important to realize that although the political object and the political commodity may look the same, they often serve a very different purpose. For example, a protest may serve to challenge racist policing practices, but the aesthetics of that protest can also be used to advertise Pepsi soda.[3] The political object is different from the political commodity because they contain different concepts in motion. The original political object contributes to the unfolding of the concept that created it, that is, it advances the goals of a given political movement. In contrast, the political commodity contributes to the unfolding of capitalism, that is, it helps maintain the capitalist mode of production. In the following sections, I will explain how it does so. I will argue that political commodification is not only economically profitable to capital, but it is also essential to the constitution of capitalist hegemony.

In the first place, political commodification leads us to conflate consumption with political action. Consumption, the act of buying commodities, can seem like a political act only when the reality of political work has been entirely disappeared. This is indeed the first effect of political commodification. In the first chapter of Capital, Marx describes ‘commodity fetishism’ as the process through which the reality of production is rendered invisible, and social relations among people come to appear as objective relations between commodities. Similarly, through political commodification, the political labor necessary to create the political object is concealed. The commodity does not show how the political object came to be, and what concrete purpose it served. It contains the appearance of political action, alienated from actual political action.

Yet, we previously stated that political objects have no inherent meaning, and that is precisely why they can be alienated from their original concept and turned into commodities. How, then, does a commodity retain a political nature? While it is true that a political object has no inherent meaning, it is also true that it becomes a bearer of meaning through its role in the concept. A flag, for example, is a mere object, a piece of fabric with shapes and colours on it; yet, used in the context of a specific political movement, it can acquire a profound significance. Similarly, a word is only a symbol, yet it can embody an entire understanding of the world. As they are created by, or deployed in service of, a political concept, political objects become bearers of social meaning, and are thus intimately linked to the concept in the social imagination. When a political object is commodified, its role changes, but its meaning often sticks.

By simultaneously hiding the reality of political work, and preserving the mark it leaves on its objects, commodification presents political work as a collection of political commodities. Equivalently, commodities are made to appear inherently political, and their consumption is equated to political action. The political meaning one can draw from buying an H&M t-shirt with a feminist slogan is due to this slogan’s concrete role in advancing the aims of a feminist political movement, not to the act of consumption itself. The act of consumption itself is certainly political, but only because it creates profit for a company and thus contributes to capital. By concealing the distinction between political commodity and political object, political commodification also conceals the very real difference between political action and consumption. Through this conflation, capitalism absorbs potential political action within its own process. This ensures that people’s political intentions will be harmless to capital, and even profitable to it.

This expansive movement, of rebranding consumption as political action, is accompanied by a restrictive movement that confines the scope of our political action to the consumption of political commodities. In Channels of Desire (1992), Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen describe how capitalist society redefines the entire scope of our existence in terms of consumption. In their words, “consumption is a social relationship, the dominant relationship in our society – one that makes it harder and harder for people to hold together, to create community.”[4] The world we live in is one where survival is made to depend on consumption, “a world where it increasingly makes sense that if there are solutions to be had, they can be bought.”[5] This is especially evident as capitalism erodes the notion of the public good, leading to social systems where basic human rights such as housing and healthcare must be purchased. It is made clear that, in order to survive, people and entities need to operate within the capitalist logic, that is, they must create profit for capital. In practice, for workers, this contribution can only be made through wage-labor during the work day, and consumption in their free time. It is logical, then, that capitalism tends to restrict the scope of our lives to these two activities. We spend a lot of time and energy looking for work, preparing for work, and working. For Adorno, even “amusement under capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again.”[6] In our remaining time, we have little strength for the labor of building community, of caring for ourselves and for one another, of imagining different ways of being and then acting towards them. This kind of political labor is not profitable, and is therefore not facilitated by the capitalist infrastructure. In contrast, consumption is promoted, encouraged, and rewarded. Think of how abundant commodities are, the wide variety of desires they are designed to fulfill, and how simplified the act of consumption has become. Consumption tends to become the last free action that we are able to perform.

We have just observed a dual movement of capitalism: a constructive movement that builds an illusory world of political commodities and equates consumption with political action, and a destructive movement that restricts our action to the sole act of consumption. To understand the result of this process, it is helpful to draw on Adorno’s analysis of horoscopes. Adorno claims that we find the rules of our social system hard to comprehend, and yet we are told they are rational and thus implacable. In response, astrology projects our social system “upon the stars,”[7] creating an image of our world that is similarly mysterious and inexorable. Although we know this world to be an equivalent delusion, astrology promises that we can make sense of it through simple, practical, and individual actions. Astrology “survives by […] demanding so little while apparently offering so much.”[8] Political commodification works in very much the same way. It projects our complex political situation onto a world of political commodities, where the only action we need to perform is the only action we can perform: consumption. Unlike the real world, which makes us feel helpless, this mystical world provides soothing answers and a simple path to action. In so doing, it justifies the status quo “by presenting a benign image of society requiring only conformity […] and limited individual effort”[9] (emphasis mine).

Green consumerism, per Slavoj Zizek’s analysis,[10] is perhaps the most stupefying example of this phenomenon. Climate change promises to leave millions of us dead or displaced and eventually make our planet inhabitable, and the capitalist mode of production is in no small part responsible for it. Capitalist consumption in particular, which requires unlimited natural resources and produces equally unlimited waste products, has proven to be unsustainable. It would make sense, then, that our approach to preventing a climate catastrophe would include changing our relation to production and consumption. Yet, incredibly, the most marketed and advertised solution is green consumerism. Capital does not ignore the political emergency; on the contrary, it commodifies the language and symbols of climate justice and makes them available for consumption through organic products, fair trade coffee, ‘recyclable’ packaging, etc. Again, the only action we are encouraged to perform is consumption, and we are promised that by consuming just the right commodities we will literally save the world. In our anxiety towards impending global doom, and our desire to live and be free, we might find the clarity to build a fairer, post-capitalist world. Yet capital is hard at work, and our energy is channeled through a paradigm of consumption that leaves the capitalist system intact, and is indeed profitable to it. And so, instead of bringing the oil industry to justice for their contributions to climate change, and simultaneous efforts to suppress climate action, we find ourselves in an inverted world where the oil industry makes us pledge to be responsible consumers.[11]

Up to this point we have observed how the logical movement of capitalism replaces political action, which is potentially threatening, by consumption, which is docile and profitable. We now turn to how political commodification is used deliberately, to create a malleable, elusive, and confusing reality that suffocates political action. We have already seen how the real world, to which we can relate in an infinite variety of ways, is veiled by a world of commodities, to which we can only relate through consumption. In this way, the current structure of the world is crystallized: its faces dance and glimmer as commodities change, but the act of consumption leaves the structure intact. This constructed world can be understood in terms of Debord’s ‘spectacle’, where “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation”[12] and “fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.”[13] The spectacle is a construction, yet it permeates our lives; it determines how we interpret the real world, and mediates how we interact with it. Ultimately, its purpose is to serve as a “total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.”[14] In other words, the spectacle is the living embodiment of capitalist hegemony.

Debord argues that the spectacle’s only message is that “what appears is good; what is good appears.”[15] In practice, this means that the spectacle is a powerful normalizing force. One could then argue that commodification may also be used to normalize progressive political concepts. This argument is often made about the recent popularization of both feminist and LGBTQ language, symbols, and imagery. We argue that normalization cuts both ways. In the first place, because oppressive political concepts are routinely normalized through the spectacle. One may think about how binary gender is normalized through gendered toys and products, or how the police, prisons, and the military are made to seem normal, good and necessary in popular entertainment. Nonetheless it is also true that, for the spectacle to maintain its legitimacy, it must track social reality. Therefore, as the discourse around gender and sexuality changes, a new representation of these concepts is integrated into the spectacle, disseminated through it, and thus normalized.

Yet, just as the spectacle enforces acceptance, it also enforces passivity. Concepts like gender and policing are well entrenched in the structure of society, which means that they are best served by passive acceptance. In contrast, progressive understandings of gender and sexuality are still fragile, and need sustained political action to fully unfold in the world. As a world of commodities, what the spectacle assimilates is the appearance of political change, not actual political change. In consequence, the spectacle creates an illusion of progress which far surpasses the concrete political situation. This legitimizes the current social system by creating an illusory alliance between capital and the political movements it commodifies, while simultaneously making further political action seem unnecessary to the general public. The current situation of gay pride marches is a good illustration of this phenomenon. Gay pride was started by a riot against the police, rooted in the understanding that gender, race, and class intersect with sexuality to maintain the violent oppression of LGBTQ people. Today, corporations have encroached on the event, and calls by Black activists to reject police participation are received with anger and disdain. In the real world, gender, race, and class still intersect with sexuality, and both the police and capitalist corporations are still oppressive institutions. Yet, in the spectacle, LGBTQ freedom can appear to exist, and those institutions can appear to be allies.

The deceptive nature of the spectacle is further reinforced by the capitalists’ ability to redefine the meaning of political objects. As they control the production and dissemination of political commodities, capitalists gain sway over their social meaning. As we have seen before, although the political commodity is distinct from the political object it has appropriated, the two entities are often considered one and the same by most of the public. In consequence, as the meaning of the political commodity is changed, the social meaning of the political object also changes. In Black Looks (1992), bell hooks discusses the “commodification of blackness.”[16] Speaking of the political objects of black nationalism – “black nationalist rhetoric […] golden medallions”[17] – hooks observes how commodification “strips these signs of political integrity and meaning, denying the possibility that they can serve as a catalyst for concrete political action,”[18] thus reducing black nationalist “protest to spectacle.”[19] As political commodities, these objects are redefined as a consumable “fantasy of Otherness.”[20] This, hooks argues, is a cultural strategy to appease “masses of [mostly white] young people dissatisfied by U.S. imperialism, unemployment, lack of economic opportunity.”[21] Mass frustration is channeled through consumption, while black nationalism finds itself misused and misunderstood.

Political objects are often used to communicate beliefs and strategies, to create unity and obtain social recognition. Through commodification, capital uproots meaning from concrete reality, and intentionally splinters communication. The meaning of a thing is always up for debate, no matter who created it, no matter what it was intended to do. Reality becomes disorienting, and political movements find themselves in a losing battle for meaning against the immense forces of capital. The wider public may use their vocabulary, repeat their slogans, and wear their styles, but they do not acknowledge the movement on its own terms, on the way it has defined itself through political work. Rather, the movement is understood on the terms of capital, in the form it deems most convenient. Without a common understanding of the meaning of its political objects, the political movement finds itself isolated, voiceless, concealed.

We have seen how political commodification can build a world, lay it around us, between us, and within us, and thus reconfigure our entire existence. In so doing, it enshrines the current social system, and prevents us from bringing about our own worlds. The infinite possible movements of life are constricted into the single act of consumption; then, that one act is given an infinite world of commodities to exercise its freedom. This spectacular world is enticing and reassuring at first, because it allows us to believe that things are mostly okay. Yet many of us feel a tension, because the experience of our everyday lives tells us they are not. Often, this tension just leaves us deeply confused because, in the spectacle, meaning is independent from reality, it is rooted in nothing at all. We can find moral clarity, maybe, by grounding ourselves, our knowledge, and meaning, in what cannot be commodified: concrete help, acts of caring, living relationships, active communities, that is, in collective struggle, in the pure concept in motion. By building bonds that we trust, and doing work that we know to be good, we can steadily unfold another world.