Many of you must have come across the Mastercard advertisements on television. There are several versions of them. There is one which talks of a senior-aged couple visiting the Udaipur Lake Palace. It mentions the price of the air tickets, the hotel rooms and the dinner. Then mentions that the cost of a long lasting relationship is 'priceless'. There is another one which deescribes a family get-together for Christmas. This one mentions the cost of the Christmas tree, the presents, a digital camera etc., but asserts that the cost of a photograph in which four generations of a family appear together is 'priceless'. My personal favourite is, of course, the one in which the man jumps to a hit-of-six while listening to cricket commentary during to his anniversary dinner.
Though each of these advertisements seemingly stress that money can't buy everything, that there is a severe limitation to the power of money - the actual asumptions behind the concept is one that stresses the overwhelming power of money. The attainment of the 'priceless' moments of human relationships has been made possible in each of these ads by the mediation of money - lots of it. In fact, the sentiment being argued by the ads is precisely that, because the occassion is 'priceless', there can be no limit to the amount of expenditure that could be incurred in attaining it. The expenditure can be so huge that the people participating in the 'priceless' occassion must enter into debt by borrowing money from Mastercard and its associates at an astronomical lending rate of over 33% per anum!! That is, the more 'priceless' the occassion, the more it costs. 'Spend more, spend more ...'
My point in analysing these advertisements is not to suggest the level of corruption of the corporate taste creation machinery exhorting people to become consumers and enter into tons of wasteful expenditure. Instead I am trying to suggest that the mighty rhetoric of capitalism which universalizes the consumerist assumption that all things in this world are 'products' with 'price tags', it cannot ignore that this assumption is not correct. It has to grapple with the reality that there are things in the world which 'money can't buy'; and the fact that these things are valuable to those people it wants to be its consumers. In this fissure of the logic lies a possibility. I would like to use one more example to illustrate this idea.
In India we are experiencing a Real Estate boom. That is, some people are utilizing the scarcity of housing, and the refusal of governments to take up the responsibility of providing housing to the people, to make pots of money. More over, the government has now allowed foreign investment in Real Estate, a move which has meant that more and more deals in Real Estate are for purely speculative purposes - a huge fraction of newly built apartments and houses actually lie vacant for their prices to appreciate. The morning newspapers and billboards are overflowing with advertisement of luxury condomiumns and enclaves with swinmming pools, clubs, shopping complexes, and 70% green cover - "In heart of the concrete jungle, live amidst nature". Of course, this sort of concept is a resultant of the neo-liberal reforms in India and the class divides that it is bringing about. The emerging uppper middle-classes create enclaves of the first world and remove from their surroundings the squalor and the poverty that their enrichment is causing. But, once again, I don't want to talk about the injustice being meeted out to the working people of this country.
Instead I would like to point out the inherent contradiction involved in the conceptualisation, construction and consumption of these enclaves. These are private spaces, which themselves rely on the ideology of private property - most the owners make their money through privately owned businesses or non-governmental corporations; they the most vocifarous advocates of privatisation and look upon the government or other forms of public control as a social evil. Yet a large part of these enclaves or apartment complexes are made of shared spaces and facilities which cannot be owned by any particular apartment owner. So these enclaves of 'private spaces' can be viable only through the existence of these 'public spaces'.
Again within the logic of capitalism and private property is located a fissure which questions it.
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