Things, people, and ideas

Swim in the sea of commodities because this is where you will find the people.

If you can talk to others about things, at the very least you aren't gossiping with them about people. And if your Marxism map is drawn well, for example, it's not hard to connect what is popular about things to a more constructive discussion about what is important to people. In any case, it's always important to move conversation away from what we like or don't like about people or things, toward the relevant relationship between the two. It's at this point that we begin to talk about ideas.

Talking about ideas isn't something that we get a lot of practice at in advanced consumer societies, however. Ideas in themselves become "things" which we regard in our role as consumers. What is normally a process becomes a commodity, or finished product. This idea is "awesome," that one is "stupid." The consumer is always casting an up or down vote, rather than seeing possibilities where perhaps no one else does; or the limitations of something that only works in one context.

If you've ever seen a group of people assembled together to "discuss anarchism," more often than not what you've encountered is a narrow subset of consumers who might as well be "fans" of any other kind of commodity. As long as it is conceived as a "thing," not a process, anarchism is just something else to adorn oneself with and fret about, rather than a map by which to know the world. You will know the former by the pointless acrimony that ensues; the latter by the impulse to always want to learn more, in whatever context.