What's inside Capitalism: 'Success'

MORE! MORE! MORE!

Forever Becoming

Success becomes confused with market values. Success in all domains becomes defined by the ideology of the marketplace. Only a few turned up to your party, so it wasn't a success. You only have a few friends on Facebook, so you aren't a success.

The so-called freedom offered by capitalism has exposed the individual to the elements, making him feel isolated, insignificant and powerless. Unknown machinations were now taking place around him, the earth rumbling with the new momentum of free trade.

Market Orientation

For the individual capitalism offered the potential of a new and better life. His tethers cut, he was free to rise as high as he wished - but this privilege was not his alone.

The heights were up for grabs, and in order to gain the best view he would have to ensure that he rose higher than those around him.

The road to success – to the most advantageous view – was achieved through selling; if man could sell successfully then he was able to become successful.

Instead of selling enough to get along – to maintain an age-old lifestyle – he was prompted to sell as a means to advancement. No longer tied to his place, through selling more he could break with tradition and imagine something new.

With the best views exclusive, the individual was forced to consider his product within a marketplace that was both more expansive and more competitive.

Pious concerns were replaced with economic ones; everyday discourse coloured by the language and ideology of the marketplace. This state of affairs has reached its apotheosis in recent times.

If something does not sell successfully – if not enough people want it – then it is deemed as a failure. Within this ideology, quantity becomes a key determinant of success; the more people want something, the more successful it is.

The notion of success becomes confused with market-values, and success in all domains becomes defined by the ideology of the marketplace. Only a few people turned up to your party, so it was not a success. You only have a few friends, so you are not a success.

It is testament to the pervasiveness of capitalist ideology that we even come to think of ourselves as products, to be carefully crafted to sell to the highest number.

Market ideology pervades all aspects of life, its fiction transforming us into commodities, and our relations into a series of marketplaces within which we sell ourselves: as employees, as sex objects, as lovers, as friends.

The concept of the ‘glamour model’ is an obvious example; with her blonde hair, bronzed skin and practiced repertoire of facial expressions, she is as finely-tuned to sell to a specific market as the newest model of executive saloon.

She sells herself, and in doing so promotes to the masses the ‘look’ that she is selling – she tells us, on behalf of our collective ideology, ‘this is what the market wants, and this is how you sell yourself to it” - the market, in this instance, being ‘men’ - or at least, the State’s idea of men.

“Flesh is converted into sign”, the body “etched, pummelled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded”18 in order to sell more effectively. Not only is the specific look of the glamour model pushed, but also the very idea that women must ‘sell’ in the first place, proliferating the mentality of the system.

In her role as a tool of the State, the glamour model serves to teach a generation of girls how to kit themselves out to become successful commodities in a competitive marketplace.

Market-orientation is not restricted to glamour-model clones.

Most of us, at points, feel the pressure to sell ourselves in some way; and with technology increasing the forms through which we communicate, it is also - as a recent article on a “narcissism epidemic” among young girls suggests - proliferating the places in which one is required to self-promote.19

With all this emphasis on selling, we begin to think of the conventions of the system as innate and unavoidable.

All motives become inextricably linked with selling and individual gain, and “what are you trying to sell?” becomes the permeating dictum. Our view of humanity is bent and twisted to fit a system that often works to encourage the worst.