In the first chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), commodity fetishism is used to explain how the social organization of labour manifests in the buying and selling of commodities (goods and services). In the marketplace, social relations among people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, etc.—are represented as social relations among objects.[3]
In the process of commercial exchange, commodities appear in a depersonalized form, obscuring the social relations inherent to their production.[4] Marx explained the sociology of commodity fetishism:
As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities.[5]
According to Marx, the operation of commodity fetishism requires the owners of capital to actively ignore or maintain an indifference to the relational whole that produces a commodity.[6]
tl:dr, Marx described that capitalism produces a semi-religious veneration for and obsession with products themselves, as a byproduct of alienating the worker from the work, from themselves, from their humanity, and from others.
An extremely rough, modern, internet slang way to say it might be ‘you being a shopping addict is basically you just being kinky for capitalism, which is something captialism itself produces in people’.
Ya’ll need to read some theory and up your meme game.
Wow that is pretty weak reasoning entirely focused on his perogative.
Counterpoint: Take a craft market where the people selling are actually immediately the people making the thing. Isn’t it nice to buy something pretty there? And isn’t it an added bonus that you actually got to talk a bit to the people there?
So the effect of being happy to have something nice works beyond disembodied consumerism. And is even heightened by personal contact.
Marx’s analysis doesn’t make the meme incorrect. He could be aware of the visible effect without fully understanding it’s mechanism and potential magnitude. Let’s not forget that Marx was working on Capital while the cutting edge of behavioral and cognitive science was phrenology ffs. His pool of knowledge and prognostic fidelity were fundamentally limited.
Shopping and commodity addiction are no doubt exploited by capitalism but the neurobiological causes will exist independent of any economic system. You could live in a socialist utopia, and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.
In the language of the meme, Marx considered “Shopping is fun” but not “Shopping is so fun! ❤️”
Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.
But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.
Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
That’s a complete distortion of Marx’s theory to support your own ideological priors. Marx calls out capitalism as an active driver of alienation, as shown in his analysis of commodity fetishism. By his reckoning, commodity fetishism can more-or-less only exist in capitalism where a nebulous value is assigned to your shopping independent of its use value. But if there’s a neurological vulnerability for fetishizing a commodity at your own expense, the alienation happens no matter what.
Modern technology enables workers to produce an unfathomable volume of goods and the logistics to efficiently distribute them to unknowable corners of the world. Who owns the means of production is irrelevant, but I’m sure those laborers will be happy to get the full value of their production. And even if they do know the harm caused to the shopper, their guilt is shared by every other laborer with a product in that store. They couldn’t rectify the alienation if they tried.
The underlying problem is not some struggle with Gattungswesen, it’s quantifiably electrical and chemical. So his prediction here is flat wrong unless you insist on twisting his theory to fit reality, à la Nostradamus.
That’s the thing that makes people fans of Marx: his work can be aspirational philosophy/commentary or hard science. Just appeal to his authority with a quote and you’re in a quantum superposition, collapsing to whatever you need it to be later in the conversation.
No, he did not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism
tl:dr, Marx described that capitalism produces a semi-religious veneration for and obsession with products themselves, as a byproduct of alienating the worker from the work, from themselves, from their humanity, and from others.
An extremely rough, modern, internet slang way to say it might be ‘you being a shopping addict is basically you just being kinky for capitalism, which is something captialism itself produces in people’.
Ya’ll need to read some theory and up your meme game.
Wow that is pretty weak reasoning entirely focused on his perogative.
Counterpoint: Take a craft market where the people selling are actually immediately the people making the thing. Isn’t it nice to buy something pretty there? And isn’t it an added bonus that you actually got to talk a bit to the people there?
So the effect of being happy to have something nice works beyond disembodied consumerism. And is even heightened by personal contact.
Marx’s analysis doesn’t make the meme incorrect. He could be aware of the visible effect without fully understanding it’s mechanism and potential magnitude. Let’s not forget that Marx was working on Capital while the cutting edge of behavioral and cognitive science was phrenology ffs. His pool of knowledge and prognostic fidelity were fundamentally limited.
Shopping and commodity addiction are no doubt exploited by capitalism but the neurobiological causes will exist independent of any economic system. You could live in a socialist utopia, and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.
In the language of the meme, Marx considered “Shopping is fun” but not “Shopping is so fun! ❤️”
Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.
But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.
That’s a complete distortion of Marx’s theory to support your own ideological priors. Marx calls out capitalism as an active driver of alienation, as shown in his analysis of commodity fetishism. By his reckoning, commodity fetishism can more-or-less only exist in capitalism where a nebulous value is assigned to your shopping independent of its use value. But if there’s a neurological vulnerability for fetishizing a commodity at your own expense, the alienation happens no matter what.
Modern technology enables workers to produce an unfathomable volume of goods and the logistics to efficiently distribute them to unknowable corners of the world. Who owns the means of production is irrelevant, but I’m sure those laborers will be happy to get the full value of their production. And even if they do know the harm caused to the shopper, their guilt is shared by every other laborer with a product in that store. They couldn’t rectify the alienation if they tried.
The underlying problem is not some struggle with Gattungswesen, it’s quantifiably electrical and chemical. So his prediction here is flat wrong unless you insist on twisting his theory to fit reality, à la Nostradamus.
That’s the thing that makes people fans of Marx: his work can be aspirational philosophy/commentary or hard science. Just appeal to his authority with a quote and you’re in a quantum superposition, collapsing to whatever you need it to be later in the conversation.