by JEAN WYLLYS & JULIE WARK
Take photos of a gold Lamborghini, or of a golden cupcake (which, if eaten near Blenheim Palace, could be pooed into Maurizio Cattelan’s solid gold toilet called “America” … before it was stolen, that is), or that photo of the gilded horror called home by Donald Trump (for whom even normal urine has to be a golden shower), complete with besuited child sadly perched on a lion, and it’s not difficult to conclude that there’s something wrong about gold. Norman O. Brown got close to it in Life Against Death: “[…] practically never found in natural conditions […] gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being”.
Now take a photo of an Amazon gold mining site, reduced to dead and deadly red clay and slurry. A gorgeous rainforest, throbbing with life and nature’s music, home to thousands of species including humans, Midas-touched to deadness. The lesson learned by the foolish, greedy king of Phrygia, when his golden touch led to his own threatened starvation because he couldn’t eat gold, and the death of living things, including his beloved daughter, seems to have been lost. Marx wrote in Das Kapital, “Gold and silver thus become of themselves social expressions for superfluity of wealth”. It’s a statement that needs unpacking to reveal the crimes, awfulness, and madness contained in these “social expressions for superfluity of wealth”.
The gold trade isn’t only about murder, mercury poisoning, displacement of Indigenous peoples, and destruction of the environment, but also the utter folly of societies and individuals that value gold so highly that they commit heinous crimes and knowingly harm the planet to get some. These are social expressions of the malignant disease of gold idolatry. For Brown, the “salient characteristic” of gold is its “absolute uselessness for all practical purposes”. It’s an “imaginary value” in “vague talk about ‘economic necessity.’” The basic necessity is food. Yet, “it is inherent in the money complex to attribute to what is not food the virtue that belongs to food. In Freud’s succinct formula, excrement becomes aliment”.
In Das Kapital, Volume III, Marx speaks of gold fetishism. “This social existence assumes the aspect of a world beyond, of a thing, matter, commodity, by the side of and outside of the real elements of social wealth”. It’s a false thing of false value that kills the real elements of social wealth. Brown’s useless surplus becomes a commodity that’s so highly valued that, thanks to the climate catastrophe it has helped to create, it destroys the conditions for the production of the necessary real food in real societies. The result: 828 million people go hungry every day, 40% of them at acute levels; 2.3 billion don’t have adequate access to food; 9 million people, many of them children, die of hunger-related causes every year (more than 1,000 per hour); 149 million children under the age of 5 are stunted.
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