Commidty Fetishism - A question

[BobKKKindle$]

I understand commdity to fetishism as the endowement of oridnary commodities with spiritual, personal, and genreally absurd characteristics under the Capitalist system as a result of the importance of the commodity under the capitalist economic structure, and as a result of the commodificaiton of things such as art and leisure.

However, can some one explain to me How A) We should care, and B) This is linked to the alienation of the worker. Its easy to argue that turning and ordinary object into a fetish is deousionary, but some deepere analysis would be welcome.

[Seong]

I'm not sure that I'm understanding your question properly but I'm gonna take a stab at answering it anyway. If I don't answer your query fully I apologise, but I'm sure someone will be along shortly to do a better job. :P

a) How should we care?
I'm not sure. I think we should care because the present system is fucking us all over. For further explanation see answer to b).

b) How is this linked to the alienation of the worker?
As far as I can see capitalism demands wage slavery on the part of the worker and then also demands that the surplus of our wealth (if we're lucky enough to have any) supports the local, regional or national economy. Advertisement media purports to convince you that the acquisition of more and more commodities will gain an individual happiness and fulfillment. In reality, you have to work so you can buy more crap that you don't really want or need because it generates wealth for large corporations, which in turn supports and expands a nation states economy.

Eventually, most people become alienated when they realise that they're still not happy even though they have a new phone with gps and a coffee maker and a television that follows them to the fridge and finds the remote or whatever. Universally, the worker has to work to live; in the west the worker has to work to live and have a 'lifestyle.'

[Ian]

The best answer for this is found here [/url]http://www.marxmail.org/faq/fetishism.htm[/url]

"On The Fetishism of Commodities (Wallace Shawn)



One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep -- Volume One of *Capital* by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers -- the coal miners, the child laborers -- I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.



His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things -- one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money -- as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the *coat* and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."



A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history -- the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all those people -- the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer -- who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.



For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore."

[barista.marxista]

We should care because capitalism imposes its control over the social-factory by forcing that commidty-form onto us. It reduces basic things such as food, water, and even personal relaxation time to commodities which we must sell our labor-power in order to obtain. By forcing everyone to do this for survival, capitalism keeps control over our lives. That people assume this is somehow "natural," and that there "is no other way," is commodity fetishism. And this is how we become alienated.

[Brownfist]

Marx's notion of commodity fetishism is explaining the relationship between the worker and commodities, i.e. commodity relations. This is important because by understanding commodity relations we can understand how commodities create the conditions by which they can reproduce themselves. Also, when human labor becomes a commodity in-of-itself then labor power itself becomes a commodity fetish.

In the 1950's and 60's there was a ton of Marxist material written on the question of everyday life which attempted to take Marx's formulation of commodity fetishism and see how it impacts the alienation of everyday life of the masses.