Give Us This Day

One of the first materialisations of the commodity was prayer.

Monasteries were the producers and vendors.  The monks were poor and humble, hence godly, hence their prayers were valuable, hence they became rich... and yet the prayers retained their exchange value after being emptied of their supposed theological use value, which was composed in the specious poverty of their producers.

The commodity has always been a fetish, its exchange value always immaterial, its use value always dependent partly on our subjectivities.  The idea of damnation made prayer a commodity, just as the reality of cold made wood a commodity.

And the putative virtue of the monastery foreshadows the self-asserted ethics of the corporation.

This is not idealism.  This is real materialism.


Just saying.