Readers Write In #722: Why is gold so expensive? A Thangalaan perspective

By G Waugh

In Pa Ranjith’s Thangalaan, in the initial portions of the film, the king who arrives at the landscape where gold is rumoured to be residing beneath, is tempted with visions of gold wherever he looks. When he orders his men to proceed towards acquiring them, he is shocked to find strange animals and predators like snakes and panthers lunging at the invaders trying to protect the treasures. After Kaadaiyan, played by Vikram, manages to subdue them, the king’s men succeed in acquiring the gold that lay scattered in the form of small pebbles and stones. But within minutes, it is discovered to the king’s dismay that these objects are anything but gold and this discovery leads to even more confusion. Only after the tribal leader named Araathi and her men make their entry, a new and a much fiercer confrontation takes place where men from both sides get killed in dozens. After Vikram manages to defeat Araathi finally, he slashes her abdomen and we are shocked to see pools of blood spraying from her body all over the parched sands which finally end up transforming the whole landscape into congealed masses of real, glittering and molten gold.

A couple of slices of bread cannot cost more than Rs. 5. An egg costs almost the same in the market. But when you order a bread omelette at your nearby fast-food joint, you should be able to pay at least Rs. 40 to afford it. Two raw materials – bread and eggs, both of which cannot cost more than Rs. 10 when they combine and transform into a new dish called omelette see their final value shooting up by at least 400 percent. Why and how? 

Let me add other inputs as well that go into determining the cost of the food in question here – a portion of the rent that the proprietor of the joint pays to his landlord, the electricity consumption charge and the cost of a portion of the commercial LPG expended to complete the preparation of the omelette. 

Even by inflating the aforesaid components of the fixed capital, you cannot raise the production cost of an omelette to more than Rs. 20. Then how does a bread omelette which takes so little to make, manage to sell for more than double its production cost? This is where the component, labour, comes into picture. Bread, eggs, electricity and LPG consumption charges and a portion of the rent that gets included in the cost of production cannot by themselves get inflated and reappear in the form of the market price of an omelette. It needs more than anything else, labour for the cost appreciation to happen. The same logic can apply to almost any article of consumption made and sold in the modern capitalist market. 

The cost of raw materials, the other components of fixed capital – rent, electricity, etc, all of which enter into the process of production are all without doubt, essential parts of a finished commodity. But the capitalist who runs the business has two primary aims – one, to recoup the money expended on the fixed capital and two, to make a reasonable profit which is pretty much why he has entered this business in the first place. But without labour that joins hands with the fixed capital to convert them into a finished commodity, none of the aims of the capitalist can be fulfilled. In other words, human labour is the elixir that keeps the body of capitalism alive by imparting the much-needed value to its finished product and this idea is illustrated explicitly in one of the greatest adventure films of all time as well, the Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948) starring Humphrey Bogart.

The below conversation appears in one of the most interesting scenes in the film.

Howard: Say, answer me this one, will you? Why is gold worth some twenty bucks an ounce?

Flophouse Bum: I don’t know. Because it’s scarce.

Howard: A thousand men, say, go searchin’ for gold. After six months, one of them’s lucky: one out of a thousand. His find represents not only his own labor, but that of nine hundred and ninety-nine others to boot. That’s six thousand months, five hundred years, scramblin’ over a mountain, goin’ hungry and thirsty. An ounce of gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that went into the findin’ and the gettin’ of it.

Flophouse Bum: I never thought of it just like that.

Howard: Well, there’s no other explanation, mister. Gold itself ain’t good for nothing except making jewelry with and gold teeth.

This conversation is where the worth of a completely useless metal such as gold is redefined not in conventional terms but in those of labour and human effort expended in the process of obtaining it. This is the zone which I would like to assume that Pa Ranjith too tries to enter through his nicely conceived sequence in Thangalaan where Aarathi’s blood transforms everything that it falls upon into shimmering gold. In other words, he tries to illustrate the value of gold in terms of the sweat, the blood expended by its searchers and its protectors or to put it simply, the overall human labour that goes into the mining of the precious metal even if the film does not lay all this out in downright, explicit terms.

To conclude, by the way, welcome to Marxism.