Coming to Terms with Terms: "The Market"

	There are a number of now and happening terms that if you a conscienced human being, with a respect for language, you have to hate passionately. None is more horrid than the ubiquitous term(s) ,"The Market" or "The Markets." Australian writer and Loreto nun, Veronica Brady, recently maligned the fact that "market", a formerly life-affirming word which conjures pictures of vibrant buying, selling, colour, music and human interaction, can now represent the global futures trade and the global electronic economy which is pushing capitalism to a near certain bust of epic proportions. The markets say this, the markets have done this, the markets have in their hands the lives of individuals, nations and economies. The market is the lap of the gods. And what a god the Market is. So reliable, so caring. Receiving dollar signed smoke from grossly international productive incense. About as moral as the notoriously homicidal, sexually active, Clintonesque gods of Roman mythology. The market that now sells you Che Guavera in a soft drink can, John Lennon's music in Nike ads and that plans advertising in space to make use of the downtime which the night sky represents. And what does this god look like? It has many faces. There is, first, the most common. The Charles Bronson face. Banal, expressionless, yet omnipresent. Beamed, printed, telephoned, faxed and e-mailed worldwide every day: The Nikkei Index is steady, The Dow Jones up a little and the All Ordinaries closed two points higher to finish the day at who gives a shit. There is, also, the angry face. The Rambo. This is represented by a TV sound byte of hundreds of striped, lab-coated stockmarket workers shouting at each other as currencies crash, tagged by the same heads in hands in front of computer terminals. Then there is the happy face. The aforementioned lab-coated pointing and yelling at each other joyfully as they stare at red or orange blips on a scoreboard revealing the escalating profits of the company that this week has most adequately sacrificed humans on the Market's altar. Rest assured, however, that the Market's soothsayers - the "knowledge workers" - will be at work the next day counselling these sacrificial lambs about the virtues of moving to the next level down on the escalator of servile degradation, as they are trodden underfoot by the very knowledge workers who are counselling them. And what is this Market god's overall relation to humanity? Well, it is panentheistic. It has its own identity and includes all of us. We are the Market, the Marketed and the Marketeers. Blips in the big Bleep. In the same way that cult members may know something is very wrong with the life they are leading, we cannot break free of the control of our master. The Market is the cult we're in. Singer Paul Kelly says it well: "In the land of the little kings, there's a price on everything." We are marketed from the womb to the tomb. Children younger than three recognise the McDonald's arches and can place them in context. Australian funeral companies are happy to emblazon Nike symbols on coffins to ensure they get your business. How can there be any other way when 90 per cent of the world's nations are capitalist and economic growth is equated with well-being, and well-being therefore depends on producing more value-free products to stuff into our lives which we never get to use because we are too busy being live, working incense, burning before the Market's altar. But if you stop buying then the heart of society stops beating. You'd like a new whatever has become if you don't get a new whatever you are not being your brother's keeper. A by-product of life, purchasing goods, has become the end product of existence. However, the most insidious feature of the market is that it practices an apartheid more effective than anything South Africa could produce. It separates the old and the young more efficiently than a barbed wire fence and a gun. The word demographic has become accepted as an okay reality of new century living. But is it really okay? Is it okay that kids TV shows are inundated with advertising which from an early age gives them a list two pages long of things they can't live without and then they can't understand why their parents can only buy one - or none - of the things they want? Is it okay that a consistent aspect of marketing to the 18 to 35 age group is ridiculing middle and old age. No wonder boomers, raised in the television age, can say with all sincerity, as this author's Dad did, that he has nothing left to offer me or anyone else now that he is over 50. It's a message that has been drummed into him by the marketeers all his life. And it's a message that non-Western, elder respecting cultures would laugh at hysterically. No wonder they resist Western marketing so passionately. Do we have to let the market enslave us? Day by day, with little decisions first, can't we pick at the cuffs invisibly tied around our wrists? We already have enough trouble seeing all races as equally valuable, do we have to allow the market to divide us further so we see pre-teens, teens, 20-somethings, 30-somethings, boomers and elderly people as separate types of human beings? How we approach our Western lives as part of the "market" is as great a test of how we live out our freedom in Christ as the test faced by Christians living under Communism. And like Russian Communism, if the rampant capitalism we live under does not reform, it will collapse. And a reformed capitalism has got to be better than the barbarism its fall would entail.

Paul Mitchell mitch@fishcomnet.com.au

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