i think of all people, Wallace Shawn (the Sicilian from the Princess bride, Grand Nagus Zek in Deep space nine) made commodity fetishism more understandable than anyone else ever has, he's a socialist and wrote this explanation in his one man play, "The Fever": _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 that 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 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 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 these 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._ it's just so good, a commodity is "a story of all the people who made and sold it," this play broke by brain and made me never unable to see labor relations.
Truly sounds like an evangelical 🙏 religious zealots speaking their secret knowledge. Just replace commodity with sin oh where has our pure noble savage gone. Our messiah marx showed us the way but boy oh boy so many have been let astray but we’re chosen 😭
Specifically searched for commodity fetishism after my mum told me it’s name. Found your amazing channel. Your production seems way beyond of what would be expected for a channel with 2k subs. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! I’m not heavily invested in sociology but if I was this channel would be a godsend. You’ve made something great here, keep it going 👍
Halfway through this video and I have no idea what's going on. Why do these ideas always have to be obfuscated with ridiculously complicated language? How is this spreading class consciousness if the average Joe can't understand a word you're trying to convey? I don't think I could share this video with any of my american friends and expect them to get anything from it, let alone anyone from my native country where English isn't the first language.
6:25 it depends. Art is a perfect example where the commodity fetishism can come from the producer of the product himself. Sure the social machine has to agree with it, but ti can come primary from the individual.
I don't get it, humans have always had object fetishism. So all this seems to be saying is that humans apply the same ancient object fetishism onto commodities, which are objects with not only use value but also exchange value. So the fetish object has exchange value as a mass produced commodity, but what's the significance here related to capitalism? Is this going to explain that the worker becomes the commodity through conflating the fetishized object with the living person if the worker?
You are correct that humans have always attributed mystical qualities to what is considered sacred in the material world, but Marx’s point is that this mysticism is generalized and takes on a specific form under a generalized system of commodity production where goods are produced specifically for their exchange value.
@@redpen1917 I don't see how fetishism comes into play with the production. Exchange value is so capitalists can use you (by use value) to make profit from your surplus value. But that is an objectively real thing. I could see how fetishism might be related on the consumer end as far as advertising instilling the sense that a commodity would bring some intrinsic benefit, or some BS advertising type stuff, but I'm not getting how it's related to the actual production.
@whatabouttheearth That is precisely what the productive process is: a social relation between people, between those who produce and those who extrapolate wealth from selling the products, then between the former two groups and the purchasers of those products, as well as every intermediary member involved in transporting products from the producers to the consumers. Commodity fetishism, in this respect, is a consumer's conflation of material relations with the social relationships inherent to how production is conducted. In a footnote to the first chapter of Capital Volume One, Marx rephrases a quotation from a thinker named Galiani, stating that value is "a relation concealed beneath a material shell." This is tied to Marx's theory that value is derived from the labor expended on producing a given commodity, and the magnitude of that expenditure of human labor is what determines its exchange-value. Therefore, exchange-value supercedes use-value (or usefulness) in the minds of uninformed consumers and purchasers of commodities, distorting the truth of the productive process and the nebulousness of value as a mystical quality rather than a quantity of social labor.
It's Obj petit a (Object raised to the level of the Thing/Sublime Object of Self) that gives a commodity its metaphysical and theological niceties. (Lacan, Zizek)
May the businessman be damned since the day he took the steam engine, which the intellectuals had controlled since the Romans, and used it for something useful. Marx express his ideas wrapped in pompous epigrams which sounds like deep thinking thoughts, as if sophisticated language has intrinsic value - sophistry fetishism. Ideas, according to Marx, are like excess steam which do no work, or as Engels says, _"Man produces primarily and essentially by means of the hands."_ With the mind and ideas out of the way Marx was left with only labor as a mysterious force that coagulated itself as value in commodities, as if labor had intrinsic value - labor fetishism. The businessman might have found a use for the steam engine, but we intellectuals go deeper than vulgar economics, we have more lofty goals. Capitalism may have lifted people out of poverty, but at the price of false consciousness. We intellectuals, just like the clergy, are not impressed by wealth. We will save people from consumerism and lead them back to their true and authentic nature.
So commodity fetishism requires mass production, alienated labor and private production yet somehow religion uses it prior to the possibility of commodity fetishism? I mean mass production is from the Industrial Revolution and last time I checked religion is older than that. Alienated labor so you telling me that in communal animist religions such as in North America they were practicing alienated labor because they had commodities. This logic is idiotic and sounds much more like some people who want to fetishize the past by saying that we were corrupted by COMMODITY FETISHISM and with the Fetishization of the FUTURE we will free ourselves from that CORRUPTION…. Almost like this is religious dogma with a nice fall from grace and a heaven aka the future.
Religion has always existed, but not in the form that it takes under conditions of mass, private production with alienated labour. This is due, in part but not entirely, to the totality of historical and social conditions of production and distribution, and how they are ideologically expressed in the modern epoch.
@@redpen1917 so you’re telling me that faiths prior to the Industrial Revolution didn’t hold commodities to high esteem? Like a pyramid or an ark or turtle shells? Gold has been fetishized forever. This is the thing it doesn’t make any sense. It contradicts itself by saying religion used it but oh well it’s exclusive to the Industrial Revolution. Yet it can be clearly seen in the past. How did faiths all of a sudden change during this period? So what commodity fetishism didn’t exist prior to mass private production? I’m failing to see that, again all this is is a substitute for religious dogma with a fall from grace and a heaven like situation but it revolves around the material world and if we come together we can make heaven on earth by riding ourselves of our original sin
@@TopeRopeTom i’m not suggesting anything, im just reporting what marx said, and if you read his work you would know what’s wrong with your question here. Commodity fetishism did not exist prior to capitalism because the value form of the commodity (dual characteristics) did not exist, and therefore commodities did not exist. People didn’t collect turtle shells or build pyramids for their exchange value. This is a very basic starting point in understanding his argument, so i recommend actually reading what he said before developing your own little renegade theological critiques that have no relation to the content of Marx’s thought.
@@TopeRopeTom it's not a substitute for religious dogma lol it's literally just a phrase that means you don't think about where your shit comes from. that's it. you are way overthinking this.
@@TopeRopeTomin times before the industrial revolution, you were much more likely to know the people who made the shit you owned, you were not nearly as alienated from the labor that went into making it. now that you go to the store to buy pants instead of having your wife or the village seamstress make them by hand for you, you are alienated from where the pants come from. you see the pants and think 'oh nice, on sale!' without thinking for a second where those pants came from. might as well be pants from the heavens. that's what commodity fetishism means. it's, as red pen said, a function of MASS PRODUCTION
i think of all people, Wallace Shawn (the Sicilian from the Princess bride, Grand Nagus Zek in Deep space nine) made commodity fetishism more understandable than anyone else ever has, he's a socialist and wrote this explanation in his one man play, "The Fever":
_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 that 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 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 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 these 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._
it's just so good, a commodity is "a story of all the people who made and sold it," this play broke by brain and made me never unable to see labor relations.
Really interesting, thanks for sharing.
Truly sounds like an evangelical 🙏 religious zealots speaking their secret knowledge. Just replace commodity with sin oh where has our pure noble savage gone. Our messiah marx showed us the way but boy oh boy so many have been let astray but we’re chosen 😭
Funny running into you here lmao
@@TopeRopeTom have you ever tried weed?
Thanks for sharing. Really beautiful quote.
Specifically searched for commodity fetishism after my mum told me it’s name. Found your amazing channel. Your production seems way beyond of what would be expected for a channel with 2k subs.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
I’m not heavily invested in sociology but if I was this channel would be a godsend. You’ve made something great here, keep it going 👍
Your mom sounds smart. Lucky for you!
@@redpen1917 haha she is, I’ll give her your compliments 😅
Red Pen is unstoppable with tha goated dialectical materialist content
Halfway through this video and I have no idea what's going on. Why do these ideas always have to be obfuscated with ridiculously complicated language? How is this spreading class consciousness if the average Joe can't understand a word you're trying to convey? I don't think I could share this video with any of my american friends and expect them to get anything from it, let alone anyone from my native country where English isn't the first language.
That’s just how people wrote back in the past
3:00 Noam Chomsky says that Adam Smith actually mentions this godly hand as an ironic criticism of how the markets work. Do you agree?
Chomsky has a pretty heterodox opinion on that as far as I can tell.
I always took it as Smith saying it's LIKE an invisible hand.
ok the intro ate down
excellent video, thank you
6:25 it depends. Art is a perfect example where the commodity fetishism can come from the producer of the product himself. Sure the social machine has to agree with it, but ti can come primary from the individual.
A Marxist Theory of Art
ua-cam.com/video/px6jRt99Qno/v-deo.html
would you make a video about alienation?
I don't get it, humans have always had object fetishism. So all this seems to be saying is that humans apply the same ancient object fetishism onto commodities, which are objects with not only use value but also exchange value.
So the fetish object has exchange value as a mass produced commodity, but what's the significance here related to capitalism? Is this going to explain that the worker becomes the commodity through conflating the fetishized object with the living person if the worker?
You are correct that humans have always attributed mystical qualities to what is considered sacred in the material world, but Marx’s point is that this mysticism is generalized and takes on a specific form under a generalized system of commodity production where goods are produced specifically for their exchange value.
@@redpen1917
I don't see how fetishism comes into play with the production. Exchange value is so capitalists can use you (by use value) to make profit from your surplus value. But that is an objectively real thing.
I could see how fetishism might be related on the consumer end as far as advertising instilling the sense that a commodity would bring some intrinsic benefit, or some BS advertising type stuff, but I'm not getting how it's related to the actual production.
@whatabouttheearth That is precisely what the productive process is: a social relation between people, between those who produce and those who extrapolate wealth from selling the products, then between the former two groups and the purchasers of those products, as well as every intermediary member involved in transporting products from the producers to the consumers. Commodity fetishism, in this respect, is a consumer's conflation of material relations with the social relationships inherent to how production is conducted. In a footnote to the first chapter of Capital Volume One, Marx rephrases a quotation from a thinker named Galiani, stating that value is "a relation concealed beneath a material shell." This is tied to Marx's theory that value is derived from the labor expended on producing a given commodity, and the magnitude of that expenditure of human labor is what determines its exchange-value. Therefore, exchange-value supercedes use-value (or usefulness) in the minds of uninformed consumers and purchasers of commodities, distorting the truth of the productive process and the nebulousness of value as a mystical quality rather than a quantity of social labor.
It's Obj petit a (Object raised to the level of the Thing/Sublime Object of Self) that gives a commodity its metaphysical and theological niceties.
(Lacan, Zizek)
Narcissism! Narcissistic supply!
nice vid
Few people understand Marx correctly!
May the businessman be damned since the day he took the steam engine, which the intellectuals had controlled since the Romans, and used it for something useful.
Marx express his ideas wrapped in pompous epigrams which sounds like deep thinking thoughts, as if sophisticated language has intrinsic value - sophistry fetishism. Ideas, according to Marx, are like excess steam which do no work, or as Engels says, _"Man produces primarily and essentially by means of the hands."_ With the mind and ideas out of the way Marx was left with only labor as a mysterious force that coagulated itself as value in commodities, as if labor had intrinsic value - labor fetishism.
The businessman might have found a use for the steam engine, but we intellectuals go deeper than vulgar economics, we have more lofty goals. Capitalism may have lifted people out of poverty, but at the price of false consciousness. We intellectuals, just like the clergy, are not impressed by wealth. We will save people from consumerism and lead them back to their true and authentic nature.
@@bjrnhagen4484 cool. good luck with that.
So commodity fetishism requires mass production, alienated labor and private production yet somehow religion uses it prior to the possibility of commodity fetishism? I mean mass production is from the Industrial Revolution and last time I checked religion is older than that. Alienated labor so you telling me that in communal animist religions such as in North America they were practicing alienated labor because they had commodities. This logic is idiotic and sounds much more like some people who want to fetishize the past by saying that we were corrupted by COMMODITY FETISHISM and with the Fetishization of the FUTURE we will free ourselves from that CORRUPTION…. Almost like this is religious dogma with a nice fall from grace and a heaven aka the future.
Religion has always existed, but not in the form that it takes under conditions of mass, private production with alienated labour. This is due, in part but not entirely, to the totality of historical and social conditions of production and distribution, and how they are ideologically expressed in the modern epoch.
@@redpen1917 so you’re telling me that faiths prior to the Industrial Revolution didn’t hold commodities to high esteem? Like a pyramid or an ark or turtle shells? Gold has been fetishized forever. This is the thing it doesn’t make any sense. It contradicts itself by saying religion used it but oh well it’s exclusive to the Industrial Revolution. Yet it can be clearly seen in the past. How did faiths all of a sudden change during this period? So what commodity fetishism didn’t exist prior to mass private production? I’m failing to see that, again all this is is a substitute for religious dogma with a fall from grace and a heaven like situation but it revolves around the material world and if we come together we can make heaven on earth by riding ourselves of our original sin
@@TopeRopeTom i’m not suggesting anything, im just reporting what marx said, and if you read his work you would know what’s wrong with your question here. Commodity fetishism did not exist prior to capitalism because the value form of the commodity (dual characteristics) did not exist, and therefore commodities did not exist. People didn’t collect turtle shells or build pyramids for their exchange value.
This is a very basic starting point in understanding his argument, so i recommend actually reading what he said before developing your own little renegade theological critiques that have no relation to the content of Marx’s thought.
@@TopeRopeTom it's not a substitute for religious dogma lol it's literally just a phrase that means you don't think about where your shit comes from. that's it. you are way overthinking this.
@@TopeRopeTomin times before the industrial revolution, you were much more likely to know the people who made the shit you owned, you were not nearly as alienated from the labor that went into making it. now that you go to the store to buy pants instead of having your wife or the village seamstress make them by hand for you, you are alienated from where the pants come from. you see the pants and think 'oh nice, on sale!' without thinking for a second where those pants came from. might as well be pants from the heavens. that's what commodity fetishism means. it's, as red pen said, a function of MASS PRODUCTION
you have a very stylish bedroom.
Thanks comrade, but that’s just the landlords living-room and decoration.