An Economy of Disappearance

From Audcwiki, the free encyclopedia.

Although there may be variation among the objects for sale, year after year the markets at Quartzsite come back. Quartzsite escapes the banalization of the marketplace by ritually appearing and disappearing with the seasons.

The exchange of rocks remains the central point to the market economy at Quartzsite. For Karl Marx, commodities are alive to us, just as religious fetishes are to primitive peoples. Marx wrote: "In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands."

At Quartzsite, the subject can disappear into this System of Objects, but instead of being a source of oppression, as they were in Marx's day, objects become a source of liberation as they once were in the Potlatch or under the never realized utopian vision of Communism. Social relations can take place via an exchange of rocks or through the way one parks one's RV.

next: Beyond Labor and Affluence

Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" in Capital, Volume I (Chapter 1, Section 4)