A Culture Is a Commodity
Now that society is becoming, ever more interconnected, perhaps it is time to look at what exactly that means in a social sense. Marxists have known for a while that capitalism and imperialism require ever-expanding markets, and while there are no new lands for people to wander off to “discover,” a new phenomenon has developed: commodity culture.
If we take cultural exchange, and recognize that there are unequal relationships between cultures within economic, cultural, and social exchanges, we begin to see what I’m talking about. Let’s ask a basic question first: “what is culture?” Ultimately, the answer has to be something along the lines of a shared system of activities typically held as standard within a society at large. If we understand that one of the primary ways through which a person experiences culture is through communication, which is now a commodity, then we get the picture.
First, though, let’s talk about communication. How is communication a commodity? It helps to view people as Marx viewed them, as units of labor-power; people are commodities. Furthermore, social interactions fit into what Mao described as “social practice,” which envelops a person’s place in producing things (whether they’re an employer or employee in producing value), their political activity, class struggle, and artistic and scientific pursuits (See Mao, “On Practice”). In other words, according to Marx, people are what they do; what they do includes politics, class struggle, making value, and artistic and scientific projects. Culture falls under two of these things; people produce objects that are considered cultural, and thereby are producing the culture itself.
People also produce culture through how they act within the society as a whole; gender is a part of culture, and how people enact their genders is a form of cultural expression. Culture, politics, class struggle, and production are all material relations; the society can only be considered as a combination of all material relations. This has significant implications when we discuss the process of globalization.
When globalization comes up for debate in politics, it is often thought to be positive. More people have more access to more products economically, and more cultures become known to more people, and so on. The problem is that this is not the case; people who produce or act out the culture of a group become objects upon a market, and “cultural experiences” such as going to a shaman in Peru disrupts the development of that culture. In Peru, most of the “experiences” of shamanic rituals are dictated by how the tourists think shamanic rituals should be; something that goes against their relation to the ritual or how they have received it from their process of coming to know the practice would be eliminated from the marketplace. Global capitalism distorts cultures, rather than increasing our exposure to new cultures.
In ways, capitalism can lead to ethnic cleansing, in which the defining characteristics of an ethnicity with a culture considered unprofitable might be eradicated by market forces. Ultimately the thing determining what is or is not profitable, must be the westerner; Euro-settlers make up the vast majority of tourists who engage in cultural tourism, and thus they provide the only market on which the cultures might be bought. Even taking the most charitable of economic assumptions brought to bear on capitalism, understood by capitalists themselves as positives, the consumer of these cultures is the determinant for what is or is not profitable, and when a tourist comes to expect and pay for a particular relation to the culture they are visiting, this means that the less profitable cultures die. When the Euro-settler determines what is or is not profitable, it means that the actual authenticity of the culture does not matter, as the Euro-settler understands the external culture through their own material experiences (in a different culture). Thus, the more profitable cultures are those which align with Euro-settler expectations for their purchase.
No authentic culture is profitable. As such, the natural tendency of global capitalism is to eradicate the “inefficient” or “unprofitable” commodities and cultures, and to replace them with models of efficiency. Capitalism can thus easily justify a genocide as a correction of a behavior that is “naturally” inferior to the present process of production. This leads to two things, the destruction of cultures, and the alienation of cultures from the people who actually participate in them. Cultural acts become things to be bought and sold, and cultures fragment, leading to alienation between members of the culture, and its eventual destruction.
