When Did We Become Products?

In the case of the extreme center the thesis we established was The Extreme Center is the established neoliberal order trying to defend a failed political system that was based on mediocrity, “concepts of a plan” and the attack of another. Now this thesis will be the one we will continue following but now we will also explore the private industries involvement in the extreme center. So the thesis might sound more like The Extreme Center is the established neoliberal order trying to defend a failed political system based on mediocrity, ‘concepts of a plan,’ and the attack of another — extended now through the commodification of the worker. We are no longer just politically pacified, but ontologically reduced to products of satisfaction, consumed and consuming.. In 1967 Guy Debord published his book The Society of the Spectacle. The book is a criticism of a capitalist society where the working class is reduced to a society of spectators who watch whatever is given to them on their television. He writes “The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy (or today's extreme center) cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice because it has to make all choices itself, and any choice made independently whether regarding music, food or anything else is a declaration of war against it” (Debord,1967). This quote and the book as a whole was ahead of its time. While Debord foresaw a media-dominated society, he could not have anticipated how technology, particularly the smartphone, would intensify the spectacle and the commodification of the worker. This shift became clear on January 9th, 2007 when Steve Jobs appeared on stage at the Macworld conference and said “(His company) Apple would "reinvent the phone" and that this was "a revolutionary product that changes everything" (Jobs, 2007). The 'dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy,' as Debord calls it, had extended its control, fundamentally changing the relationship between the average person and the ruling class. In the Debordion framework he says that a worker remains a worker/ proletarian during his shift and it is when he returns home to watch television that he takes the role of commodification. The Iphone changes this, the worker no longer has to wait until he is home, and instead remains a commodification his entire life losing his title of worker at all. This shift prompts multiple questions. What is a worker today? What Society do we live in? Where are we going today? What should the working class do? Most importantly, How does the extreme center exploit the commodification of the worker to remain in power? This paper argues that today's worker has been transformed into an actor of mere satisfaction, a passive participant in a society driven by instant gratification and constant commodified engagement. To reclaim a dignified existence, the working class must reject this imposed satisfaction, resist commodification through collective organization, and reclaim media as a tool for worker consciousness rather than consumer distraction.

Today the word worker must be redefined according to the environment we live. The dictionary has worker defined as “A person doing an activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result”. This definition is flawed for multiple reasons. First a person doing a physical effort can also be called a labourer and for this paper it is my finding that although labourers do participate in the commodification process, they are somewhat protected as they still work in the classic sense, and therefore must be treated differently than the average office worker of the developed world. The average office worker of the developed world or what will from this point forward be referred to as a worker, has an incredibly easy job. A.I has changed this, tasks that used to take all day, can be done in 5 minutes leaving the worker finished their shift realistically three hours in. Of course they will pretend to keep busy but this is all an act. In reality they are scrolling social media, online shopping or watching/ listening to something becoming a commodity as they work. Noam Chomsky in an interview once said that “A job is about control, as long as you are employed the state has you in their hands. Your wealth, welfare and life is now based around them.” The commodification process is no longer reserved for the home, so what is a worker? Following the premise of Chomsky's point, this paper proposes that a worker is a person who is kept occupied with meaningless tasks, to ensure that he will continue purchasing goods that he does not need and not realize the situation that he is in. The worker is today the hand that keeps the extreme center moving. A worker is not there to contribute to society, everything he does can be done by tools such as A.I, outsourced for cheaper labour or is not needed at all (as we see from constant headlines of hundreds of workers being fired at a time.) What the system needs the worker to work for is to keep him satisfied and feeling like he does not need more, specifically that workers don't feel a need for a change of system. The extreme center line of reasoning often resonates with Winston Churchill's famous saying “Democracy is the worst form of government except for those other ones tested from time to time.” Is this not what the extreme center does every time that workers try to unionize at Amazon for example, just with a few more steps. It goes like this: "Capitalism is the worst system, we accept that and understand that it puts you in precarious situations where you work long hours, don’t see your kids and don't get paid a good wage but at least you have “freedom” and food to eat unlike socialist countries.” Now, I am far from being the first to say that the average worker is exploited but saying that the average worker is useless is a uniquely 21st century thing to say.When I say this however I am (for the most part) not criticising the proletariat but instead the position that the proletariat is put in by the extreme center. The only thing the proletariat can be criticised for is for acting like an abused wife who knows all the horrible things their husbands do both to them and others and yet stay. We live in interesting times, where a social media comment can fall into philosophy essay but was the random user not right when he said “our loyalty to capitalism will be questioned for centuries once everything capitalism aided (to inject myself into this comment, exploitation  of workers, the destruction of our planet, famines etc…) by the extreme center comes to its climax” Is this climax not presented to us in the Disney movie Wall-e. Specifically there is a certain aspect of the movie that is crucially relevant today. In Wall-e, humans have destroyed earth through overconsumption and pollution and retreated to space in Cruise Ships where they do nothing but continue to overconsume, pollute and cease walking as they decide that instead it is easier to take mobility scooters. Humans accept their fate, but more importantly do not accept the consequences of their actions and escape the destroyed earth. In real life however, we have no way to escape the Earth, Zizek has a term for this uniquely human problem. He calls it the “spaceship earth”, the fact that we only have one earth should lead us to treat it as a spaceship, not one that we can escape but instead one that we are tied to, what happens to the earth happens to us. Is this not the same thing as a “spaceship job”? Today workers are the same, we accept that A.I is coming for our jobs, we accept that the ruling class is going to lay us off in the hundreds as soon as keeping us satisfied is not as important as the money they would save and yet we still accept commodification? We accept our fate, but do not react to the actions of our own consequences. 

This commodification is not just economic it’s political, shaping loyalty and obedience. The society we live in, is one where both Donald Trump and Hitler were elected democratically, but they have different goals. Hitlers goal was to make the Aryan race pure, destroy the Jews and conquer the world Donalds Trump is different.. His goal is to instil a group of workers loyal to the upper class, willing to be commodified and to follow his political order, as well as pledge allegiance to the extreme center, to the idea that the capitalist American Dream is still alive.  It is reported that to get a federal government job in the United States you must write four paragraphs as to why you are loyal to Trump. Yet instead of standing up to it, the working class is going along with it and writing essays. Although the interesting aspect of Trumps new presidency is his new friendship with the Techbros of silicon valley. Remember as soon as it looked that Trump was going to win the election, Mark Zuckerberg and all his friends were calling Trump both to congratulate him and to work together. This brings up two interesting points. First, the realisation that the extreme center is actually not threatened by the fascist threat that is Donald Trump that they often pretend to stand against. The same Silicon Valley poster boys of the extreme center who campaigned against Trump, have now cozied up to him. Due to the simple fact let alone that the extreme center is not about what is best for the worker but instead what is best for profits and the established Neoliberal order, it is even often apolitical. Remember the definition “The Extreme Center is the established neoliberal order trying to defend a failed political system that was based on mediocrity”. If it serves the extreme center to work with Trump or Le Pen they will just instead of doing it politically they will do it through business. Although Mark Carney might pretend to stand against Trump, if you see his business practices you would think they are the same person, two greedy businessmen who do not think of the other for a second. Secondly, in the case of the worker we have developed Stockham Syndrome, or in more specific terms we have become the product. The worker accepts becoming the product because they are kept “satisfied" by the extreme center. For the worker this satisfaction stems from having the newest iphone, clothes or accessories. These accessories as Zizek put very well in his book Sublime of Ideology when talking about Nike shoes said “If you take the logo away, you take the price away as well. You are not paying for the shoe but instead paying for the display of wealth.” Now there are two issues stemming from this. First, the fact that the working class is so satisfied with their commodification that they continue to purchase these goods that they do not need. They throw away their money but as well destroy the environment. These shoes and goods take an incredible amount of water to make, use cheap labour made on the other side of the world and still have to be shipped to their homeland, but second. Workers have reached a further level of commodification, they now use apps such as Klarna that lets them pay things in instalments. In a virial piece a person bought a taco that would have cost 7 dollars, for 80 instalments of 50 cents for the next 160 months. This means that the vendor would be making 40 dollars. Now for a small vendor this story is both amusing as well as not the issue we are after, the issue becomes when companies such as Nike will pull the same trick for more money but more importantly. Buying that taco seems like an absurd one off joke, until you realize that buying useless consumer goods with apps like Klara has been normalized. So why does this matter, when we struggle to buy things in instalments, private companies and greedy individuals are buying houses at incredible rates, the new generation of workers (which i’m included in) is the first generation that is not expected to own a house in their lifetime. If this was an egalitarian society based on the needs of the people, that had eliminated the need for private ownership I would be celebrating. However the greed of a few wealthy individuals leading to a housing crisis must be confronted. It leads us to becoming a product that we had never imagined, even the simple act of breathing in a near future could have a cost.

So what do we do, the simple and first action is resistance, as of today most workers are passive actors who accept their commodification. Instead we must be aware of what we purchase, what we spend our time following. Lenin often spoke of the need for the vanguard wing of a revolution, the wing of workers most able and willing to take on the cause. Why do we not see this today? To resist it we must have people not asking when we become products? But instead, how do we become people again? Until we resist the commodification of the extreme center we remain products, not people.