Reading Capital, continued (thread #4) Fetishism...

[blindpig]

BitterLittleFlower
02-14-2010, 09:35 PM

got the actual volumes 1, 2, 3...so I can always revisit as I read ... onward... when all are go...

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blindpig
02-15-2010, 05:59 AM

I've been at home the past few days and have had to avoid this thread, it takes forever to load there.

Yep, in the end it always seems to come down to bread, which might give a clue to the new name we are hunting for...

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
02-15-2010, 09:20 AM

we're just brainstorming for ideas and phrases that are evocative and thematic.

(Aren't we?)

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blindpig
02-15-2010, 09:39 AM

those things are handy to have, particularly for illiterate soldiers like myself...

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Kid of the Black Hole
10-22-2010, 09:54 AM

and had forgotten how good they really were!!

So how do we do "more" from here.

It might be that a refresher is in order first..

(How) Do we cover the Manifesto? Is there a gameplan for covering the rest of Capital? (for instance, we hopped into Theories of Surplus Value instead to cover capitalist crisis)

Definitely more of this though, its invigorating

https://web.archive.org/web/20130327203 ... 52825.html

[solidgold]

This is the shit I'm lookin' for. Thanks for going through the archives. I came up with some bullet points I may post later. I wish we could get this place actively talking like back then.

[blindpig]

(Sub-thread) Check-In: "Fetishism" and the end of our "line-by-line" reading...

anaxarchos
01-06-2010, 01:36 PM

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- ... m&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- ... m&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- ... m&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- ... m&start=30

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Dhalgren
01-06-2010, 02:23 PM

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...)

[blindpig]

blindpig
01-06-2010, 02:44 PM

let's go...


Nice trip down memory lane, great thread.

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
01-06-2010, 05:12 PM

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.