It has been a while since we left our reading of Capital. I wanted to give a chance for our participants to check-in before we start (if the timing is convenient). I also wanted to set a larger context for this reading, transcending the economics of the reading to also talk about the larger implications of fetishism on political thinking itself. With this last in mind, below are excerpts from the dozens of exchanges on that larger subject on PopIndy:


In our society, social relationships between people are expressed as material relations between things. You have no connection to people in China and yet a hundred people are set in motion there because you wanted a new pair of sneakers. You pays your money and gets your shoes. It is the shoes that carry the attributes. They have a price, they are on sale, they are contributing to the trade deficits. Profits "rise", plants "close", emissions "increase", markets "panic", industries "move", capital "accumulates", cities "grow"... gimme a break. Meanwhile people sit and watch a dance of inanimate objects in which their only connection is to material things. They earn "money" and they spend "money", that is, if they are not subject to unemployment (and I guess if they die, they are subject to unalivement). We have an evolved social intercourse, a giant beehive, that encompasses 6 billion people, where no one person can get a facial tick without it rippling through a million others, and yet everybody swears that they are isolated, alone, and not "connected". It is a side-effect of "alienation". It is "dead labor", congealed as Capital, that actually appears to be in motion, while living labor counts for nothing. Everything stands on its head. What would be obvious to a Martian, or to a Huron, or to an Athenian, even with his 32 slaves, is absolutely indiscipherable to us.

http://populistindependent.virtual.vps-host.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=265&hilit=fetishism&start=15


What follows from this is that all thinking that proceeds directly (and sometimes indirectly) from a peculiar social form that expresses social relations as material relations, also has a tendency to present itself as similarly inverted and veiled relations (i.e. "humans vs nature") which, taking one simple step backward, reveal themselves as phenomena which cannot possibly be true as presented. In fact, these too, are the expression of the underlying social relations ("human versus human"), no matter what "it looks like to me".

http://populistindependent.virtual.vps-host.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=265&hilit=fetishism&start=15


One side-effect of this form is that it creates a certain confusion about the actual processes in action. The value of the commodity appears as something intrinsic or innate to the commodity itself rather than a function of the social relationships within which it is produced, and this despite the fact that no electron microscope or chemical analysis can reveal one iota of “value” or “congealed human labor of the most abstract type” within them. The realization of surplus value appears, not through the relationships of people with each other but through that of things with each other. That obviously absurd “relationship” is the basis of fetishism in Marx.

In turn, one side-effect of that fetishism has got to be expressed in the way that people think about their existence: that they set themselves, incorrectly, with or against “things” is just a variation on the way that the phenomena of their every day life present themselves to them.
http://populistindependent.virtual.vps-host.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=265&hilit=fetishism&start=30


It is an irony that a set of complex social relationships unimaginable to slaves also creates an indecipherable mystery to the modern participants in those relationships that would be obvious to those same slaves: stripped of his commodities, values, exchanges, etal., the master expropriates the products of the producers, returns to the producers that which is necessary to maintain the producer (at a changing, socially determined level) as a producer, and expropriates the rest, which then augments the power of the expropriator to maintain precisely those same conditions. The details of that expropriation are, of course, also the main props of the illusions of any age. They don’t need to be invented because they invent themselves from the whole cloth of the “social fabric”.
http://populistindependent.virtual.vps-host.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=265&hilit=fetishism&start=30

I hope I can keep up. I already have a request for a little more -

"In turn, one side-effect of that fetishism has got to be expressed in the way that people think about their existence: that they set themselves, incorrectly, with or against “things” is just a variation on the way that the phenomena of their every day life present themselves to them."

Is this something we will get to in due course or is this a good place to ask for a little explanatory clarity? (For us slower ones...)

let's go...


Nice trip down memory lane, great thread.

but figured you worked at your own pace :) A couple weeks ago when I did this same check-in poll, Pinko was around, hope hes still here too.

Great stuff there:

In our society, social relationships between people are expressed as material relations between things. You have no connection to people in China and yet a hundred people are set in motion there because you wanted a new pair of sneakers. You pays your money and gets your shoes. It is the shoes that carry the attributes. They have a price, they are on sale, they are contributing to the trade deficits. Profits "rise", plants "close", emissions "increase", markets "panic", industries "move", capital "accumulates", cities "grow"... gimme a break. Meanwhile people sit and watch a dance of inanimate objects in which their only connection is to material things. They earn "money" and they spend "money", that is, if they are not subject to unemployment (and I guess if they die, they are subject to unalivement). We have an evolved social intercourse, a giant beehive, that encompasses 6 billion people, where no one person can get a facial tick without it rippling through a million others, and yet everybody swears that they are isolated, alone, and not "connected". It is a side-effect of "alienation". It is "dead labor", congealed as Capital, that actually appears to be in motion, while living labor counts for nothing. Everything stands on its head. What would be obvious to a Martian, or to a Huron, or to an Athenian, even with his 32 slaves, is absolutely indiscipherable to us.

Will try to keep up, feeling like Alice...great stuff; seems I understand the terms so much better through others' discussions rather than through personal readings...maybe it has to do with "alivement"... :)

You have a lot of patience to keep trying this. I'll be here. Fetishism is indeed our way of life.

some of us *cough* *cough* have come a ways since then :)

I'll be happy to wait a couple of days for them if they like...

This thread is a great place, too. I figured I would start another once we got to the reading.

Watcha got in mind?

but ultimately "with or against things" actually gets us back to private property, right? I suppose its not the most direct route, but its not a big detour, either.

EDIT: we might take a stab at this from the Kantian "phenomena" angle too, which you brought up forever ago in that Pop Indy thread.

I think they both at least pop in occasionally so it probably won't take too long to hear back from them

I don't get the private property connection. Those couple of lines suggest to me that every day life is experienced as if everything we encounter has an inherent value, standing apart from social relations. We position ourselves with or against all manner of idealized religious, political, economic, moral and even aesthetic constructs, as though they had meaning apart from social relationships. Why would we do it any differently with things?

and that is really the crux of private property, isn't it?

For instance, what does it mean to "own a home"?

Thanks for the reply.

so I think I have gotten some clarity by doing that. But I am assuming that Marx's use of the term "fetish" is the classical usage meaning something like an object or construct held to be of preternatural power to help or impede (as the case may be) in the service of the fetishist. Is it through this kind of construct that the fetishism Marx speaks of "bleeds" out into the society? Or are we so warped by the primacy of this pervasive and basic fetish that we are all but incapable of any other form of social intercourse? And isn't this something more than "just" private property" or "ownership"? Doesn't this go to the very nature of the consciousness of human beings that this society produces?

Or am I seeing too much in this?

But there isn't some fetish that fetishism radiates out from. Instead, EVERYTHING is fetishized societally, which entails that it will be fetishized in the consciousness of men.

Plato's Cave is pretty instructive. Instead of watching the real actors (ourselves), we see only the shadows -- our own shadows -- which is congealed dead labor ie "stuff"

As a really obvious example, consider when people assert that the stock market affects the economy. But the stock market is transparently a relationship of buying and selling by traders. Not all of the relationships are so transparent but they are all basically the same in how they play out.

has had a fetish at it heart? Is some form of fetish necessary for the establishment of human society? I would not think so (but am willing to entertain the idea). That seems to be the idea coming from your statement, "there isn't some fetish that fetishism radiates out from". I would think that it is, in fact, a foundational fetishism that makes capitalist society what it is; and that, in turn, substantiates the fetishistic nature of all of our relationships. How else could it be? I think this area is important to "flesh-out"...

because our social relationships are upside down/inverted. Thats a major paraphrase but Marx makes an epigram somewhere like that.

Its the "props of the age" as Anax calls them. All of our social relationships and collective powers are put in motion for the aggrandizement of a few and directed by those same few while those who work are denied access to their own labor. This is what we see and internalize it as simply the facts of life, how the world works, the way things are and *fill in your own cliche here*

The rest flows from there. Is there a psychological component that exists as a substratum of every society? I suppose so, but its a derivative effect, not a primary one and its certainly not the same over time as various modes of production emerge and go through their lifespan (which is an important part of what Hegel helps us to see).

For fetishism as we're discussing it to come into being you really have to have the same extremely developed productive powers necessary for the circulation and perpetuation of capital itself. They go hand in hand I think.

Consider that during feudal times, it is likely that almost everyone considered a caste system intrinsic to "human nature". Some are nobly born, some born base.

In capitalist society, surplus value is created at the point of production but realized only after the commodities are sold. The latter occurs at the end of a process of circulation which differs in time and place from the original expropriation of surplus value and serves to mask the underlying "social relations". These "relations" are, at bottom, quite similar to previous ones of slaveholder and slave, serf and master, freeman and lord, etc., but they don't appear as such because the expropriation is not immediate and direct but appears as subsequent and indirect. The complexity of the process of circulation only furthers this disconnect. Thus, the actual social connection between worker and capitalist only appears in its full glory, retrospectively. In place of the naked exploitation of one by the other, we see what appears as "fair exchange" between them which nevertheless spits out surplus value (and a lot of it) after a while, at the other end of the process.

One aspect of this disconnection is that it stands on its head the underlying social reality: commodities exchange with one another according to their intrinsic attributes(really?), capital grows through the movement of the "markets", etc. Commodities themselves appear to take on the attributes that actually belong to their producers and "owners". Inanimate objects gain the active role while the actual humans are reduced to passive spectators.

This last is what causes fetishism. Its projection onto life in general is guaranteed to to confuse the situation. It is not the dictatorship of people but of things which is inevitably presented... almost as a force of nature.

but isn't it the accepted observation that the society is responsible for the consciousness of the citizen and not the other way around? I do not necessarily agree that some type of fetish is at the heart of every society (I may be wrong, but I am not convinced). The concept that the society molds the character and understanding of those within that society, I think, is a given; it is the idea of the "fetish" that I think may be unique to capitalism? When power relationships exist within a society, it does not, I think, of necessity, lead to the development of a fetishistic existence and relationships within that society. I am just thinking out loud, here, but it seems that this type of dehumanization is "capitalistic" in nature. The caste system in and of itself does not lead to members of the same casts treating each other in a fetishistic manner (using the classic definition of "fetishism") I suppose this is where I was going...

so I was trying to simplify things a little. Check Anax's response as well because that is probably a better approach to answering you (besides which, I am more offering thoughts because I am not qualified to be the Answer Man ;))

The difference is when you turned over a portion of your crop to the Church, you knew exactly what you were surrending and understood it for what it was, an expropriation. Today we say that unemployment is the result of a sales slump. Granted, that is one of the more easy to crack absurdities that abound, but there are a limitless number, and many are so highly ingrained in our thinking that we can't even see them. Chlamor takes this on from a different angle when he points out how thorougly ideology is embdedded into language. Even innocuous things like saying a football team "capitalized" on the opponents turnover.

Also, I am not arguing for any kind of enduring perma-fetishism. I really don't know about that either way, it occurs to me that it would be hard to understand capitalist society observing from without, so we are equally limited in that regard when we try to view previous forms of social organization retrospectively.

"This last is what causes fetishism. Its projection onto life in general is guaranteed to to confuse the situation. It is not the dictatorship of people but of things which is inevitably presented... almost as a force of nature."

This is how working class/poor people can so easily identify with the Owners! This is how so many gentrified yuppies can look all big-eyed and can't understand all the "bitterness" and "resentment" that is so often expressed! This particular fetish has so displaced the realities it represents, that citizens of the society cannot even see it anymore, cannot recognize it as representing human beings!

Is that close? Jesus...

Good stuff, eh?

.

but ideology doesn't come in a vacuum, but rather comes packaged with the circumstances that breed it. Its a helluva lot easier to identify with the owners when you have a comfortable existence and envision yourself "getting ahead".

I think where the "force of nature" factor comes into play is when the scales come off but you STILL can't imagine any alternative..its that entrenched, that overbearing.

so hopefully she will stop by this thread

Alright, alright. I couldn't resist.

I'm always around and will be following this as always. Busier than ever with the offline world tho, including again working to help parachute someone headed over the cliff to homelessness. Not much time fer the web at the moment...


edit - blame the misspells on the PDA. They call THIS a keyboard?!

People are, of course, aware of the intercourse... but it is as common as breathing so that it rarely enters our consciousness. The fetishes are what is at center stage. Thus, young stock brokers on Wall Street want money, gold, big paydays... which is rarely translated into the desire to command the labor of others, though that is precisely what is "desired". The objects acquire the attributes of their objectifiers. Of course, the whole is constantly revealed, but it is also continuously plowed back under...

Remember this cartoon? The worker knows it, as does the capitalist, but neither is often aware of it, or views this most fundamental of all social connections as the basis of any, much lesser, phenomena. In truth, the answer to "Why do you get the proceeds of my labor?" is exactly the same as that given by the Feudal lord: "By force of arms." Part of the meaning of developing "proletarian consciousness" or "self-consciousness" is in bringing to the fore and keeping there, that which is normally obscured by a thousand layers of "prices", "markets", "laws", "property" and the rest. We are describing a trade in people, conducted by other people, and not some crazy equivalent to the forces of nature which stands apart from us. All of it exists "by choice".... or, more accurately, by "force of arms".

http://salsa.babson.edu/Media/Fwright.jpg

I remember when blindpig posted that at DU because I saved it. I never thought very deeply about capitalism until I saw this image. I read the threads here on capital and when I get in over my head I refer back to this cartoon. :grin:

its a good way of keeping things straight

Yeah, this this wanna-be eco-anarchist has 'evolved' a bit....

Haven't gotten caught up yet, but I'm around, so don't hold off on my account. I'll try to do some reading today or over the weekend.

My job is really crazy, has been taking all my time and energy for a couple months now, it's wearing me down a bit. But things should mellow out again shortly. Sorry I've been so scarce.


I'll check in at socindy too Mike...

I've been reading over the previous material linked to..amazing how much more significant it strikes me now, heh

.