There’s a crowd of people slowly moving toward platform 7 and the 13.31 train to Paris. I become aware of a young woman and man in close proximity. Why them? There are plenty of other people within a few inches or so. And yet no one bumps another and if they accidently do, they generally offer genuine apologies.
The woman is holding a passport in her hand; it’s Ukrainian.
There is talk of armaments, defence, attack, war, imperialism, sub-imperialism, where the main enemy might be; here, at home or abroad. I guess these ideas may change the closer the front lines are, whether missiles are hitting the town, and if occupation by marauding troops becomes a possibility.
War has to be manufactured. Not just the bombs and tanks and rockets and guns. A death machine of television programmes, newspapers, pro-government radio stations, bloggers, influencers, emojis and X accounts.
The death machine trims the edges with sanctions against opponents, murder of civilians, sniper shooting to the head of people wearing ‘PRESS’ in large letters on their body armour.
It’s digital fascist destruction; the more they lie, the louder they shout truth. The more they censor, the louder they shout anything goes; the more they exhale death-head’s venom the greater they claim the fresh air of freedom.
Within all these tensions develops the contradiction of having momentary luxury.
I have the luxury of packing a suitcase, selecting books, adding fine-ink pens and a drawing pad, carefully packing notebooks and cameras.
It should be a permanent reality for everyone. Somewhere safe and comfortable to live, enough food, medicines and health care, education, the opportunity for days of travel and leisure.
Instead, war and economic frictions, cost of living crisis, damp-mould housing, job uncertainty, coerced labour, a generalised anxiety at the world level.
There’s a few at the top with enormous power. A constant misuse and abuse.
At St Pancras station I am told that the seating plan on the train has changed. It’s a smaller train. ‘But we still have to try and fit everyone in’, the man at the information desk explains. I raise an eyebrow, ‘will we all get on?’, he shrugs his shoulders hopefully, ‘just’, he replies.
I’m slightly apprehensive now but when I get on the train I find myself in a carriage of confident high-speed modernity. I have a seat to myself, facing fowards, by the window. The train starts slowly but by the time it reaches Stratford it’s gliding along at full speed. And then out of the tunnel under London and I gaze at the bland new build housing over by Rainham marshes and wonder how ‘sustainable’ it really is.
Someone comes round with a trolley and offers food and drink. I chose salmon with potato salad and pickled red cabbage and a small bottle of red wine. It’s delicious. I make it delicious because I want it to be so. It’s an unexpected treat on a sunny Thursday afternoon; a vignette of the quality without a name.
The plates are collected and coffee poured. And then the woman who seems to be in charge of the carriage asks if I would like anything else. We agree, another small bottle of wine would be just the thing.
There are now several conversations bubbling around the carriage involving random strangers thrown together by chance; exchanging intimacies and life stories. ‘So you’re an Aries?’, I hear someone ask. But surely it shouldn’t be like this?
Isn’t it supposed to be war of all against all? This seems to be free-wheeling, easy going, fair minded cooperation. And from observation and casual listening everyone seems to be enjoying it a great deal.
A few months ago I caught the late afternoon train from Paris to Zurich and found myself sitting next to a random stranger; a French woman on her way to a conference. We chatted, she worked, I read a book, we chatted some more. She went to the buffet car and bought us both coffee. And then we chatted again and she kicked her shoes off and curled up on the seat next to me and we watched the sun set over the Alps.
At Zurich we shyly said goodbye on the platform amidst a crowd of people who all seemed to have stepped off the train at exactly the same time.
But this is all by the by. Today I’m going to Paris and I’m considering what this trip is all about. What’s the reason? Is there something I plan to do? A building to visit or a painting to see or a particular street to walk up and down?
There doesn’t have to be a reason. But some sort of intention can work well.
I once went to Hamburg simply to see the painting Flora by Jan Massys. I knew nothing about Massys and cannot remember how I first discovered his work. Flora was, and is, a tempting invitation.
Jan Massys was perhaps a member of the Family of Love, a secret society dedicated to the realm of ideas, free thinking and tolerance in the Antwerp of the mid sixteenth century.
They were influenced by the Humanists, Erasmus, Thomas More. They read Seneca. They lived in fierce, violent, dangerous times. This was the time of the turmoil of the Dutch bourgeois revolution, the Sea Beggars, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Massys spent years in exile from Antwerp after being accused of heresy, a capital offence.
Flora is not simply a painting.
There is a Massys painting in the Louvre David et Bethsabée and I will go and look at it. Perhaps that’s a reason to be in Paris. And there’s a Massys in the Le musée Jeanne d’Aboville at La Fère a couple of hours by train outside Paris.
I emailed the gallery to ask about their opening hours. They replied along the lines of “usually in the afternoon, but if a day or two’s notice is given, we’ll make sure someone’s around to let you in”.
A key reason I’m going to Paris however is that I have recently been made redundant. The idea of visiting Paris was a distraction from the last weeks of wage slavery and the discontentment with the gulf between what many employers say and what they actually do. At some of the final meetings I attended I realised how aggressive and false so much of it was. And how exhausting it had been to always wear a mask.
I had known this for a long time but I could never admit to myself what it was really like. That would have devastated my soul, knowing that I had to remain within social conditions of psychic carnage. With a sense of leaving, so many elements emerged that had previously been suppressed. I wasn’t expecting how it all developed.
The last day came and went and a couple of days later, for the first time in years, I had lucid dreams and dreams in which I was flying. Sometimes oppression is hidden in weird ways and only when it lifts do we get a real sense of what it was.
In those final months of work I read a lot of Marx and James C. Scott and ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Groeber and the history of socialism in England, Germany and Austria. It provided a theoretical and practical framework to measure where I was.
And I concluded that I wanted a change in time and space. It can be a good test of ideas; one’s own and other people’s.
Where these ideas I was thinking about just personal and specific or where they collective and general?
In particular the categories that Marx used of commodity production and the selling of labour power as a commodity and the rate of exploitation. Where these just word games in my head, conjured up while reading books? Or are these real things, determinants that apply both to the wider world of production and also to one’s inner life?
I will be temporarily uprooted from the sea, cliffs, countryside, the less well known streets and alley ways of London, wide estuaries where the Thames and Medway roll out to the sea, marsh land, port infrastructure, office blocks and supermarkets, clusters of warehouses and industrial estates.
I’m familiar with all that stuff, I can recognise Marx’s Capital there in familiar scenes. I can see and feel commodity production and labour-as-a-commodity in that world. Have I created a world that suits my image of the world or is this image of the world open to wider critique?
The Eurostar train is fast and it’s like being in an aeroplane at ground level.
The French countryside is a patchwork of green shoot fields, heavily ploughed soil, willows and lines of poplars and exuberant bursts of white hawthorn blossom. And everywhere, industrial infrastructure.
Agriculture here has shifted from being labour intensive to capital intensive. Here and there a tractor; but the peasantry have gone. Consumed in class struggles, technical development and seismic shifts in the relations of production.
Scattered around are aircraft hanger sized sheds, the warehouses of distribution. They are owned and run by global companies. They soak up migrant labour, outsource software development to India and Bulgaria, develop global strategies and marketing campaigns.
The centralisation of distribution is both the centralisation and dispersal of labour. It is all predicated on a complex and hierarchical and racial division of workers. And each touch of a box or steering of a wheel by human hands is the selling of labour-power as a commodity.
Inside these warehouses, goods accumulated from around the world, shipped along the sea routes, commodities made in Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Nigeria, China, Mynamar. Labour power organised by authoritarian regimes, anti-union, intolerant and narrow. Again and again; the selling of labour power as a commodity.
Into the homogenised mass of world energy are poured oils from Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq. Little, if anything, is covered in the daily new fix about the conditions of the workers involved.
The railway runs along the side of a motorway. The first traffic signs to Paris can be seen. Hieroglyphics of global trade.
These are the routes the drivers from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech State, Turkey, Italy, Germany take to and fro to the ports of Calais and Dunkerque, and then to Dover; and across Britain.
And yet no lorries ever seen in the west of Europe that originate in Russia. Labour power is collectivised and divided in equal measure.
The train is now rushing into the late afternoon and the outer suburbs of the city.
Even the way the shadows fall; that’s of interest . And the history of the sky, and the story of the sea.
Everything about Paris is industrial.
The depth and thickness of the concrete tunnels of the Metro stations, the weight and mass of the RER trains, the size of the glass and steel of the high rise buildings, the mass produced clothes the people in the streets wear.
The science-technology that produces pocket phone-computers, smart card data applications, the vaccines that have eradicated deadly disease, the pills that keep people alive, the global internet that the mass of Parisians are connected to.
Every rare earth metal can be found here, mined by children and pregnant women. In CT scanners, medical equipment, computers, microchips. Surgical tools to cut the body open, remove the tumour, sew the skin back, pump blood out, pump blood in.
Inside the wet lab research centres, intensification of research with each new discovery of the genetic code, the structure of cells; what might consciousness be?
Satellite communications, radio waves, x-rays, the splitting of the atom. The energy from the atom provides electrical power across the urban area.
If Paris is a city of capital, then it must be a city of the selling of labour-power as a commodity. That’s how capital is made.
Everyone who works here in Paris is selling their labour power as a commodity.
And labour-power is the unique commodity. When it is consumed by capital, it produces a greater value than it’s paid. There is an exchange between the capitalists and the workers but it is neither fair nor equal.
In the classrooms of the Sorbonne, the professors sell their labour power, in every kindergarten, school and college, the same.
The drivers of the Metro and RER trains sell their labour power, the waitresses in the cafes of Montparnasse sell their labour power, the construction workers who are building blocks of flats and offices.
The thousands who work in the financial district of La Défense, the art assistants in the Louvre, the market workers at Regnus, the shop workers in La Fayette and Printemps and Monoprix.
The workers who ensure the provision of electricity, fibre optic networks, gas and water supplies; the medical staff in the Paris hospitals, the delivery drivers who endlessly cross the streets and avenues, a never ending conveyor belt of boxes and parcels.
The factory workers in the aerospace industries, the technicians and laboratory assistants and researchers in the pharmaceutical industries, the artisans and designers in the fashion and luxury goods industries.
Several hundred thousand, maybe millions of workers in the Greater Paris area; all selling their labour.
In conditions which they do not control. Following work instructions, project plans, delivery times, schedules, Gantt chart milestones, and answering to the constant tyranny and discipline of the clock.
They must sell their labour power. If they fail to do so then poverty calls. That’s a social relation of coercion.
This endless selling of labour-power as a commodity is a universal activity and for the interests of the capitalists must never stop.
So it can be done. The thesis Marx sets on in Capital that describes labour-power as a commodity fits Paris too.
And then somehow the train slows down, 250 kph, 200, 150, 100, 50, now it’s at walking pace. Now it’s stopped. The doors open.
The initial buzz of Paris is indescribable. The city as ever: magnificent.
I step into the RER train as one might step into the introduction to a Tarkovsky film.
Deep into the tunnels of Paris, further and further underground, faster and faster, the faces of the people become ghostly, ghoulish, everything now becomes a blur, my head is rattling along with the train and suddenly with a final surge of electrification, the RER train bursts out into the daylight again and comes to a halt in a deep forest.
Nothing can be heard but the sound of the rain dripping from the giant leaves to the forest floor. No one moves. Perhaps we are in a place where the law of commodity exchange has ceased to function.
The driver steps from the cab. He wears a long grey coat with an ermine collar and stands in the glade in the forest. This is the meeting place for the League of the Despised.
The moss beneath his feet is vivid green. There is no sound and a deathly stillness as if the air has set into a hard physical state.
The RER train is now just dead labour. The steel and glass were created in a different time and space, in steel mills and factories scattered round the world. The seats and trimmings were created in a different time and space by workers who sold and applied their labour power some time ago.
And now all that accumulated dead labour can only be put in motion by living labour. The driver who stands in the glade of the forest breathing in the fresh pine air.
He receives a warning signal from Paris. He must return to the city or his labour will be dismissed, rejected, made redundant. The break of the coercive force is the potential loss of earnings, reduced income, the inability to pay for all the accumulations of food and energy and housing.
He climbs back into the cab and starts the train. The machinery of selling his labour power as a commodity recommences.
As we return to the city the heat increases. It is stifling in the train.
It’s heading to the east of the city, past office blocks and tower blocks, railway marshalling yards, cages and traps, prisons, sanctuaries and a sprawling maul of motorways and car-crash yards, a density of concrete, and urban plans, dreams shattered, utopia forlorn, a communist promise that twisted, turned and shattered.
Eventually the crimes of Stalin caught up with the Stalinists; but why, again did the workers have to pay?
I notice a young woman on the RER train with headphones and wearing suede khaki boots with two inch crepe soles. They are desert boots, for the airless, torpid dust of Mars.
It’s the same woman I saw earlier, a cosmic time ago, in the Eurostar Terminal at St Pancras. Then she had a Ukrainian passport; its French now. It might be momentarily safer.
But everything could plunge so quickly; this facade of supermarkets and dream apartments and a job in the factory-warehouse-office-department store-bureaucracy-admin-complex.
Everyone put on notice as the city shuts down. Fleeing to the shelter when the siren sounds. There wasn’t even time for a practice run.
Even in times of war, workers sell their labour power as a commodity.
Published on Saturday 5 April 2025
Commodity Fetishism 
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