Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 19:52:32 -0700 From: DasKapital-AT-pseud.pseud Subject: Re: M-INTRO: Re: Value theory > >Perhaps it would be helpful if you could say what you meant by >commodity fetishism. first, what is a commodity (except a mysterious thing...)? It comes to being when as he has it famously, a table is no longer seen as what it is, a thing made out of this common, everyday thing, called wood. The moment the table transcends its wooden nature and is seen as something else, it has changed into a commodity. It is no longer seen for what it really is, its physical properties. the "physical relation between physical things" (between the eye and the object) is severed in commodities. let me cite from capital: "there, teh existence of the things qua commotities, and the value relations between the products of labor which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom". (my emphasis). so, the fetishism is something "attached" (in german: angeklebt, which is much more graphic in what Marx wants to say) attached in the sense of something artificial, something almost metaphysical, that cannot be reduced to the physical, material characteistics of the thing. therefore he says that the fetish character of a commodity cannot be separated from the produiction of commodities. so let us take the Beanie Baby case: can we say that the value of the commodity called BB (which btw I really do not know very well) lies in its physical propoerties or something else (say sign value produced by advertising as someone had suggested)? If the value of it does not lie in its material existence, (again, its use value), the BB are a commodity. as a commodity they have a fetishistic character attached to them. just as a designer table that tries to conceal the fact that it is wood that even the designer table is made out of (given it IS wood). >I've always understood it to mean an ideological >effect generated by capitalism, whereby relations between people >appear to be relations between commodities. that's a bit general don;t you think? hard to disagree with this statement...so i agree. but maybe you can be more specific than that? what does that mean? "generated by capitalism"? what do you mean by that? what does capitalism in this context stand for? and what do you mean by "ideological effect"? Not real? Do you think Marx was an Idealist? This doesn't have anything >to do with whether the need for particular commodities is 'irrational' >or not. see, i disagree. Marx had a very clear normativ notion of what is needed (has use value, is useful to society, etc.) and what does not. "to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language". In the society that Marx envision, with all due respect, BB certainly would not have qualified. Do I agree with Marx? No, I do not think it is as easy as he imagined to categorize things into socially useful and useless. But do not forget that Marx's utopia was a modern one and not a postmodern one. He had clear laws according to which value should be established. I think we know now that these laws may be a version of desirable social construction but hardly attainable in a consumer culture dominated by the fetish character of commodities (such as BB). > --- from list marxism-intro-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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