“Two clients were promised nights out with Penthouse Pets.”

10. allen:

Make of it what you will.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

11. marymcl

@10 allen: That’s a great example of what Thomas Sowell was talking about when he called Marx a brilliant propagandist. It’s a lovely, lyrical expression of an meaningless statement.

* * * *

Maybe Marx on commodification might be more appropriate than Marx on religion. Love has been commodified to a great extent in contemporary capitalist culture and largely collapsed into equivalence with sex. This is not to say that people don’t still seek love. But love is a difficult thing to commoditize, while sex is easy to commoditize. The internet can be accommodate an economy of love and relationships; but it more easily accommodates an economy of sex.

Marx was a humanist romantic, and his critique of commodification is a profound one. Without religion, however, it opens the door to even greater exploitation of human beings via socialism than is performed via capitalist commodification. Catholic social doctrine/subsidiarist thought results in some kind of balance of social critique and respect for human beings.

Here’s a Wikipedia entry on Marx on commodification:

” Marxist political economy,[3] commodification takes place when economic value is assigned to something not previously considered in economic terms; for example, an idea, identity or gender. So commodification refers to the expansion of market trade to previously non-market areas, and to the treatment of things as if they were a tradable commodity.

“For instance, sex becomes a marketed commodity, something to be bought and sold rather than freely given. Human beings can be considered subject to commodification in contexts such as genetic engineering, social engineering, cloning, eugenics, social Darwinism, Fascism, mass marketing and employment. An extreme case of commodification is slavery, where human beings themselves become a commodity to be sold and bought. Similarly, the use of non-human animals for food, clothing, entertainment, or testing represents the commodification of other living beings.

“’While a person dies every day during the eight or more hours in which he or she functions as a commodity, individuals come to life afterward in their spiritual creations. But this remedy bears the germs of the same sickness: that of a solitary being seeking harmony with the world.’” — Che Guevara [4]

“Karl Marx extensively criticized the social impact of commodification under the name commodity fetishism and alienation.

“Commodification is often criticised on the grounds that some things ought not to be for sale and ought not to be treated as if they were a tradeable commodity.”