On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 6:08 AM, Carrol Cox <[email protected]> wrote: > This touches on a matter I was somewhat lazily thinking of this morning. > > Marx tried two different labels for the social relations capitalist > commodity exchange generates: alienation (early work) and commodity > fetishism (later work). Both I think were unfortunate choices. They name > or are intended to name an objective feature of the capitalist world, > NOT ways of thinking about or responding to that world. Yet the > 'dictionary' sense of both terms is completely subjective.
to my mind, purely fetishism in Marx isn't purely subjective or purely objective (but is extremely different from consumerism). On the subjective level, it's a matter of what an individual sees "on the surface" when examining a commodity-producing society from the inside: it looks as if it's commodities and the exchanges of one for another that rule society; it looks as if people and their activity don't form the basis for society and its reproduction over time. On the objective level, in a pure commodity producing society commodities _do_ rule society. Our activity only "counts" (as value, as "valuable") to the extent that we produce commodities that can be sold. As it says in the old marketing slogan (of IBM??), "it's not creative unless it sells." It seems to me that a commodity-producing society is most likely to be reproduced over time if theory and practice work together, in sync, which seems more likely to the extent that it is pure commodity production. Of course, it isn't. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
