A few weeks ago, I saw a report on ABC World News Tonight about a troubling but entirely predictable new trend: In order to afford their dream weddings, some couples are now selling their wedding’s advertising rights to corporate sponsors.  Isn’t it romantic…

I say this trend is entirely predictable because selling your big day off to the highest bidder is merely one more instance of the way we sell everything these days–of the way even the most intimate and precious human relationships are increasingly for sale. We’d already seen Who Wants to Be a Millionaire morph overnight into Who Wants to Marry a Millionare. Now “I do” can be exchanged for “Just do it.”

The cover story in today’s New York Times Magazine provides another example. In “The Brand Underground,” writer Rob Walker looks at a generation of young, self-proclaimed rebels who look in the mirror and ask themselves this question: “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?”

That depressing question, and the earlier TV images of those folks entering holy matrimony under corporate aegis, put me immediately in mind of Karl Marx’s “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In the Manifesto, Marx (with an assist from Engels) wrote that capitalism:

has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’…It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade.

A few paragraphs later, he writes:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away…All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life…

You know, as in “How can I turn my lifestyle into a business?”

Like I say, whether it’s selling your wedding or yourself, it’s entirely predictable. Indeed, the old man already predicted it. 

Rereading that passage from the Manifesto this afternoon reminded me of another piece I’d wanted to share here for awhile. It’s an essay on the Manifesto by Marshall Berman, titled “Unchained Melody” and published in The Nation on the occasion of the pamphlet’s 150th anniversary. I particularly appreciate Berman’s paraphrasing of Marx on being “compelled to face with sober senses [the] real conditions of life,” and in words nearly as eloquent and powerful as Marx’s own:

The crucial reality [of capitalism] is the need to sell your labor to capital in order to live, the need to carve up your personality for sale–to look at yourself in the mirror and think, “What have I got that I can sell?”–and an unending dread and anxiety that even if you’re O.K. today, you won’t find anyone who wants to buy what you have or what you are tomorrow, that the changing market will declare you (as it has already declared so many) worthless, that you will find yourself physically as well as metaphysically homeless and out in the cold.

If you’ve never read the Manifesto, or if it’s been awhile, you can do so right here. As Berman stresses, the commentaries are no replacement for the real thing. Not that commentaries aren’t worth while–as Berman proves with his own. I’m making Berman’s “Unchained Melody” a permanent resident at The Reading List. Check it out.

*****

A few other items of interest: 1) Be sure to go to Rock Over Graceland where you can download two swell Bobbie Gentry albums, the out-of-print 1968 lp The Delta Sweetie and its same-year follow up, Local Gentry…2) Dig the spangly sartorial stylings of Nudie Cohn? Then be sure to visit Nudie Cohn: Rodeo Tailor to the Stars…and finally 3) I’ve been remiss in not mentioning the marvelous and smart “Cardinal Colors” series now underway at Locust Street. We’ve already seen editions for Red and Orange, and now Yellow is up–each with a dozen or so color-coordinated downloads for your listening pleasure. Stay cool. More soon…

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