If I return to hip hop over and over to explain the dynamics
of capitalism, it is because hip hop more than any other genre of contemporary
popular music faces directly the economic realities of our times. Unlike many
of the fantasies generated by affirmative culture in which we retain the purity
of our souls, hip hop maintains that there is no place that guarantees freedom
from the material necessities of capitalist society.
Perhaps the most stunning moment in Capital is when after a
long explication of how a useful thing becomes something meaningful in the
logic of capital only because it can be exchanged and thus enters into the
world of money as a value, Marx makes commodities speak. This is what they say:
“Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as
objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural
intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing
but exchange values.” In other words, capital transforms things that are made
and used by people into objects whose primary value is defined by
their ability to be exchanged with one another. Specifically, these things,
commodities, are understood as having an intrinsic value that is different and
separate from the way we use or consume them and which can be expressed as a
price in the ultimate medium of exchange, money. This price becomes its value and
allows us to relate and compare it to other things that also have a price. When
things relate to each other primarily as commodities they are in a sense freed
from the human labor that produced them and the human necessities they satisfy.
They can stand side by side as objects defined by what they cost. This is what
makes Marx’s rhetorical move to give commodities a chance to speak so
effective. So doing, he makes his argument concrete and tangible: in
capitalism, relationships between people are replaced by relationships between
things. Human labor and human needs are effaced by the “value” of commodities,
which seem to come from the things themselves as their own natural property.
Capitalism describes a society with generalized commodity
production. Our society is capitalist because nearly all of us work in the
production of commodities (we make things or provide services primarily for people
to purchase) and we treat our own labor-power, the amount of work we can do in
a specific amount of time, as a commodity we exchange for money. But while we
are often under the illusion that we willingly sell our labor-power, that no
one forces us to work, we nonetheless do not have the liberty to not work for
wages. If we were able to provide for ourselves outside of wage labor, then
capital would be unable to function. That is why capital compels us to sell our
labor-power whether we want to or not and that is the engine that keeps
commodities and money in circulation.
