The commodification of experience and the economy of shit

The radical left has paid too little attention to the contemporary problem of the commodification and proletarianization of all of life for those whose role in the economy is that of capital-generating labor power. Labor is time spent generating wealth that is so organized as to produce the maximum monetary wealth in order to produce surplus value or capital. Labor is time spent in subjection to the demands of capital. Everything that most of us 'have to' do when not at work is now capitalized. This includes education, which we are expected to pay for, though it is primarily organized in the interest of capital. It includes what we spend on housing, transportation, and health care, which we all need and want but we must get in ways that are organized by capital, for its profits, and on the principle that for us, to be properly disciplined and motivated, must be kept in conditions of artificial scarcity. It includes the repair work of the 'mental health' system, which is capitalist and only really is organized to help people at all by helping them fulfill their roles as workers and consumers of commodified use ('consumption') and leisure, and also by punishing them for failures to 'function' well enough in this system for its purposes. In this and other things, it also costs a lot, and these costs are the responsibility of individuals or otherwise to be off-loaded onto some other source of payments than the companies that employ people (for only some of their profit-generating activities). It also includes consumer activities that require costly and exhausting 'communications' with customer and technical support services, which are now mostly semi-automated in ways that make them efficient and cost-effective for the companies that provide them, and expensive and annoying for individual consumers.

I am increasingly impressed by how much of my non-money-earning time must be spent, wasted, because businesses succeed by leveraging the cost of time, which is the monetary cost to capital of labor (work that someone must do), so that this cost is minimal to the company that wants to maximize its profits, even if it is maximal to the individual consumers, who do not, in the end, gain but lose, by this leveraging of the commodified value of the uses of things and time in what otherwise could be called experience.

Capitalism destroys citizens and individuals who want to live the good life and pursue its effective organization and enjoyment through the, deformed, when not inactivated, public sphere. It turns citizens and individuals whose only 'task' is to live their lives as well and freely as they can (and is that a task?) into workers and consumers, and increasingly everything is some sad necessity, task, or (moralized) duty to a system of needs that in the end accumulates, what from the standpoint of individuals interested in living a good life, reduces ultimately to: shit. Shit is the commodification of experience that reduces things of use to what has no meaning other than its monetary value as a unit of profitable exchange.

Shit has two defining properties: it is what has no interest, and it is offensive to sensibility. What has only exchange but no use value is like shit in sharing the first property. What has no meaning or value to those experiencing it but is offensive to sensibility is experiences that are unpleasant and boring. Labor (paradigmatically, factory labor) has long been recognized as essentially unpleasant and boring. Today all kinds of leisure activities have this set of qualities or are maintained in a constant state of fear of them.
The second attribute of shit that defines the experience of it, being offensive, may be avoided by management apparatuses by psychologizing the experience of it as offensive. Then the messenger who declares it to be such is the one to be negatively sanctioned. You can deal with anything; catastrophes only exist in your mind: this is the pseudo-Stoical, and pseudo-Buddhist (it is these ideologies without the ethical qualities that once defined them) thinking that drives most of today’s popular psychotherapies. But some things are catastrophic, and the disaster should be named. Then it can be refused. This refusal is a collective project that can be taken up in the name of the good life, or the free life, or both. Shit and wasted time or destroyed experience, like the adversity of suffering and the annihilation of death, is real, and the denial of such evils is the greatest ideological evil and cause thereof. What was the Holocaust but a way of demonstrating to people that their experience can be so transformed that it has no meaning, and, more than that, that they can be transformed into waste? In a way this echoes in a most extreme form the fact that capitalism tends to need to consume and destroy both the intelligent bodies and the environments used in its production.