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

[blindpig]

Two Americas
01-06-2010, 06:51 PM

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.

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BitterLittleFlower
01-07-2010, 04:21 AM

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"...

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curt_b
01-07-2010, 09:10 AM

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

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Kid of the Black Hole
01-07-2010, 09:41 AM

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

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anaxarchos
01-07-2010, 11:52 AM

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

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anaxarchos
01-07-2010, 11:55 AM

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

Watcha got in mind?

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Kid of the Black Hole
01-07-2010, 12:05 PM

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.

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Kid of the Black Hole
01-07-2010, 12:07 PM

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

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curt_b
01-07-2010, 12:29 PM

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?

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Kid of the Black Hole
01-07-2010, 01:03 PM

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

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