text by Perry Shimon
Over the span of two days, the two most important—and certainly most online—people in my life told me about Labubu. They sketched out the general contours of this social and economic phenomenon, the latest craze in children’s collectibles, seemingly growing ever more complex alongside the development of capitalism. We did a cursory review online. One meme caught my attention: someone had photographed a Labubu on Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery.
This darkly brilliant intervention invoked what Marx described as “commodity fetishism” and the difference between “use value” and “exchange value.” If we accept that Labubu has even a modicum of inherent pleasure or comfort, this would be considered its use value; the exchange value lies in the exorbitant prices and resale markets it commands. Commodity fetishism is the hype that occludes the material and labor conditions that produce Labubu, in this case, workers in Dongguan factories where China Labor Watch has chronicled endemic overtime hours, low base wages, non-compliance with contracts, and unsafe conditions involving toxic chemicals. In some cases, Dongguan workers endure 70–100 hours per week, are cheated out of overtime pay, and are housed in overcrowded dormitories.
These small, moderately cute, and largely demonic-looking commodity fetishes embody the speculative character of financial capitalism. Collectors buy a Labubu at a dubious cost, often not even knowing exactly what they’re getting, or “blind boxing,” as it is marketed. The value of each fetish is arbitrarily determined by an artificial scarcity. Then the figures trade on secondary speculative markets, potentially generating profits. Labubu is an education in financialization for children.
A few nights earlier, I saw an acquaintance at a birthday gathering at Close-Up, a beloved east London independent cinema—theoretical cosmologist, professor, and conceptual artist called Reza. We shared a long, convivial conversation about art, friendship, and the cosmos, and he invited me for a walk in Queen’s Wood near Highgate.
On the overground ride up to see Reza, I asked ChatGPT to elaborate Labubu for me, prompting Marxian, postmodern, and psychoanalytic readings, as well as inquiring what Sianne Ngai might have to say based on her theorization of the aesthetic dimensions of post-Fordist capitalism—and in particular her fascinating work on the cute and the gimmick. When we met at the station near his home, I gave Reza a short, AI-augmented primer and suggested we check on the Labubu status at Marx’s grave. He warmly agreed, though with what felt like minor reservation—that I later learned was the £10 fee to enter the cemetery where Marx is buried: perhaps one of the greatest perversities one could conceive.
On our walk over, Reza recounted his affectionate conversation with a transit worker at the tube station and lamented all the walls that now enclosed the common grounds and cemeteries he had happily wandered in his youth. When we arrived, I informed the gentleman at the ticket counter that I was a journalist who worked for a Los Angeles-based art magazine and was here to do a story about the Labubus accumulating on Marx’s grave. “And this is my friend Reza, who’s a theoretical cosmologist,” I added.
“Um… this is above my pay grade…” the ticket seller replied, picking up a radio: “I have a journalist from an art magazine in Los Angeleese, here with a…”
“Theoretical cosmologist,” I repeated.
“…and they would like to go see if there are…”
“Any more Labubus on Marx’s grave.”
After a long pause came a slightly garbled “Well, carry on then…” and we continued along, laughing together, until we reached the small gathering around Marx’s final resting place.
There were no Labubus to be seen, though there was one raggedy Beanie Baby, quite a few flowers, and several letters. I added a Gilchester bun—a favorite sourdough roll from the beloved E5 bakery—as a kind of ofrenda. We stayed for a bit, took some pictures, and Reza suggested we continue up to the park next door, where he offered a free and relatively unobscured vista on the same spot. Minutes later, standing behind the fence and looking back on the milling pilgrims, we expressed our sadness for these dark times. We sat in the park café and shared a cold bottle of water, marveling at a red-haired child playing in the verdant grass, floating butterflies, and gently windswept trees. Over the course of our conversation Reza quoted Rumi and contoured the limits of quantum mechanics. I asked about the ludic quality of math in Babylonia and how we’ve become so ruinously obsessed with the quantifiable.
Queen’s Wood is a 21-hectare ancient woodland where stately oaks and beech canopy holly, hazel, hornbeam, and hawthorn, and are home to breeding pairs of passerines like the endangered song thrush, long praised for its melodious call. Reza walked me to a clearing in the woods and on to the mouth of the subterranean Moselle River, one of several tributaries buried in the name of progress. We quietly reflected on these fascinating spaces of revealing and concealment. Reza shared that he had taken our mutual friends here for an installment of their London Walking Collective’s peregrinations. When we passed the clearing again on the way back, it was filled with children at play, their happy song in the peaceful wood. Reza had me over for a delicious vegetarian mezze. We ate in the garden with his wife, laughing about Labubus and recounting our day.
This World Which Is Made Of Our Love For Emptiness
Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness
These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words
and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
—Rumi
(The Essential Rumi, trans. C. Barks)