Market ‘Mania’: Who Will Save Politics, Art & Education From Capitalism?

Money was supposed to buy us goods and services. But what happens when it becomes more than just a medium?

(The Quint brings to you 'Khairiyat', a column by award-winning author Tabish Khair, where he talks about the politics of race, the experiences of diasporas, Europe-India dynamics and the interplay of culture, history and society, among other issues of global significance.)

Despite the many definitions that exist, each more convoluted than the other, ‘capitalism’ is a system in which the medium is privileged above the substance of the mediation. Economically, this happens when money, which is required as a medium to transact diverse products, goods and services, ends up reproducing itself, with growing independence from the goods and services between which it is supposed to mediate. This is when money turns into capital.

The end purpose of all capital is self-perpetuation, and, in that sense, it is correct to compare it to a virus. Capitalism is at its purest when money – as capital – can reproduce and increase itself without having to be extracted from human labour and production.

This is when money – once a medium – takes over, and the goods, services, etc, that it is supposed to mediate between, become less important and even less real. Note that this does not mean that they cease to exist; it just means that they become secondary, less real.

It is the medium that comes to exist as reality, and the realities behind it and around it turn into ghostly things – easy to exploit, discard and ignore.

Readymade Ideas and Wheeler-Dealers

What happens, as above, in the economic sphere also happens in all other areas that are impacted (and what area isn’t affected?). It does not simply mean the dominance of money as capital in these spheres. That would be a small worry. What happens is far deeper and integral to the structure of the other spheres.

In the political sphere, the slippage is from ideas to dealing and posturing, from statesmen to ‘middlemen’. One thinks of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the US or Gandhi and Ambedkar in India, and one thinks of the current breed of politicians in all nations. The greatest talent of the current breed is in ‘mediating’ easy, readymade and often faulty ideas to a large number of bewildered voters. They are not capable of examining the ideas in existence; like a virus, they can only reproduce ad infinitum. Of course, there are always one or two in all countries who are not just wheeler-dealers and viral mediators, but these are exactly the politicians who never come to power.

In the academic sphere, everything is turned into communication, and universities come to exist largely as factories to produce fodder for the ‘job market’. Even research publications become a matter of points collected through a leveraging of the system, instead of actual and vital research work.

Higher academia, except for a few oases assured of endowments, becomes a sphere where the shots are called by administrators – in the past mostly academic administrators, now increasingly ‘digital’ ones – rather than researchers and scholars.

Often the notion of ‘service to students’ is used as an excuse to dumb down the disciplinary aspects of a field of education. The middlemen take over.

Could TS Eliot Balance Literature With 'Market' Today?

In the literary sphere, the shots are called by literary agents, marketing executives, editors, publishers, etc. Essentially, if you are thinking of good literature and not just of selling books, these are all middlemen, again. Many of them do an excellent job, but their first commitment – by definition – is to other things. Good literature comes second. Or, in some cases, third or fourth.

It is not as if writers did not work under similar pressures in the past. They did, and money was always a bottom line in publishing. But there was a time when a Faber and Faber editor could argue and convince his way into publishing The Palm-Wine Drinkard by the unknown West African writer, Amos Tutuola, a novel written in “atrocious” English, a great novel of its kind but flying in the face of all cultural and market expectations of the 1940 and the 1950s.

The editor was TS Eliot. Today, given the extent to which editors with literary tastes have to kowtow to market experts, this would be unlikely. Actually, it would be unlikely that a TS Eliot would work as an editor for long: he would be called upon to ‘mediate’ between literature and the market, mostly to the detriment of the former, a bit too often.

Money & Mediocrity

Yes, yes, I know. Capital calls the shot, why complain?

But even here, something strange has taken place. During the three years of a global pandemic, jobs have been lost, production cut and small businesses and factories have shuttered down or even gone bankrupt. But ‘financial markets’ are doing very well. The top 1 per cent have made more money in these years of an economic slowdown than ever before.

How do the very rich make money when there is less production and trade than before? It does not make sense in terms of classical capitalism – where profit (and exploitation, if you prefer a Marxist version) was created solely in and by the triangle of labour, production/trade and capital. But today, it seems that capital alone – the medium – is sufficient to keep you earning a profit. Or, at least, it’s sufficient if you have sufficient capital in the first place.

We live in an age when the ‘medium’ has triumphed – to the extent that it has rendered increasingly redundant and ‘unreal’ all that it was actually supposed to ‘mediate’ between. Interestingly, it is not just the word ‘mediation’ that is derived from the same source as ‘medium,’ which comes from ‘medius’ in Latin. Another common word has the same roots: it is ‘mediocre’.

(Tabish Khair, is PhD, DPhil, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. He tweets @KhairTabish. This is an opinion article and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)