Human Products
Criticisms of capitalist-industrial society are old hat to anyone with any exposure whatever to its human component parts. We consistently hear tittering of the "The Rat Race;" we recall tales from our school days of the most oppressive of assembly lines or canneries from bygone times, where soul-killing labor was performed ad nauseum in disgusting conditions under the oppressive glare of fat cat, profit-driven barons. Thoughts of this nature tend to strike us with a feeling of relief - thank God I didn't have to live through that – after which we stop our daydreaming and turn back to shuffling papers, breathing the re-circulated air under fluorescent lights while we attempt to block out the incessant din and chatter of our insufferable co-workers.
Many would consider this a marked improvement, and granted, some of the pointless and abject dangers of normal work have been eliminated. But what has been gained in their place? Seemingly, the tedious slavery of grueling toil has been replaced with that of the insipid tedium of "work" for purely abstracted ends. How, despite our beneath-the-surface criticism and the dread we feel associated with our jobs and ways-of-life, does this system continue to perpetuate?
One could quickly assert, and be partly right, that this is a system that has been thrust upon us externally – that the will of the average person to simply exist requires a passive participation, at minimum,  which throws momentum to the system by its very nature, a momentum that thrusts it onward to no conceivable end. However, as history (and our own intuition, and death metal) tends to teach us, internal decay can't be far down the line of causality when these sea changes occur. In picture perfect retrospect, it seems enough were ready to give themselves over to make the turning of the tides a foregone conclusion. As the market economy made commodity of the planet, we willingly turned ourselves into products ready for quick consumption by the same.
While playing up to the law of Supply and Demand, we uproot ourselves in pursuit of lucrative jobs, leaving our cities a heterogeneous mess of others with similarly shallow goals but no overarching, binding culture. We interact with these others in the only way we know how: by playing up our carefully cultivated personalities and pitching them for sale. Our spare time with those we meet in this fashion is spent chasing pleasures with diminishing returns, carefully calculating and making efficient our purchases, leisure and activities as we cycle through the process with all the other semi-anonymous "individuals" struggling against us in life's marketplace, all the while making jokes about quitting our jobs and pursuing our dreams, but having no real means or sincere desire to do so – if we can even remember what our real dreams were.
On a personal level, the break from this depressing life-capitalism is a decidedly simple one. Most of the forms are intact, but have been stripped of any significance by a process that requires toothless versions of everything for sale to a mind-numbed populace. Do, don't "buy;" connect, don't "interact;" learn and understand, don't "hear" or "see." These may seem exceedingly simple credos, but an equally simple glance around reveals them to be too difficult for most – those broken, human products – to understand. Only when we have re-made ourselves as living, breathing entities again are we able to understand the treachery of such a synthetic existence.
by Markus Nordman
May 2, 2007
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