Architects - For Those That Wish To Exist

Welp, i tried. I really did. But arguing is the least productive human activity and i'm a lean into it kind of guy, so guess we're going to listen to the entire For Those That Wish To Exist album by Architects while synopsisizing the conceptual problem we're having living in the middle of the story Marx used to explain the entire history, present, and future of humans. You see, you can't actually argue for or against Marxism without accidentally folding through the 4th dimension and becoming Marxist. The harder you argue the more Marxist you become. We all fall in parallel. 

Why did this coincidence happen? I dunno, Madam Coincidence does what she does. Dan Searle says "this album was me looking at our inability to change to a way of life that would sustain the human race and save the planet...." Looking in the mirror, personal responsibility, the culture of "wanting someone else to deal with it." See? Creepy isn't it? I'm putting no effort into it at all. It's not really surprising, though. No matter how much architecture you try to build on top of it, it's all just an elaborate attempt to run away from death. 

DS: I just want to live and die in peace. 

Me too, Dan. Not a fan of p(nmi)t's dead butterfly album either. Washed my hands of it in the 3rd book, even. 

So, if you've been really reading, you'll know that i've raised 3 objections to Marx. 1) you don't logically have to believe his story, 2) he did a bad job of explaining that you can't make it happen on an arbitrary timetable, and 3) Marxist thought is itself essentially a religion with a preconditional origin mythology. Lenin and Stalin truly believed they could accelerate their country through the whole crappy Capitalism part as quickly as possible. He also didn't really explain that none of his ideas had anything to do with the accumulation of wealth itself beyond recognizing that you can't create material wealth without exploiting the labor that creates it. "The means of production" is technologically assisted human labor. There is a grain of truth to the argument that "nobody gets rich," but that's only because there isn't any money or a need for money anymore. It's a nonsense argument, is what I'm saying. 

"The fiction that i'm living in says i should pull the pin." I don't for one millisecond believe that Dan Searle reads much Marx or Lenin for fun in his spare time, and he certainly wasn't reading my facebook posts in early 2020 while writing the album. Although, i did sell a few copies in England so that's a ridiculously hilarious conspiracy theory i just invented. 

So, what is the mythology from which Marxist thought originates? It is simply this: there was a before Economics, there is now Economics, and there will be an after Economics. Economics, much like Pop, will eat itself. 

Now, that's a pretty tough pill to swallow at first. It sounds wackadoodle because it is. Not irredeemable, but silly without the added notion that systems create their own Truth rather than emulating an objective one. We just have to accept that it's impossible to imagine a world without some underlying mythology to justify its own existence, because you can't unthink it without a lot of collateral brain damage. 

A common misconception is that Marxism equals poverty. That's ridiculous because Marxist economics is just Classical Economics with actual Christmas bonuses as opposed to Jelly of the Month clubs. Marxism proper equals ensuring the baseline of subsistence is met for the entire population before we start handing out bonuses at all. Remember that this baseline subsistence is predicated on showing up to work and actually doing something productive every day. You can choose to stay home and starve if you want to, but that seems pretty counterintuitive if you ask me. Also remember that the three pages of The Wealth of Nations i could stomach to read contained an explicit defense of the Welfare State. You can't argue out of that one, Smith says 50% unemployment with no access to book learnin' is still better than not living in Western Europe. A hundred years later watching people still dumping chamber pots out their windows, Marx called shenanigans. 

Now don't get me wrong, being a successful Capitalist is tangibly more physically comfortable than being a homeless bum, at least i think that's the technical term for "unsuccessful capitalist." You could of course choose to be a rich homeless bum like Elon Musk, but that seems unnecessarily stupid. I only say that to point out that the opposite is even more ridiculous, a rich guy borrowing money to pay for some idiotic vacation. Capitalism gives two thumbs up to both those things: "I invented Clear Cola, everybody loves it so that definitely deserves an all expenses paid trip to the Galapagos to shoot penguins. It's not like i can just hand all of my employees an extra $50 this week because i feel like it, it wouldn't be fair to the ship's crew or the penguins. 

Man, this album is lovely. I was honestly expecting a lot more Metalcore from a Metalcore band, but traces of Industrial, Emo, EDM, and Arena Rock, this is complex and quite frankly refreshing. 

Here's the thing about Marx, and yes i know i've hammer-and-sickled this to a pulpy mush, he says "look, there's normal life and that's normal, but as soon as you separate the labor from the product of that labor, the guy who made it is stuck with less money than it costs to buy a new one from himself. How many toasters do you need to make to earn enough money to buy the toaster you just made? This, by the way, is the point where Proudhon stands up and yells "property is theft!" He means private capital property, not personal property. 

All well and good, but we don't have any actual numbers to evaluate the situation. All we have is a predetermined cost of manufacturing, a guesstimate of the final selling price, and no idea what actually happens to the surplus value. All we know is that two groups of people walk out of the same factory. One group is dirty, tired, and grumpy, the other is clean, expensively dressed, and pleased as punch. Follow them home and the shiny happy people live in huge mansions in gated communities while the dirty grumpy people live in rundown neighborhoods, apartment buildings, trailer parks. Seems a bit suspicious, if you ask me. 

Anywho, we have to ask two important questions. Do you work in Richard Corey's factory and curse the life you're living? Or, do you own your own factory and try to put him out of business? What if the answer is neither? 

Can you hear them? Just stomping and jittering and ruckusing about like squirrels in a place where you don't want squirrels. Auditors. All they do is count, and recount, but who's paying them, so now we can't even be sure they're doing a good job. 

Then the temptation is just too much. One little aspiring painter gets madder and madder and that one nasty little Auditor in the corner whispers "pick a problem and kill it." All of a sudden it's Marx vs Hitler with little old Liberal America sliced right in two. 

Now, i know this is all confusing, and that's because everybody likes to use words that get people to think they agree with you and ignore what you're actually doing. Well, no secrets here, i'm doing a Marxist reading of the history of albums by listening to them. 

Marxism is an analytical methodology that seeks to explain its subject in terms of the real world forces and architecture that force people to act in a certain way. Marx's own primary subject was Capitalism: how it works, what it does, where it will lead, what we can or cannot control about it, mine is the recorded music industry. I personally think the music industry has already gone through its capitalist mode of production (music being produced for the sole purpose of selling it as a commodity), musicians collectively own the means of production, and we are once again producing and supporting music for its consumptive value. We are, in essence, back in the pre-capitalist state of complete musical freedom. There is no heirarchy of musical classes exploiting each other, no one type of music is better than another, and all that is lacking is a wider industrial willingness to make an equivalent trade for our efforts. Some amount of music must be equal to some amount of food, clothing, shelter, appreciation. It's not about competition, its about value. Give music back its actual value, not merely use it to accumulate money at the expense of all our hard work.