Fixing Capital in Art

Surely one of the weirdest cultural products of capitalism is character design and vinyl toys, collectible decorative plastic figurines.

Marxist Geographer, David Harvey, proposes that capital must expand to new territories in order to 'fix' capital and maintain value.

Money has to go somewhere or it stagnates and deteriorates in value. What better way to eat up some value than by putting it in a toy? A toy can't be used for anything else - and these are not even meant to be played with - and design usually has a fairly short lifespan, so that value is actually eaten up and destroyed.

A generation of kids in the West grew up playing with Star Wars figures and watching cartoons. They communicated through that idiom, sothat instead of making art or pottery, they designed toys and characters.

As more and more areas of life have fallen under the ambit of design - which itself is a sales tool - the more design has become an end in itself. In a way I think the vinyl toy fetish is revolting. Nothing could be more wasteful or self-indulgent and yet it is kind of the avant garde of popular culture and nothing expresses our cultural perspective like it.

ReMarx

Apropos of nothing, I came across this excellent remix of the Communist Manifesto today - written very faithfully in the style of the great man himself - by Columbia Law professor, Eben Moglen. Here's a quote:

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt its culture and its principles of intellectual ownership; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. But the very instruments of its communication and acculturation establish the modes of resistance which are turned against itself."

Pretty impressive. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Moglen is affiliated with the Free Software Foundation.