It kind of sounds like a dark comedy no?
Anyway, I went through the process of selling a car privately. Something that many Americans experience in their lifetimes, and something which, as it happens, should be routine for a culture that worships both cars and markets. Though this sounds like it is going to be a boring life journal post, I can assure you it is not. The experience has been revealing, to say the least.
Now it has become almost commonplace to assert that commodity markets tend to supplant people-relations with object-relations, at least as they become more powerful and widespread. If your very survival is predicated on the steady accumulation of trade-objects - money in this case - then of course whatever produces money is going to take priority in the consciousness.
And where survival is threatened, one feels great pressure. The objects of survival elevate themselves into the forefront of the attention with this constant pressure. The pressure is much worse in poor communities, who don't have whatever small cushion of family wealth to fall back on if something goes wrong. And forget about relying on the state, at least in the U.S.; the state is bound up in the same social darwinist claptrap, that one has to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps or one becomes weak and dependent, an ideology that is of course racialized to boot.
This pressure only grows as you ascend the commodity ladder. Larger, more expensive objects, like cars and houses for example, take on an existential importance. They operate as shreds of shedded capital, augmentable resources for one to latch onto and shield oneself against the constant economic disintegration presented by rent and hunger.
Of course it is important to remember that in many cases, this dynamic is completely reversed. To be poor, one eventually gives up on many things which one realistically acknowledges as unattainable, and so the pressure is lifted. Whereas for the rich, there is a constant pressure of cascading desires; the trade object is never enough. In the face of this reality, it is easy enough to understand the market paradox in which many of the poor are spiritually satiated and content (which goes without saying that this is not an excuse for poverty), while the rich act as if they are perpetually dehydrated and starving. Outcomes in this complex interplay of economic forces are by no means simple or easily predictable.
Now, I could still be considered to occupy the middle class, and the process of selling certainly did not present the urgency of life or death, but nevertheless the process took a prominent space in my waking consciousness, and it even made its presence felt in sleep, through various stress dreams.
Through the mere act of selling, I felt as if I was doing the buyer a great disservice. Charging the greatest amount I could get, I feared that somehow the buyer would be ripped off and left with an inferior car, to be indirectly injured by my own economic needs. But of course, I'm operating from a self-conscious desire for mutual generosity; I have failed to internalize the warlike spirit one takes going to market, that what is equally likely is that the buyer is pursing their own desires, and attempts to get as low a price as possible, at the expense of the other. It is the way of things; it is business.
Participation in a market, at least in this era, is a fundamentally antagonistic activity. There one is presented with the prospect that one is entering a wilderness where everyone is pursuing their own self-interest. Theoretically, we are speaking of a neutral medium here, in which there is a mutual exchange of equals. Yes, pursuing such relations with a generous spirit is one way to stave off this reality. One gives others a good deal, in the hope that the other will subsist as a sympathetic agent, eventually returning the favor. Economic relationships are established, mutually beneficial ones.
But as the economists say, the bad money drives out the good. Similarly, if a market is driven by predatory actors hoovering up value at the expense of everyone else, one can only be so generous for so long before one's self is steadily diminished. Within such a milieu, the self-interested forces described by game theory take over. One must take what one can get, and one expects the other to do the same.
As Funkadelic put it so eloquently, you descend to the level of your lowest concept of yourself. If it becomes permissible to instrumentalize another to make material gains, as a basic condition for daily survival, then instrumentalization, and objectification becomes a regular fact of social life.
Being able to manipulate and instrumentalize other people in order to get a greater share in trade necessarily revises one's global ethics; it is an instinctual change that occurs beneath one's own consciousness, which influences one's acceptable actions and pushes them in a certain direction.
If the character of a system depends on a certain threshold of constituent activity, then corruption is all that can become of the institutions predicated on a market society. The rule of law may keep such forces at bay for some time, but the institutions of law do not occur outside of the societies they regulate. Interpersonal relations permeate society, and there is no lasting barrier between market behavior and interpersonal behavior.
This last fact is easily demonstrated in the rise of neoliberal ideology as a governing principle, which has been applied to all branches of society. The market itself has spread to all corners of society, and so it is little surprise that many can only think in its terms, as even their survival instincts have been wired for this reality. And so as the market continues to operate, as bare self-interest spreads in number and density, a society must necessarily be restructured to accord with that reality, and corruption becomes a simple fact of social existence.
It bears articulating: markets are not the source of evil; their extension over a majority of the earth, and the forced participation in them, is. I did initially make the claim that theoretically, markets should appear as neutral, as a neutral act of exchange, but this is a purely logical claim that is ahistorical for the most part.
So long as societies have had a surplus to trade, and just as importantly, state actors to feed, markets have existed. But the increasing spread of markets is administrated with fundamentally self-interested and antagonistic activity. The personified archetype of the market, the merchant, is driven by these desires, who then upon reaching a critical mass in number, form the societies and institutions required to express their ecstasies. This has been achieved through explosive violence, a fact that lingers amongst our social relations like a smoldering fire, which seems to be steadily sparking outward yet again.
