Why we are selling ourselves in 2016: An economic explanation (a ghostwrite)
Last month I was here talking about French theorist Pierre Bourdieu and the importance of considering not only who you know but who you can know when evaluating your social networks. Today, I want to talk not who or how you know, but instead why we are so very focused on selling ourselves. There is a theoretical explanation for this, and that explanation goes something like this:
Remember reading Marx in college? Or maybe that was the Cold War and so you didn’t, but here is what Karl-Marx-the-economic-historian (as opposed to the revolutionary) said when describing our contemporary economic system.
He said capitalism demands growth or risks imploding. Grossly oversimplifying Capital Vol 1 (but hey, this is blog), Marx said, “You start with capital, which you invest in raw materials and rents, you add-in labor, a cost likewise assumed by the capitalist (yeah, yeah, assume you own a factory, here), and then you come out with a produced commodity, something that holds the value of the capital you invested up front, along with additional capital―PS we call this additional capital ‘profit.’” Those are my words and Marx’s ideas. Are you with me?
So you start with money (M) to get a commodity (C) and you must also get, by definition or the whole system breaks down, more money (M’). That “more money” is what you reinvest to continue to build your business, improve your home, guarantee your children’s educations, etc., etc. In short: M — C — M’
This is a whole lot like the Labor Theory of Value, mathematically expressed as c + L = W (where c = capital invested up front, L = labor, and w = wert (German for worth)). Except, while Adam Smith and David Ricardo, for example, took resultant worth for granted, as a just reflection of supply and demand curves, Marx spent significant time writing about how to drive that worth up (meanwhile Friedrich Engels slipped cash to Marx’s wife and kids so they could continue to eat, no lie).
In short, Marx wanted historically relevant and socially contextualized explanations for profits. Which is how he came up with the idea of the fetish.
“Marx came up with the fetish?,” you ask, but in fact, the anthropologists were using the word before Marx to talk about *primitive* religions and *false* idols. Yeah, see what Marx did there? All snarky and stuff.
So way before fetish meant sex practices about which you hope your in-laws don’t find out, but after it meant false idol, it meant the process of driving up a product’s value to significantly more than one’s input costs.
Consider: you buy Nike shoes for $500 when you know those Nike shoes did not cost $500 in materials and rents and labor, no? Or if not Nikes then Fryes or something. That part that makes you value the shoe above its inputs, that’s the fetish. And sure, you remember this from college now, but here’s what you haven’t considered:
When Marx and Adams and Ricardo wrote, laborers sold industrial labor. They sold their abilities to sit in chairs and fit widgets into holes on a production line for a mind numbing number of hours each week, and with the returns on that labor they went home and reproduced and maybe even leisured a bit. Do you know what percent of the US labor force is currently working jobs like that? Or better question: do you know what percentage of the US labor force is now working in either goods producing industries or agriculture? Less than 20 percent according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2015.
And this, then, becomes my point: 80 percent of us are working in the same economic system all those old econ theory guys described. However, we are not making things, the way those old guys described. Value, our value, and we mean the value of each of us in the 80 percent of the US labor force producing and selling services, has never been in fitting widgets into holes.
The widgets are already fit. Or they are getting fit by the sub-sub-sub-contracted. Instead, we sell, which is another word for serve, which is another word for build human to human relationships at the micro-level.
We make things of another sort, emotive things that include client confidence and security and satisfaction and even, sometimes, joy. This, in 2016, is where value lies. And because this is where value lies, this is what must now be fetishized if profits rank among our end goals. By definition.
M — C — M’.
In short, the difference between now and then is that C in the present tense, the commodity you produce, is social and not material. It is your labor, not the fruits of your labor. It is how and who you are. It is the ideas in your head that become credible when paired with how and who you are. And this, my dears, is why we are selling ourselves in 2016…
