Uber–Marxism was a social movement that swept the world as a hurricane. Marx’s first attempt had been too feeble and, because of its feebleness, too violent. Marx had fallen into romantic rhetoric to make up for lack of economic knowledge: “Proletarians of the world, unite!” In reality, the class struggle propounded by Marx was a fallacy based on a Darwinian view of the world, but the rudiments of truth were there, specially in his views of the value of work.
The neophilosophyst J. Martin proposed a reformed theory of the Marxist value of work, which contemplated the haphazard value society gives to things. According to capitalists, labor or even raw material are almost uncircumstantial to the value of something and the demand from society is all that matters. J. Martin, however, argued that this is equal to not having a real value of goods at all, and similar to rolling a roulette for commodities, since we can never guess what society wants. Also, the value society gives to something fluctuates according to promotion or even the popularity of a commodity, which implies further chaos, which ended up in society paying ridiculous amounts for objects that were irrelevant to their lives for the mere reason that they were valued by others. Thus the metaphor of the piece of shit came about: Someone could market a piece of shit until it became really popular, and then people would bit huge amounts of money to buy it, increasing its value exponentially. In the end, the winner would have a piece of shit in their possession, nothing else and nothing more. “From the liberal point of view, there is nothing wrong in that, the same as there’s nothing wrong in sticking a carrot up your ass and walking around while bragging about it,” argued J. Martin, whose register was polemic enough to appeal to the masses. “However,” he said, in a stroke of genius, “From an ethical point of view, walking around with carrots up our asses does not contribute to the betterment of society, but simply gives us selfish pleasure. Now, from an anal analogy, buying a piece of shit, does even worse than not contributing, but it gives value to things that should not have it, thus taking away value from worthwhile things.” It was as simple as that, but no economist had put it so clearly before. Economy, to J. Martin, was “the social organization of the value of things, ” and thus “it should contemplate ethical and esthetical value too.”
To do this, he just added talent to the equation of value propounded by Marx. A commodity, then, was not only worth the value of its raw material and labor, but also of the added value of its creator’s talent. And talent, to J. Martin, was a measurable factor. “Of course there is place for subjectivity,” he said, “but no one would argue that a piece of shit is less aesthetic than a painting by Picasso or a lively flower. Then, if someone is willing to pay more for a piece of shit than for a flower, they’re simply distorting the inherent value a flower has over a piece of excrement. From a liberal point of view, it should be allowed, but from an ethical point of view, it should be condemned.” Thus, a new movement emerged: Aesthetic capitalism, so called Uber-Marxism by its detractors, which dismantled all those commodities that were obviously futile to society. Thus, viral videos and overnight superstars lost their inflated value, while real talents started to emerge, embellishing and bettering society. No one could believe that social change could’ve been started by a pseudo-economist, but, if we think about it, J. Martin and Marx had something in common: Both were humanists and sociologists first, and economist just by mere chance.
***
**
One Comment