THE POTTED POLITICAL ECONOMY OF OPERA CRITICISM.

Commentary's Eric Nelson tackles a serious subject in "Wagner and the Anti-Semitism of ‘the Ring’."  He opens, though, in a most unserious way.

The experience of reading [Roger Scruton's] posthumously-published Wagner’s Parsifial: The Music of Redemption has now converted my instinctive feeling into a near-certainty. For in the opening pages of this new book, Scruton recognizes that “in his mature operas” Wagner meant to reject the bourgeois, liberal “world of deals and transactions”—a world characterized, as Wagner saw it, by the perverse “‘commodification’ of human relations,” rather than the longed-for “dissolving of the self in the experience of community.” This is indeed a central ideological preoccupation of the Ring. Scruton misses only the crucial fact that, for Wagner, this pathological world of bargains was essentially “Jewish.” Wagner’s anti-Semitism was therefore inextricably bound up with his critique of bourgeois liberalism. And since this distinctive style of Jew-hatred has recently returned to prominence on the political left, getting to grips with its character is, alas, no longer an imperative for deranged Wagnerians alone.

There is no better reason to understand the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment than to cast, forever, the lunatic notion of "commodification" into the outer darkness, or at least somewhere beyond Pluto.

By way of review: in radical political economy a good or service becomes a commodity when someone produces it for the purpose of selling it for a profit.  We'll leave as tangential feel-good legislation that holds labor services or education as not commodities, or the business vocabulary in which a commodity is a standard product that can be traded on standard contracts.  The role of profit is different in radical political economy as well.  In classical and neoclassical economics, profits function as information, devote resources here whether than there, whilst in radical political economy the profit is an end in itself.  What any of those considerations have to do with human interaction is beyond me, and the article doesn't clarify.

It does, however, suggest the author could benefit by a second lesson in economics.

Wagner did intend to put on stage a world that requires emancipation from its “Jewishness.” There is a great deal of evidence that [Paul L.] Rose might have offered for this claim, much of which comes from the libretto itself. Let me begin with a clue—a small detail from the second scene of Das Rheingold (the first of the Ring operas to be scored, although the last to be written). Wotan awakes from slumber to find that Valhalla, the new home of the gods, has been completed. We learn that he has made a bargain with the giants, Fasolt and Fafner: If they build the fortress for him, he will give them the beautiful goddess Freia in payment. The bill is now due, and Wotan’s wife, Fricka, assails him for having entered into this perverse contract in the first place.

So much for bourgeois notions of property rights. Freia is not Wotan's to give in the first place.  The contract to build a McMansion worthy of the Gods has all sorts of potential for hold-up, and, the giants having built it, it might have occurred to one of them that Wotan might want to revise the deal, now that Valhalla is up.  Wotan enters into a commitment he cannot credibly make good on, and the giants did nothing by way of securing a performance bond before they built the place.  But the use of one term, Schächergewerb, suffices to suggest that the incomplete contract between Wotan and the giants is an example of a Jewish street-pedlar trick.  (As if itinerant hucksters don't come in all flavors, but I digress.)

Ultimately, we wind up with a pretty good exposition of just how empty Marxian political economy, at least as understood by music critics, is.

Marx argued instead that Judaism and liberalism were in fact a perfect match. Liberalism, on his account, is simply an expression of Judaism. Man in liberal civil society is “active as a private individual, treats other men as a means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.” Religion in civil society is therefore “the sphere of egoism, of the bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of division. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men.” The notion of “the rights of man,” as understood within the liberal order, presupposes a picture of man as “an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself,” into “his private interest and private choice, and separated from the community.” The pathological focus of liberal citizens on their private, isolated needs estranges them from their fellows, whom they encounter as mere “means” to the advancement of their own interests. The result is the distinctive commodification of human life that Marx associates with the bourgeois, liberal order.

But this fact about the liberal state, for Marx, is to be explained as a manifestation of its essential “Jewishness.”

To the contrary, the notion of "rights of man" is the emergence of a set of conventions by which people can rub along agreeably well with each other, with the understanding that it is often more productive to respect the interests others wish to advance as a way of advancing their own gains.

I repeat, "commodification" is a lunatic notion.