The Fetish of the Dollar

 
The Fetish of the Dollar

For an emoticic $ Legal Course: It is impossible to imperialize a currency without imposing a symbolic super-value that involves it. In addition to the economic "trust" that it means to "trade", the dollar, in particular, has been varnished with a hysterical "status" value manufactured to inoculate it as a fetish and rayano spell in irrationality and market fundamentalism. A kind of "God" fully described, for example, with Ludovico Silva in his "Ideological Surplus Value". Once and for all we go ahead against economicist allegations: Nothing in the economy is foreign to politics or culture. That is why the dollar exhibits what it exhibits in its history [1] and in its exotic and initiatory graphic. Not even God trusts them.

For the bourgeoisie addicted to American capitalism, the dollar is much more than a "refuge", it is nothing secret ever armed complicity with the aim of overthrowing governments, ending all beliefs and unifying humanity under a Single World Monetary Order , with a global system of unique thinking, unique ideology and a unique planetary "religion": "legal tender" capitalism.

The ideology of the ruling class imposes peoples their thinking and language, using all the semiotic redoubts they have at hand and is capable of assigning mercantile senses to all objects of reality. And one, which occupies a preferential place, in the objective and in the subjective, is its particular way of fetishizing the Dollar. Such fetishism is worthy of study, in its sign form, because of the importance acquired within the framework of Cultural domination.

Thus, it turns out that the Dollar is a “value” that, in turn, is articulated in the historical tension of armed military development in the territory and in memory. Through the Dollar and its addictions, a nation surrenders, implicitly or explicitly, with all its history and beliefs beyond its service as an international currency. The dependence on the Dollar expresses the spirit of the times and its submission to a colonial aspect of the ideas that have determined the self-representation of the slave peoples of an imposed currency. The ideology of the ruling class has amalgamated soul and the market, in the fetish of the dollar in all aspects of life: in their food, health, free time, sexuality, education, social security and death. What we confusingly call "currency" controlled by capitalism is a system that floods reality into bodies and souls.

In this territory we need an emancipatory semiotics capable of dismantling the network of meaning made to impose the Dollar as a supreme force that protects us, even, from the bourgeois rallies themselves, each of them camouflaged as “sense” for the semantic and syntactic slavery of the villages. And it is that the Dollar changes skin in the bowels of the Dominant Ideology; It is the death and resurrection of its monetary symbols and palimpsestos. Economic domination continues within the Dollar, too, as an object with graphics and symbology designed by a hegemonic semiotics with metaphysical ambitions.
 

The Dollar and its use as a symbol, in all forms, serves to convey messages with content, traditionally oppressive with its class semiotics infested with marketing stimulators. Semiotics or semiology subordinated as science at the service of monetarist fetishization systems, handling Charles S. Peirce, Ferdinand de Saussure, or any other theoretical referents distorted by the logic of the market propped up with wars. The Dollar as an emblem of a semiotic marketing, or as a "supra-natural force" that must be worshiped in the marketing of domesticated mentalities for the purchase of merchandise or as symbolic interactionism. The language of the Dollars transmitted efficiently and really as "essence" of human beings. Do we exaggerate?

 It is increasingly clear what happens because of the fetishism of the Dollar, all over the world, when human beings feel secure of a “value”, of an existential representativeness that everyone considers appropriate to satisfy fears, desires or needs , putting the product of his work, the heritage of the offspring, in the hands of the currency of the largest predator in history. The symbolic mutant dollars between evaluating and valuing tangible business equivalences, at cultural levels that increase their intangibility according to the ideological needs of the ruling class. It is clearer, and every day with greater certainty, that people also become addicted to the market of hegemonic symbology, endorsing with their work and their wages, the objective, subjective (and ideological) value of goods and their brands. Especially if they are sold at a dollar price and with "appreciation" for the dollar.

To emancipate from an imperial currency, that is, from the currency imposed by capitalism in its imperial phase, is also to emancipate itself from a reef of Imperial Culture and Communication. They should not be seen as two unrelated realities and it is indispensable to deepen the emancipatory economic, political and semiotic action and intervention to scientifically combat the monstrous ideological product based - frequently - on the heads of the peoples who see, in the Dollar, the salvation of their "savings" while quietly enjoying "the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie" in currencies.

Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez
Director of the Institute of Culture and Communication and Sean MacBride Center
National University of Lanús