The Revolution Commodified
You can buy a Che Guevara t-shirt for £12.99 on Amazon and have it delivered to your door the next day, for free. The warehouse worker, whose hour of work is worth less to their employers than a Che Guevara t-shirt, will process this package among hundreds of others during their 10-hour shift. You can also purchase the Communist Manifesto from anywhere between £2.59 (questionable where and how the profits could possibly be divided equitably) and £8.19 (if you want it hardcover) and have it go through much the same process.
The conditions of workers in Amazon sweatshops — pardon, factories — is a topic which has been written of frequently before, and awareness should continue to be promoted, not least in countries with far worse workers rights which make conditions in more developed countries look comparatively luxurious (with the caveat of the United States, who ranked worst for worker’s rights amongst major economic powers). Yet, that is a topic in its own right; the takeaway from the opening is, instead, the commodification of Che Guevara’s image.
The Che Guevara t-shirt is a microcosm of the wider problem at hand. Frankfurt School sociologist Herbert Marcuse calls this repressive desublimation. Marcuse argues that under this process, art loses its power of negation through which it traditionally dismantles the status-quo, and instead becomes a tool of a capitalist society to quell revolutionary ideas by removing the antagonistic dimension added to society via art, an antagonism achieved through:
“…the process Freud called sublimation, which according to psychoanalysis is what happens when the libido is brought under the control of the reality principle: gratification of sexual desire is delayed and transformed into an aesthetic achievement or what Marcuse refers to as Eros. Under such conditions, Marcuse argues, the artistic realm is an ‘other’ dimension, radically distinct from and intrinsically antagonistic to everyday life”
As a result, society becomes one-dimensional, removing the possibility for the development of meaningful symbols of revolution; Che Guevara, among other figureheads of 20th century revolution, has been co-opted by and contorted into a puppet of the old guard. Take that, Marxists.
Capitalism works in mysterious but ultimately unimaginative ways. Through desublimation, it flattens ideology down to a Guerrillero Heroico tote bag or article of clothing, thereby generalising ideological revolutions to the extent that a solid means of reaching revolutionary ends cannot be extricated from the commercialised symbols. Those wishing to rebel, revolt, or revolutionise increasingly see less need to read theory and develop meaningful plans of action; they need only pull on a Che Guevara shirt to feel they’ve accomplished something. To add insult to injury, they’ve likely also lined Jeff Bezos’s pockets, because it’s just so convenient, isn’t it?
It goes even beyond this. Those taking productive action, going to protests with their meticulously made, creative (and often entertaining) picket signs, fall victim to the same complacency — the difference being that this is even less through any fault of their own. Marches and petitions have been ‘marketed’ (so to speak) by the powers that be as the only acceptable form of demanding change under the guise that demands for change must be civilised, demure, and peaceful. This achieves little, especially in terms of marches; all it has done is inflame governments on either side of the globe now trying to pass anti-protestation legislation (of course, not when people are protesting institutions that help the most craven of politicians’ causes). This is not to say that we should cease to protest, but we must protest differently, with a ideas and goals behind it bearing a greater structural integrity.
We cannot let the revolution grow more commodified than it has already been, done so effectively by the economy-centric democracies emerging with greater force all over the world as the years go by. It will only grow more pervasive, grow more global, and therefore the counterculture must get on sturdier grounds, and universalise also. No more Che Guevara t-shirts, and certainly not as a substitute to this necessity.
