File spoon-archives/marxism-intro.archive/marxism-intro_2000/marxism-intro.0010, message 28


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).



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