Content area
Full Text
The distinction between being and having produces terrible anxieties for critics of consumer culture. For the young Karl Marx, it is the key difference between a real human paradise and a hellish state of alienation, and in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he indicts the capitalist world for preferring the possession of commodities to the cultivation of human senses. Objects themselves are not the problem, and indeed Marx claims that "only through the objectively unfolded richness of man's essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility ... either cultivated or brought into being."1 The only way to understand and cultivate what we are is to work on the world, to manifest what we are in objects and practices. In a rational world, every individual could test his or her being, and the success or failure of that labor reveals the truth of each person. For instance, if one wants to enjoy art, one must work to become "an artistically cultivated person" (105). But such a becoming is by no means guaranteed. For instance, "if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent-a misfortune" (105). Achieving a state of being is so valuable because it reveals a hard-fought truth. Capitalism, however, makes a black magic out of money that "is the general confounding and compounding of all things," or simply "the world upside down" (105). With enough money, anyone can avoid the labor of being for the ease of having. With money, "what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women" (103). The labor of becoming is exchanged for the ease of having, but the price is the terrible alienation of a lie.
The problem of being and having is not unique to just money, but becomes the underlying problem of all commodities. In Capital, Marx succinctly defines the problem of the commodity form, maintaining that "the relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between...