Don't spend all your meteorite money on alcopops
 
If you find a British meteorite you may be able to sell it for £1000. That's on a rarity principle similar to that of coin and stamp collecting. Fewer meteorites fall on Britain than on Africa, and so British ones fetch a tidy sum while common African space-rocks are worth only around £20. All this is according to a recent talk-radio item. Interviewing a meteorite collector, the presenter objected: 'But these aren't British meteorites, they come from space, they don't belong to anybody'. But as became clear from all that was said, if you put a price on it, and somebody's willing to pay the price, that's all it takes.
 
In the Age of the Market, everything is potentially a commodity, and not even meteorites can be allowed to belong to the global commons. If you are someone who would simply say, 'Look what I found, it's a meteorite; isn’t it amazing? Here, hold it in your hand, it's as old as the solar system' - someone content to wonder at it, and share that wonder - then you're not an accredited twenty-first-century commodity fetishist. By consumerist standards, you’re an eccentric. Or if your first thought were, give it to a museum - you might as well offer yourself to the museum and join the other dinosaurs. If you're a true commodity fetishist, you hold it in your hand and wonder how much it’s worth. Or you buy one, and then you can hold it in your hand and wonder if you can resell it at a profit.
 
On the same show there was an item on alcopops - no link was made to meteorites: how at first they were cunningly eased into the teenage niche market by 'hiding' them among the non-alcoholic mixers, and subsequently 'outed' by being moved to the alcohol shelves. Labelled in nice bright colours, and coolly branded with rock-band-style names - Two Dogs, Spaced Out, Barking Frog, Four Loko - to hit the spot with teenagers, they turn a nice profit wherever they‘re placed. Speaking in a little vox populi interview spot, a fifteen-year-old girl says she doesn't think 'they do anything to me'. But they're 5% alcohol by volume.
 
Eric Appleby, chairman of Alcohol Concern, says: "The whole alcopops thing came about because at that stage the industry had realised that they weren't getting the normal flow of drinkers coming through. The industry knew it had to do something. They will always deny it but it is pretty clear that the whole alcopops thing was about recruiting young drinkers and getting them at an early stage."
 
So what to do about them? The French government tried adding enough extra duty to double the price. The Australian government did much the same, but over the following ten years found that the average alcohol consumption of children aged 11 to 15 who were drinkers had risen from 5.3 units a week to 9.8. Labour and Coalition governments in the UK have toyed with proposals for minimum pricing and tax hikes, but so far neither idea has found its way into law.
 
An alcohol industry spokesman on the radio programme says the industry is concerned and would probably accept higher tax on alcopops 'within reason'. Somebody else talks about educating the young to use alcohol sensibly. The one thing the Market can't do is simply stop producing alcopops. Like the atom bomb, they can't be uninvented.
 
Because the market must expand. That's the Sod's Law of the modern world. The market demands far more than mere production of useful commodities and an effort to sell as many of them as possible. It must invent new commodities. There must be lots and lots of everything, and then lots more. The market must dream up endless new varieties of simple things where one or two would be enough: an already ludicrous choice of kitchen towels is further augmented with new rolls of more or less absorbent paper called Funky, Movie Magic and Forever Friends. Whole new families of commodities appear, so that you have not merely cleaners but kitchen cleaners, bathroom cleaners, toilet cleaners, shower cleaners, computer screen cleaners, windscreen cleaners, dashboard cleaners. (I'm not saying some of these things aren't useful, but there might just be another motive behind their proliferation.)
 
If you can't offer a product that's even remotely new in itself, you can dress the old one up in new packaging.  Or add a useless but romantic new ingredient. New! With aloe vera! You can look for new markets, remote people in Borneo or Amazonia to sell cigarettes to (the Amazon forest - how can a niche so huge have been neglected so long!), or rich-world teenagers who apparently don't yet consume enough alcohol. Or else, leaving no stone unturned, you can discover, rather than invent, a new commodity - such as rocks from outer space. If you were a religious marketeer, you might say meteorites are a godsend.
 
Alcopop promotion is just part of the dishonesty that surrounds us. We go to this great barn of a place to get meat, veg and rolls of paper and we are surrounded with practical jokes. In my home town there's a truly fascinating little shop called 'Joe's House of Jokes'. Tesco, Walmart and the rest should combine and rename all their stores 'Joe's House of Jokes'. There are the more or less harmless jokes. 20% extra FREE! (Give me just the 20%, it’s enough for my lunch, I’m not that hungry.) Or the way they move stuff around so that in your tortuous quest to find what you came for, you are tempted by things you never thought you wanted. (A fundamental market principle - create new needs.) But there are the nastier jokes too: LOW LOW prices at the expense of impoverished producers and immigrant packers. Vegetables and fruit in bulk packages that may suit a family of eight but contain too much for one or even three people ever to use, and so offer a difficult consumer choice: buy this and waste half of it, or don’t buy it. All aspects of Sod's Law of Market Expansion.
 
We should never forget, however, that this is merely the surface of capitalism. Right between the aisles of the supermarket we should remember the depths of capitalism too. ‘The great work of the past half-millennium was the cutting off of the world’s natural and human resources from common use. Land, water, the fruits of the forest, the spaces of custom and communal negotiation, the mineral substrate, the life of rivers and oceans, the very airwaves - capitalism has depended, and still depends, on more and more of these shared properties being shared no longer, whatever the violence or absurdity involved in converting the stuff of humanity into this or that item for sale.’* It would be difficult to find anywhere, even in Marx or Marcuse, a better or more deeply felt statement about the nature of this malignancy that has all but encompassed the earth. Whatever the violence or absurdity…: in the supermarket, where it plays its practical jokes on us, what we largely see is its absurdity; all around the globe, anywhere within reach of the global military, and in the vast, ramshackle shanty suburbs of poor-world cities, in increasing anger and despair we witness its violence.
 
The attachment of exchange value to British or African meteorites takes us one step beyond. They are not even ‘the stuff of humanity’, but the stuff of the cosmos, the stuff of a time before humanity and long before an age of a humanity so wholly oppressed by the ethos of buying, selling and war. To appropriate a piece of rock from space and put a price on it is hardly the most appalling thing ever done in the interests of capital accumulation. There is something in its symbolism, though, that makes the heart miss a beat.
 
*Retort Collective (Iain Boal, TJ Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts) - Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso 2005).
 
James Graham.