The nature of being human: from environmentalism to consciousness

Reification is rooted in the necessities of economic life. The intensification of the drive for surplus value and profit accelerates the rate at which past goods are liquidated to make way for new goods; planned obsolescence is everywhere from consumer goods or thinking to sexuality. Built-in obsolescence exempts neither thought nor humans. Social amnesia is society’s repression of remembrance—society’s own past. It is a psychic commodity of the commodity society.
An important aspect of economically produced social amnesia to which Jacoby alluded is the notion that planned obsolescence refers also to human beings. In other words, social amnesia encompasses the human cost of economic activity and success. It also incorporates the natural world whereby creation is forgotten in its instrumental reduction to “natural resources” Clearly, this is revealed in the capitalist commodification of creation and the objectification of human labour as commodities to be bought and sold, hired and fired, and employed and unemployed (or under-employed) according to the whim of market conditions. This is precisely what Kavanaugh refers to as the commodity form. The commodity form defines the reified matrix of our capitalist existence, and it serves as a potent legitimation for the devaluation of creation and the objectification of human beings.