Zombies and Humans: Two Conspicuous Consumers

With the release of George Romero's “Dawn of the Dead” in 1978, the figure of the zombie became forever linked with consumer culture. As Matthew Walker's article “When There's No More Room in Hell, The Dead Will Shop the Earth” illustrated, the film is filled with references to the zombie-like nature of the average consumer who is compelled to purchase goods that he or she may not need.

Because of Romero's film, it isn't hard to draw connections between human behavior, zombies, and the concept of “Conspicuous Consumption” as put forward by sociologist, economist, and Wisconsin native Thorstein Veblen in “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” Veblen's work outlines the purchasing patterns of people in modern society who spend money primarily to demonstrate their level of income to their friends, family and neighbors. While Veblen cites examples of consumption from the aristocracy, you don't need to look far to find it in our daily lives. Though a Dodge Neon may work just as well as a means of transportation, an individual who makes a larger income will likely feel the need to purchase a Mercedes or BWM to demonstrate their position in society.

Though the concept of conspicuous consumption is addressed through works like “Dawn of the Dead,” the zombie itself has another relation to the concept of consumption. As Scott pointed out in the class discussion board for “28 Days Later,” the zombie consumes in a way that is hard to understand. “I cannot imagine that zombies are able to digest food, so what is the driving force that directs a zombie to eat human flesh (or brains)? Is it jealousy? Or a hunger that cannot be satisfied? Or something else?”

The zombie's hunger itself is an example of conspicuous consumption. As the zombie is no longer alive and likely lacks the biological processes to digest the “food” it ingests, it is consuming something that it does not in fact need. The reason for this in a literal sense is difficult to understand, but symbolically, it is rather a clear and useful illustration of Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption.

The Zombies of Capitalism According the Marx's "Fetishism and Commodity"

“The Fetishism of the Commodity and It’s Secret” is a section in Karl Marx’s “Capital: Volume 1” and discusses the different kinds of values placed on objects in relation to human use, labor and how they contribute to the capitalist system. To start off, it will be helpful to define a few key terms that are consistently used in this excerpt: (according to Marx and Merriam-webster.com)

· Fetish- an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion

·Commodity- an economic good, something useful or valued

·Use-Value- the degree to which an object satisfies human needs, property of the item itself

·Exchange Value- the value of an object relative to other objects or a specific system, directly assigned by humans

The term in the title, “Fetishism of the Commodity,” describes the significance of an object in a way that is completely separate from its use value. It is a fetish because although it may have no real use value, the commodity is still revered in a mystical sense because it is a product of human labor. Marx breaks this down by explaining the manner of labor both individually and socially and how certain objects can come to be commodities.

When it comes to exchanging commodity, “what initially concerns producers…is how much of some product they get for their own” (234). In essence this comes down analyzing how much capital value is placed on an object and demeaning the amount of labor put into any given commodity to a single price. This means eliminating labor as a human factor and simply valuing “relations between material objects” (236). In accordance with the theme of this course, we could perceive the dehumanized laborers in this practice, as “zombies.” Take for example the social labor of factory workers, that is a group of people working together to create one specific product. Are they “zombies” because they toil repetitively only to remain unrecognizable? How different are they from the Haitian zombies, who are revived only to fulfill the needs of the field owners?

Marx continues to explain how we as humans come to assign value to commodities and why labor is a determining factor in this process. He uses the example of “Robinson Crusoe,” the English novel by Daniel Defoe, and how Crusoe slowly turns items into commodity and conforms to the ideology of capitalism. After being stranded on the island, Crusoe makes use of what he has acquired, using labor to ensure his survival, but as he forms his new life, he realizes that certain tasks have greater importance because they require different amounts of labors. Crusoe essentially creates his own system of capitalism because he assigns exchange value to all the commodities he has created and starts to adhere to this as a cost.

Often times, we as consumers are hardly different than Robinson Crusoe because we assign commodity value according to a similar system. But once this system is known it seems to disappear from everyday transactions and appears only as a price tag, thus come the consumers who are bred to ignore the labor and adore the cost, or as Marx would call them the bourgeois. The system thrives on these people because they feed the market and demand exchange value over use value. But what comes to mind when we think of these mindless consumers, only waiting for the next best commodity to come their way? They are the “zombies” on the other end of capitalism, buying into fetishism, adoring the high value of commodity and forgetting that by paying the price, they are losing sight of the human element.