Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [57]
About to be free of a record contract, and staring across the record business’s wasteland, Radiohead was angry and confused. Money had been cracking their souls. But they found a way out of the torment with their next album by freeing themselves from money altogether: the album was more or less free. Whether or not this changed the music business, it helped turn a spotlight on not just how the music business has exploited musicians, but on how creative talent risks being exploited. This was the ultimate focus of Marx’s philosophy, a focus that changed much philosophy after it. Early in his career he stated: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” With Radiohead’s departure into contract-free territory, the vampire was getting a stake through its heart and, as Yorke said on the band’s blog, “We made the sign of the cross and walked away.”
But some complain that Radiohead’s change of music business models helped few artists beside themselves. Sales from the album, while unknown (guesses pin sales somewhere in the multi-millions), make clear that pay-what-you-want was a smart business move. But by taking over the enterprise of selling their own music, you can ask, isn’t Radiohead just becoming the money-making capitalists they despise, removing the middle man to make even more money? But this misses a crucial point Marx emphasized: Radiohead’s move does not accumulate wealth for wealth’s sake. What they’re doing, by wresting the method of distribution from the hands of the record business, is removing the capitalist middle-man, the business in the middle that does little more than make money from album sales for the sake of making money at the artists’ expense.
Still, you might object, Radiohead were hardly being what Marx called “immiserated,” rendered miserable by the circumstances of their employment. Liking their former record contracts or not, they’re millionaires. They’ve done well by capitalism. But doing well in this way does not mean they succumbed to capitalism and became accumulators of wealth for wealth’s sake. In fact, their new distribution method would hardly be a blow to capitalism if capitalism hadn’t brought Radiohead to world-wide prominence. Capitalism, then, enables Radiohead to more widely circulate their critique of music business methods than they could ever do otherwise. As other philosophers have argued, capitalism’s products will be its own downfall. Capitalism wants rapid and wide distribution of goods: but what if the goods being rapidly and widely distributed make consumers think twice about capitalism itself? Capitalist interests made Radiohead an international phenomena, and capitalism gave Radiohead a platform from which to help remove exploitation from the capitalist equation.
C-M-C Music Factory
Marx, it’s no surprise, had an equation that helps make sense of Radiohead’s move to remove the middle-man: C-M-C. Economic transactions that don’t exploit, Marx said, can be represented as CM-C. “C” is commodities and “M” is money. A person exchanges C, sells a commodity, for M, for money. That money, in turn, can be used to buy C, or commodities. I sell the product of my work for money and use that money to buy the product of someone else’s work: C-M-C. Capitalism works differently—more like, M-C-M. A capitalist uses money to buy commodities and the capitalist sells those commodities for money.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this formula, but it can get perverted into what Marx represented as M-C-M*. The M* represented transactions that sold commodities for more than they were worth only for the accumulation of M*, money above and beyond what’s reasonable. This surplus is then passed back into the M-C-M* transaction, and on and on, at the expense of those providing the capitalist the necessary Cs, or commodities. Also, a capitalist, perhaps above all, is one that takes the work of another and uses it for M-C-M*. The worker providing the C never gets their rightful