There is really no good term that we can employ; one that expresses all that the "market" really is and encompasses. As I have stated several times now, "the market is beyond religion and politics". This very fact is demonstrated by the marketing efforts of most, if not all, of the major religious affiliations---seen as competition for converts grows in much the same way that businesses compete for market share in specific demographics. The religious person is a marketing target. Market forces and ideologies are subsuming religion and political ideologies.

Even when we take such disparate political ideologies as democracy and communism, as embodied in the United States and China respectively, we still can see and note the bright lights of the market blotting out the dark challenges of political ideologues in distinct opposition. The issues of trade and opening up the Market to more consumers transcends the issues of differing political ideologies (along with such banalities as human rights abuses, slave labor, and the transference of jobs from home to abroad).

When we look closer we can see how the Market allows for an exchange of ideologies and concepts, information and cultural artifacts; when political ideologies would most likely prevent that exchange. The nature of our greed is knocking down the borders and boundaries of ideology. One of the seven deadly sins is serving to open us up to each other... as nations... as groups... as cultures... as importers and exporters of goods and ideas that we want to exchange so as to turn a profit for ourselves.

Let's take The United States of America and The Peoples Republic of China as an example. The USA sees potential consumers for their goods in just the same way that China sees an influx of capital investment in infrastructure and the like. United States Capital is investing in Chinese infrastructure so as to take advantage of both a cheap labor force and the future boom of consumers for American-style goods. The notion of business is shared in common; the desire for an increase in wealth through trade, through exchange, through the Market transcends political differences. All of the investment and involvement in the Market occurs despite political and religious differences. And to me this is "the" most amazing fact of postmodernism---one that often goes unnoticed.

As we focus on the discrepancies and differences that still present themselves we miss out on the great commonality that is sweeping the globe come hell or high water. We are one under the heading of the Market; as Market place we are global. Commodities and labor are global. Capital is global. Information flows are global. The Market is global. No other ideology can proclaim this. No religion can proclaim this. Only the Market can proclaim this: "I am Global".

Sure, we still have differences, and those differences will still be expressed. At the same time that these differences are expressed they will continue to be expressed within the marketplace---as all has become differences and similarities become commodified. Again, all that we know has become commodified, as all is included in the Market. We cannot separate ourselves from the Market. We are all within the range of the Market. This is the one single greatest unifying element that, according to my knowledge, has not been noted as such. Not as ideology anyway.

The irony of this unification of the globe is striking when we consider all of the talk around uniting the diverse peoples of the world as one. From Teilhard de Chardin to the Christian evangelical mission, from Alexander the Great to the Nationalistic Imperialism of the 19^th Century, many have voiced a desire and a will to "see" such a unifying force come about. For centuries upon centuries the highest call of Power was to unify the peoples of the earth under one or another ideological or religious heading. Christianity and Islam made their attempts, as have Democracy and Communism, along with leaders like Alexander the Great and Adolph Hitler. But none have succeeded to the extent that the Market has. And I shall, from now, capitalize the term "Market" so as to signify the overwhelming force and influence that it possesses as the Adam Smithian "impersonal hand"; one that is continually, and without fail, unifying the peoples of the world for good or ill, in sickness and in health.

 

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When we notice only the particularities of the market, the differences that are quite apparent, what we miss out on is the great unifying force that underlies and allows for those differences. For whatever reason, we become so caught up chasing after and/or rebelling against the various Market forces and factors, that we completely miss out on the realization of the present and continuous unification of the worlds people in one Market. The unprecedented nature of this event leads me to assume that we don't really have any clue what it would look like---so, when it does come along we are not likely to recognize it. Yet, it is here. We are in it. The Market.

We must still be cautious; for the moment that we begin to claim that all the differences are, in fact, far superior than the unification factor, then we are right back again into the land of struggle over claims of difference. What this entails is that we hold onto, stay with the realization long enough, close to us, so as to integrate that realization. Before we go back to making and drawing distinctions based on difference once again, let us try and hold to what is shared; which is the force of the Market and the non-conscious ideological motivations that are induced in all of its subjects.

It seems that the differences are more apparent, they leap out and we are so used to seeing them that these are all we notice anymore. What happens is that perception becomes entrained to notice the differences, and cannot see how those very differences are in fact various tributarial streams of one Great River that I have been calling "the Market". Frederic Jameson gives us a clue as to why we may not see how the unification is proceeding, and that this is due to the nature of how we represent and map the present and emerging global order. He states that "our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping the network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself" (the Market). That "whole decentered global network of the third stage of capital" is the very Market we have been illuminating here; it is that global domain of capitalitic interests that has subsumed all other interests as secondary to its own.

Just one example of how prevalent this network of "late capitalism" is: A story that ran on the American TV news show 60 Minutes told of how the Russian military was selling rides in their MIG fighter jets to American businessman in order to raise money to pay for the production of spare parts and the necessary maintenance on those jets. This is one story---and no doubt there are may others---which shows how far we have come.... or rather how far the Market has taken us. The Market knows no military bounds, no boundaries of espionage, or political considerations. The Market cares not where you get your capital and what you do with it. Sure governments and bureaucracies still profess to care---but not the Market-never the Market.

The Market: the "whole decentered global network of the third stage of capital" is the ideological force of our times, that has both material power and psycholgical cunning. Involvement and investment in the Market is primary, all else is secondary according to this new ideology.

The fact that the Market is indiscriminate, that prior boundaries and divisions crumble in its gaze, are a sign of an event that carries great consequences. The Market becomes... or rather, has become totalitarian in a sense.

In the sense that the Market unifies it also absolutizes and totalizes.

This is the threat of any structure or organization that becomes too inclusive. What happens is that few groups can resist the Market: the nature of the Market and our relationship with it becomes a survival issue. As Stewart Brand states in his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, "if you're not part of the steamroller you're part of the road." Here Brand merely points to a fundamental duality (steamroller of power vs. road of oppressed bodies) in relation to the Market and that Engine of Progress that promises techno-ascendance over all former constraints on humanity in the coming centuries. For a few who ride steamrollers. The rest are just a necessary sacrifice for those who do not adapt fast enough to the "definition of reality" handed down from the laboratory thrones at such places as MIT.

Totalizing systems, as we see reflected and embodied in totalitarian states, tend to eliminate dissension. The techno-engines do the same. The Myth of E-Progress exacts a tribute in the form of a sacrifice paid by all of those who question the steamroller metaphor as the "way of life in the future". Aspects incongruent with the motive and intent of the system per se, need to be removed, and this usually means people and places, cultures and clans, customs and content all need to be either made to align with the intent of the totalizing system or simply need to be purged from the all inclusiveness of the system itself. If we draw comparisons between a fascist dictatorship that purges all rebellion form the rank and file public, and the Market, which ever more and more dictates how one shall live and what are the conditions that need to be met---we come to find that there are many similarities. It pays for us to be cautious. And to not necessarily assume that just because the totalizing Market appears to give us back a few desirable nuggets, that this means that we have freedom and equality, that we are in fact free-agents. In all likelihood we are anything but free agents.

The Market assures us that we must perform in accordance with what the Market allows. The negligence of this truth leaves us on the fringes, as outcasts who are also commodified and philanthropically designated as viable reservoirs for dumping and off-loading capital so as to make the proverbial winners in the game feel good about themselves (not to mention a good write off for tax season). When Jameson hints that the market is a "Leviathan in sheep's clothing" he is not exaggerating. The Market is monstrous in size and scope---is the Adam Smithian "impersonal hand" of a heretofore new global social order, which will result in radical resocialization; a novel cultural re-education for the masses.

 

34

The Market determines value. The valuation of goods and labor, even of capital, is set accordingly to some chaotic attractor working within the Market. Now, the value of commodities is not always sensible. In other words, the values of the Market may not be, directly, the most intrinsic values of Being-human per se.

Those who are able to play widely in the Market are also able to set the value of commodities (including labor). The least ironic fact of the Market itself is that those who are not producers get to be the main beneficiaries of the Market. A farmer who produces a commodity such as wheat has little to no control in relation to the Market, i.e., is unable to set the price at which his or her crop shall sell. The farmer must sell the fruit of this years labors according to what the Market says is the present value of the crop, that labors, work, blood, sweat and tears. So, the farmer has no freedom in relation to the Market. The farmer is bound by the Market. The Market has become an "impersonal hand", something that the "personal" cannot control but very little, if at all.

The farmer cannot go to someone and tell them, "Hey, these prices are way too low. I am losing money. It cost me more to plant the crop than I am going to get back by selling it at this price." The answer comes back: "I am sorry. There is nothing we can do. The Market value of your crop is determined by supply and demand, and right now supply is overwhelming demand so the value of that commodity is dwindling." In short, the impersonal force of the Market, that is at once everywhere and nowhere, is dictating how and what the current value of the whole world is to be... including people---Nature, wildness and sex... including everything... everything.

In a labor intensive Market, where labor itself is in high demand, we are assured that the Market will determine that wage values will increase-simply because the demand for labor is overwhelming the supply of labor available. Hence, wages are said to increase, or the value of labor as a commodity increases. Now, what is labor? Labor is people, animals, machines; and the people who run machines and husband animals. Labor is the ability to produce, to work.

The essential irony of our times is that the supply of labor is dwindling at the exact same time that we all appear to have more exchange value., i.e., Capital. This imbalance---that capital appears to be increasing at the same time that labor-as a commodity---is in ever higher and higher demand---turns out to be a great tragedy; a major inequity and downfall of the latest capitalistic expansion that matches the gross inequities of prior capitalistic expansions. The increase in capital is due to the gross inequities that have been displaced. The gross inequities are removed from view, shipped south where the raw resources of materials and cheap human labor allow for the latest, greatest era of capitalistic expansion. The cost-added value that becomes profit in the Market is achieved through cost-cutting, through farming out production to regions where cheap labor is a steady flow.

What will essentially have to come about, is that the demand for labor will become so intensive (labor as a commodity) that it will begin to undermine the very notions of capital that we appear to be so fixated on right now.

I'll explain. In the Market more and more people want to get their money to work for them. In other words, capital becomes the new labor force. We invest our capital to make us more capital. Money works for us. As our investments turn a profit for us, we have to labor less and less to meet the demands of life.

We have for a long time drawn distinctions between capital and labor; as if it were some fundamental dualism. That divide is collapsing now. At the turn of the 20^th Century it was believed that capital and labor were opposites, were diametrically opposed forces in a capitalistic society. This was the age of the unionization of labor and of the workers rights campaigns, were unionized labor forces mounted a battle against the capital-oriented forces of ownership for better pay and working conditions. And that is what essentially came about---better pay for labor and better working conditions through unified struggle.

Now, at the turn of the 21^st Century there is another movement of capital and labor where we are seeing capital become the new labor force. How so? Well, as more and more capital is invested into the Market, the Market "appears" to churn out more and more capital returns/gains on those investments. So, more capital is re-invested... gains are won... reinvestment... gains... reinvestment... gains... This is all hauntingly similar to the Myth of Eternal Progress.

Upon closer examination some discrepancies arise. First is the notion that we cannot have capital perform all our labors for us. There are limits.... And one of those limits is that capital will not be able to perform all of our labors for us. This notion is played out in the lottery myths and instant riches myths that we are somewhat subject to in the West most especially. The assumption is that once we have all that "capital", then all of our chief labors are behind us. And it is in accordance with this myth that a great many partake in the Market. The notion is to get capital to work for us. The Market becomes not the place of exchange.... As in the sense of a place where we go to exchange goods and service, to contribute to a growing company, but as a place for speculation which drives up the costs for all concerned. Which leads us to one of the great economic threats of our times: that speculation runs wild and the Market becomes no longer a place to exchange that which is of actual value but as a place to determine speculative values so that a certain party or parties can gain mightily at the expense of the losses of another. We are partly heading in that direction now.

The Market has become a place not so much of exchange but as a place to "capitalize" through exchange. In other words, the Market becomes glutted with those who produce nothing, whose only function is to speculate and manipulate values to serve their own ends. In the age of the Market, those who profit most are those who can manipulate the various markets best for their own gain. Give nothing; take much.

It is possible in the current Market for me to never produce anything of worth or value for the community as a whole and to profit greatly; to effectively see my capital gains soar right through the roof. This sort of capacity creates a great discrepancy, an alienation between peoples; the engines of the Market are adjusted to serve the self-driven motives of the profit mongers at the expense of those who are producing true and authentic commodities of actual value.

Imagine that we both go to the Market, though we don't know each other at all. I arrive with raw steel. I want to sell that steel so I can buy some coal to fire the furnaces at my steel manufacturing facility. You arrive with coal, while a third party arrives just looking to buy steel to mold and manufacture into railroad tracks. It is possible that we could all get together and work out a deal where we were all happy with exchanging authentic goods, either for something we need or for capital so as to be able to purchase what we need. We arrive at the Market and find out that we cannot directly interact with each other. We must go through various middle men---and we cannot even set the price on our own goods! The price has already been set by the Market! Whose the Market? Good question! No one knows. That's just the way it is.

So, I sell my steel at the going rate, receive capital, or exchange value, so as to buy the coal---also at a Market adjusted rate---and then the third party comes along and buys that steel in the Market. And do you think that those whose work is in the Market do not extract a few pesos for being speculative? Of course they do! Yet, there is no production of anything that is of value or worth other than the ability to hold a space where buyer and seller can get together, where exchange can take place. In a global adjusted Market such circumstances are necessary. And it is exactly the age that we live in... where the Market rules.

When there is a big swing in the markets on any given day----what is the top news story? The state of the Market. When there is a big merger between two market entities---what is the tops news story of the day? The consequences of that merger on the Market? And here we tie in to the dominant myth of our time.... The Myth of Eternal Progress as it is reflected in the Market. In fact, there is a direct correlation between the main myth of the Market---that of unending growth or indefinite progress. This myth is marketed, bought and sold, consumed and ingested as if it were in fact the case. So, all of our values becomes values directed and dictated by the Market, because we have allocated the Market the right to dictate what is of value and worth and what is not of value and worth. This all goes so far as to include what we might consider to be more humane values. These---if not marketable and determined to be of high value in the Market---become cheapened in our actual lives. The Market sets the values of exchange in relation to commodities, which includes labor, goods, capital and now increasingly information. Where does this leave intrinsic value and worth? It is rendered obsolete by the system. Intrinsic worth and values are not commodities that can be exchanged, are not material components that can become commodified. This is for us, both the great threat implied by the Market as ruling force in our time, and the great hope that lies out of the reach of the commodifying grasp of a material driven cultural epoch that values only what the Market does.

If the Market is unable to teach us of intrinsic value we must go look in those pockets where the Market has little or no influence. Where is the resistance to the Market the strongest? The answer to this question becomes that place where we can look to locate the immaterial realization of intrinsic worth and value. The Market has such a broad sweep and is so materially driven that certain inconspicuous pockets abide within the confines of the Market. If it can't be seen, tagged, stamped, dated, bar-coded, then the Market wants nothing to do with it. The Market has to have something to sell and exchange, to trade in, even if that trading takes place through capital symbols and designations of meaning. In that abstract sense, the Market trades in real goods, though these real goods are designated with abstract symbols.... And it is that those symbols become so abstratced from the concrete actualities of where and what those symbols signify, what they actually refer to. So, once again, it is not difficult to see how the abstract can come to supersede the concrete. That very real good or commodity that someone labored for and with has become just another symbol represented by a market value. The abstraction of significance: meaning rendered unto what the Market says; thus, we have a new book of law. Paul Hawken states in The Ecology of Commerce that "The primary freedom of the modern, global marketplace is to grow unremittingly, regardless of the consequences... Free has come to mean big and powerful but not necessarily accountable... We are turning over the financing of the world, if we haven't already, to the money lenders whose interests and incentives revolve around minute increments gained in the sale of abstracted financial instruments."

Hawken asks, "What will happen to social and environmental values when they are subordinated to a common discount rate... By making the entire world economic system exchangeable on a moment's notice, we have in essence set up a new standard against which all economic activity is measured. We have created a common global value system that is measured in monetary terms alone..." We have a new book of law: The Law of the Market. Where the common global value system is economically oriented. Show me the money indeed!

For instance, it is virtually impossible to have regional economic zones where the local regions are able to set an agenda that is distinct from the global agenda of the Market and its multinational kingpins---it is virtually impossible. Everyone has to play the game according to the rules set at the top most tiers... rules that benefit the highest echelon of capitalistic tendencies. We assume that in the United States, at least, that there is freedom to do as we please and that the Market is open to anyone. This is a misnomer. The trading that occurs in Thailand overnight can have an adverse effect on the organic farmer in Washington the next day. We are free to be involved in a system that ripples across the whole surface of the Earth seeting and resetting cost-adjusted values based upon supply and demand, with a lot of bureacratic hedging as well. By being so totalizing and heavyhanded, the Market ends up leveling the fields and homogenizing the regional zones wherein we could have semi-autonomous economic activity that was not so prone to what took place overseas. But this is not the way the Market is set up to operate. The Market is the one new Social Web that traps all within its snares and strands. Value is to be determined globally via capital interests; local differences are almost inconsequential.

Hawken: "Markets arise spontaneously, separate from philosophy or religion or political belief...." And indeed the Market does arise, "separate from philosophy or religion or political belief", while becoming its own philosophy, religion, and political belief. At the same time, the Market subsumes all other philosophies, religions and political beliefs---commodifying them as cost-adjusted values to be produced, distributed and consumed within the Market. This has always been the stance that the dominator ideologies took throughout history---win the ideological war and subsume the cultural artifacts within the domain of the new ideology. Who could tell the difference, right? It's all still there.... only now it is a commodity within the Market, what was once freely given is now set up for profit.

As I said, it is one of the oldest tricks in the book---to include all of the old ideologies within the embrace of the new ideology. The hope is that all of the old ideologues will be so appeased to know that their ideology is still alive in the new totalizing system that no one will notice the new ideology for what it is: at once more powerful than all other ideologies, and yet so insidiously subtle as to go unnoticed.

At this point I would like to diverge a bit and pick up on another stream.... With the hope that will we once again converge upon all of these rivulets that will serve to reveal the postmodern confluence as a new mythology in its own right---with its own language and prevalent perceptual and cognitive blind-spots as well.

 

35

Donald Rothberg, in the journal Revision points out that the development of human capacities has not always been equidistant from the center of Being. Meaning that some capacities overshadow others; that growth of capacity can become an imbalance for the individual and the collective. For instance, Rothberg writes that in the modern age---which we are still very much living under the post-traumatic influence of----"For a variety of reasons, [the] emergent potentials of modernity, these three modes of knowing and acting [art, science, morality], were not evenly developed. Rather, as many of the main critical analysts of modernity have suggested, modernity as it actually unfolded (and still unfolds) was (and is) heavily weighted toward the knowing and manipulation of the first world, of a 'disenchanted' and objectified world dominated by an 'instrumental' or 'technical' rationality." Rothberg goes on to point out that "The content of the other two worlds (the intersubjective and the subjective worlds) was increasingly organized according to the structures of the empirical sciences and instrumental and calculative rationality; Habermas links this unbalanced development especially with the powerful influences of the forces of capitalism [the expanding market]. Under the 'scientistic' influence of positivism and empiricism, there were claims of a unified empirical science that encompasses all 'real' knowledge, excluding the various attempts to claim an autonomous status for the emerging human sciences of cultural and subjective reality".

I would like to take the liberty to point out some synchronous developments between what Rothberg says is the "unified empirical science that encompasses all 'real' knowledge", and what I have been alluding to as the Market. Both claims, that of a "unified empirical science", and that of the Market, subsume all other developmental fields within their own overwhelming and often suffocating embrace. In the same way that "the emerging human sciences of cultural and subjective reality" have been excluded---or languaged in terms of the dominator langauge of empiricism---so too have those same sciences and arts been commodified and langauged in terms of the all-encompassing Market. And the triangulated scale of art, science, and morality has been weighted to the objectivist tendencies of empirical science and radical positivism... We have seen this similarity in value-weighting within the Market itself, towards the increasing valuation of the fruits born from the labors of a 'technical' or 'instrumental' rationality and a devaluation of the subject unless that subject can make money and make the turnstiles sing at the local cinematic multiplex.

If morality and art want to get into the Market they are forced to do so on terms set in accordance with the valuations attributed to 'technicalization' and 'instrumentalization' of the lifeworld. In other words, the subjective and the intersubjective is forced to play the lifeworld game according to the direction set by the objectivists who espouse a technical rationality above all other modes of humane interaction with the lifeworld. Habermas calls this the "colonization of the lifeworld", while Rothberg points out that "the potentials of modern subjectivity have also been severely constrained through extensive control, ideological influence and commodification".

This "colonization of the lifeworld" we have been witnesses to. We might as well say that colonization has resulted in commodification. First, colonize, or empirically claim, and then we can begin with the commodification---the setting up of new production, distribution, consumption chains in relation to the newly colonized resources. With the result that the colonized and commodified lifeworld has, by this time, become part of the Market, and is subject to the Market ideology.

So, what is there left to say about our "subjective and cultural realities"? Well, first and foremost, as was just stated above, these realities have been colonized by the imperialistic tendencies of the objectivist empirical language. And after colonization we all know what comes next: commodification. Our empirically colonized subjective and cultural realities become commodities within the all-encompassing embrace of the postmodern marketplace. These realities are for sale, have a value placed on them, are really no different than any other raw material or information that is traded and exchanged within the ideological fortress of the Market.

Our colonial heritage in the West, along with our imperial motivations, has not disappeared. These are now deeply ingrained subconscious tendencies that we are all more than capable of. As an example, the colonization of the "subjective and cultural reality" becomes a Market issue because of the all-encompassing nature of the Market at present. How so? Due to the "empirical" and "instrumental" logic of the modern era, art and morality are no longer viable cultural and subjective realities unless they can be "imaged" and made to be reproducible. In the same way that empirical science seeks to discover only that which is verifiable---repeatable and reproducible---so too does this become a requirement for the "subjective and cultural" realities that are also a very great part of our existence. Again, even our subjective and cultural realities are forced to play by the rules of the victors---which in this case are those colonizing and commodifying tendencies of the objectivists.

Our most intimates are now reproducible commodities, and before long we will have colonized the brain, and that lurid psyche, doing what the Western European objectivist has always done... subdue the savages! The wild elements within are bound for the graveyard if they can not be commodified and colonized, leveled and flattened into digital-ready easily reproducible images for sale and trade.

The mass production, mass distribution, and mass consumption cycle that we are in at present, requires reproducible images and objects. Anything that is wild enough to escape the digital domain has already left us. The simulated world of reproducible artifacts and cultural simulacrum, the commodified lifeworld; already colonized, subject to having to live under the heavy and quite too impersonal hand of the Market.

The last remaining aspects of an uncolonized lifeworld might as well be said to be non-existent. For the wild within has been commodified in true ecological fashion, so as to save it from colonization. A tiger on a calendar, so as to raise money to save the actual last remaining tigers. Are we saving the image, or do we want to really save what little of the actual wild that remains? The irony behind "saving the wild" campaigns is that the colonization has aready taken place once commodification has occurred. The wild lifeworld is rendered as an image that is easily reproducible, readily distributed, and consumed like any other commodity of the Market. This, no matter the intent, effectively renders that lifeworld dead and diminished. We must sell the images in ever increasing fashion so as to save the actual?

Erik Davis writes in the book Techgnosis that "The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard diagnosed this condition as a mass infection by the hyperreal, which he defined as a social, political, and perceptual organization based on the dominance of technological simulacra. Like an ontological virus the hyperreal invades and destroys the older frameworks for understanding the real, replacing it with a new order of reality based on simulation." We don't really want to get rid of the savage elements---the wildness of the world---we just want to be able to control it, have it on a postcard that we can look at fondly, antiseptically, and perhaps a touch achingly (feeling alienated and yet dominant in relation to that wild Other).

We become voyeurs of the lifeworld we once knew... alienated subjects, dead and longing for the world we have turned into flat-glossy snapshots of the once too Real. Now we stand and gaze, through our 'instrumental' logic, we see what the heavy hand of impersonal colonization has done: fragmented the psyche, alienated the self, disposed of the wild Other that was both the juice and justice of our now half-simulated lifeworld.

We didn't kill the wild spirit until after we had made an image of what was doomed to proceed to the gallows. We didn't sacrifice the wild Other to our colonizing gods until a digital ready template was made. Yes, we have the simulation. So, it is more readily manipulated by our hands now; we can brush it up, tone it down, tear it apart and put it all back together again. We have become as gods... not of the Real, but of the simulacra. We are gods of the simulated world. And we had to kill and eliminate the Real so as to not be reminded of our inept embeddedness within that field of the equally Real. In other words, construct images of the Real and then reconstruct a hyperworld based upon those images of the Real. Overlay the Real with simulacra. And call it progress.

As soon as the Real was rendered back to us as a glossy image of the former, we leapt into the simulated void, and piece by piece, began to fabricate an imagined lifeworld. We have taken the best of the imaged lifeworld and have pinned it up in the walls of our psyche, blotting out the manic, obscuring the depressed, masking the schizoid---all the while toying with a "return of the repressed" by dimunizing the biological messiness of the Real.

Anytime that any culture has been colonized, those elements that resisted coloniziation were done away with, excluded, negated, squashed, denounced, diminished, repressed, torched, lit up, burnt down, subdued, tranquilized, demeaned, denied, dealt some death. Those who were taken up in the colonization tide were re-educated into the proper forms of conduct and behaviour that were in accordance with the approved consent. The colonizers have always been bent on the elimination of dissent---or have sought to. And that which is taken up and forced to live under the rules of the colonizers becomes, in our time, now, commodified, i.e., a commodity to profit from.

When the Market colonizes; all that remains left to wander the priced world is itself defined as a commodity. Subjects: commodities. Objects: commodities. Time: a commodity. Space: a commodity. And the Market determines the current value of those commodities. All of the talk of politics and religion is really mute when one recognizes that these are also commodified subject/objects that have been subsumed under the resocialization and re-education auspices of the Impersonal Market that spans the furthest reaches of embodied existence. Erik Davis writes:

....the machineries of capitalism extend their extracting claws into every fold and crevice of the planet: the deep sea floor, the Communist fortress in China, the genes of rainforest plants and peoples. For now it is clear that profit, and not cosmic evolution, is the driving spirit of planetization---its major metaphor, its omnipotent and universal truth. As the techno-logic of the market increasingly infects all spheres of human existence, from politics to education to family, it achieves unparalleled domination. Boundaries of time and space that once kept the demands of the market at bay are dissolving into an enveloping sea of silicon, as information technology extends the competitive empire of work into the nooks and crannies of our personal lives.

Davis further states that "the global economy has created an even more propitious climate for rapacious multinationals and corrupt local officials to accelerate their plunder, precisely because they operate on an international scale that is nearly impossible to regulate or police." Now that the Market is so expansive, and business can effectively take place anywhere, the standards of accountability can be transcended. For instance, if a corporation does not want to meet the standards set by a regulatory agency or governmental force---essentially the voice of the people---then, they can just pack up and head to greener pastures, where, perhaps, accountability is not as high a standard as is pure profit.

The irony of the global market, a sad irony at that, is that those officials that make unilateral business decisions can do so without being effected by the consequences of their decision in a direct and local manner. Corporate decisions can be made on a global scale, where negative consequences are played out in the backstreets of New Delhi or the dusty corridors of Pakistan, and not in the high rise purified air of corporate America. In other words, the colonizing multinational kings can rule over the colonized from afar... and may never have to feel the pain and oppression of the colonized, the commodified, the numbered masses. The global distances collapse and yet the gulf between members, states, conditions grows ever wider. The multinational corporate structure allows for the far-reaching effects of unaccountability to be fostered. The trade-off for losing a tract of the rainforest, or an indigenous way of life, is to be able to garner a few commodified trinkets for ones self and ones family. "This is the way of the world, this is the tide of evolution, this is the way of progress, this is how nations build for themselves a new prosperity... just follow us." The new Market propaganda is sold as the truth of progress and forthcoming prosperity. It is propaganda; bold-faced lies that serve to break the backs and spirit of cultures so as to prop up and expand the profit margins of those corporate structures that see resources only, commodities only, numbers, abstractions, capital.

Karl Marx, during the beginning of the industrial age, wrote of the pathological consequences for society and its members when life and living becomes a means of production only. "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates." Though Marx is often associated with Communism-and dismissed as a result of that unfortunate relation---many of his most poignant and cutting remarks and historical analyses bear a striking resemblance to what our lives have become. The "more commodities that we create the cheaper we become", we become valued for what we possess/produce and not for what we are. We become a reflection of the commodities we have created/claimed.

"The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity". Now we can see the direct correlation between the objectivist efforts of science, the increasing value of things, in and of themselves, as commodities, and the languaging of the subjective and cultural realities as commodities also---proceeding towards what Marx calls the "devaluation of the world of men"---which are those very subjective (I) and intersubjective (we, cultural) realities that have been displaced so as to give greater sway and power to the objective world of its and the empirical delineators and managed gurus of the It-world of objective rationality and calculative logic.

Marx goes on to equate the "loss of reality" with "object bondage; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation." We become alienated and estranged from the subjective and cultural depths because we are merely labour producing commodities who are lost in "object-bondage" when we are not actually producing objects for the Market. The very focus and fixation on the "objectivist" doctrine has left us alienated and estranged from our sense of self---and our sense of "we" is reduced to what we produce in relation to others. Marx hauntingly echoes to us from the distant past forewarning us against the threat of privation through "objectification". He writes that "it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself---his inner world---becomes, the less belongs to him as his own... The worker puts his life into the object;" And we are only as good as those objects we can create, those commodities we can produce, those goods we can put our life into. And when we are no longer productive the state institutionalizes us, tosses us away, discards us, we are spent, we have given and sacrificed our life for the commodities you see on the shelves of your nearest market... This is the meaning of our lives: all subjective and cultural realities must be framed in objects, formed into commodities, made reproducible and representible in terms of the Market so as to procure a profit and have "value".