Michael Jackson and Karl Marx

The big news story of yesterday and today was not, of course, the revelation that the United States is supplying weapons to maintain the political instability of Somalia. It was not the United States congress' treatment of the upcoming -- and possibly quite momentous -- climate change bill. It was not the frightening suggestion from China that the U.S. dollar should be replaced as the currency of international trade. No, the highlight of the last two days was the death of a single man, Michael Joseph Jackson.

As is often the case with the death of big-name celebrities, Jackson's passing has prompted massive outbursts of mourning, from people of all walks of life. Some weep openly; others are merely tinged with sadness. Some simply see Jackson's death as the closing of an era -- a road marker of nostalgia. Importantly, all these patterns of grief are linked by an underlying structure of emotion; that is, all mourners feel the loss of Michael Jackson. The reaction is fundamentally affective.

Of course, the presence of emotion at the threshold of a person's death is not strange; rather, the absence emotion would be unusual. An emotional response to the death of Jackson the person, then, makes perfect sense. However, for the vast majority of Jackson mourners, M.J. did not actually exist as a person. They did not know him personally. They did not know what he was like before becoming the King of Pop, and they did not know how becoming the King changed him. They did not know the person of Michael Jackson. All their knowledge of Jackson was and is mediated through consumables -- music, television, etc. They did not know Michael Jackson the person, but they do know Michael Jackson the product. This is why the mourning for Michael Jackson is so curious. Mourners react appropriately, as if mourning a person, but the actual object of their mourning is not a person, but a thing.

For Karl Marx, one of the major problems of capitalism is that it disconnects the worker from that which they produce; the worker has no personal stake in what they are creating and producing. This leads to a sense of meaninglessness, as one must labor to survive, but the available avenues of labor are not fulfilling. Sure, you can scrape by, but is it really living if you feel your work -- and life -- is meaningless?

Obviously, if this sort of questioning was widespread, it would cause massive social instability -- a very bad thing from the perspective of those in power, the bourgeoisie (the class of people who own the means of production). One can't have people constantly questioning the meaning and validity of their work; they would eventually get to a point where they simply stopped working. But how to infuse their lives with meaning? How to make them believe that their existence -- and their work -- is worthwhile? The bourgeoisie answer is, according to Marx, to convince the masses that commodities -- objects (not necessarily material) which can be bought and sold for money -- are the key to happiness. If you believe that buying a new car will make you happy, you will work hard and stay in your place until you earn enough money to buy that car. Of course, the car doesn't really make you happy, so you set your sights on something else you can buy. Marx calls this commodity fetishism -- a strange system in which we value commodities to the point that we think they can give fulfillment, even to the point that we react to them as if they were more than commodities.

Thus, Michael Jackson's death is a particularly interesting case of Marx's conception of commodity fetish; the commodity of Michael Jackson is being treated as if is more than a commodity, as if it possesses some intrinsic magical or spiritual value. This thing -- that is, the sum of all the purchasable and consumable Michael Jackson-ness (music, music videos, tabloid articles, concerts, etc) -- is treated with the same reverence as a person.

People today aren't mourning the loss of Michael Jackson; they are mourning the loss of a commodity, a commodity with which they have entrusted varying portions of their life's meaning. With this fetishism in mind then, the emotional reaction makes a bit more sense. If the commodity is believed to bestow some level of meaning, and the commodity is lost, then mourning the loss of the commodity is the equivalent of mourning the loss of that particular portion of meaning. And then, as icing on the cake, we make this whole business sound rational by saying that we're mourning a person, rather than a thing.

The irony is, of course, that the object of mourning -- Michael Jackson the commodity -- isn't dead.

He lives eternally in our iPods.



Oh, and if you don't have an iPod yet, go buy one. It'll make you happy and give your life a sense of fulfillment.