On the Imperative of Niceness, Part One

The imperative to be “nice” is, at bottom, an imperative to properly comport oneself to the demands of the market.

Like dogs walking their slow, cumbersome owners to a dog park, commodities must get their guardians, in Marx’s words, “to place themselves in relation to one another as persons whose will resides in those objects.” Doing so is the most basic reorientation that a human being must undergo in order to participate in the process of exchange. For someone who…