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

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
01-15-2010, 07:47 AM

had grown, developed, matured, evolved, incubated in the womb of feudal social relations is what I think he meant. Its kind of self-fulfilling statement, since they are pre-requisites. And it is certainly something that is only totally identifiable and clear in hindsight (since even the principals -- the capitalists -- didn't really see the Big Picture until well afterwards)

Where fetishism comes from is a multi-layered question I guess, since you can answer on more than one level of abstration. But fetishism is not that different than religion -- we personify and objectify relations of exploitations into actual physical items (commodities) -- a strange type of transubstantiation, if you will. Which if you draw the parallel, mirrors religion.

[blindpig]

Dhalgren
01-15-2010, 08:12 AM

So where does fetishism come from. I think we can work out why it is called fetishism, the explanation you give seems right to me. But where and why does it arise? That seems to be the question no one is addressing straightforwardly. If that question can be answered on many levels, give me one and then we can advance to other levels.

This is getting good...

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curt_b
01-15-2010, 08:28 AM

It comes from the perception that the value of a commodity is realized at the moment of exchange, thus making invisible the labor embedded in it. If the human element of labor is ignored then all that follows must be innate to the object. Trade becomes based in some mystical quality that all commodities are assumed to have, capital obtains wealth from the value of the object in the market place, and the value added by labor is left out of the equation.

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Kid of the Black Hole
01-15-2010, 08:31 AM

trying to avoid platitudes, but it is still instructive to remember that the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology of the age.

And to the bourgeoisie (as the cartoon in the other thread depicts), they make money by buying and selling products. And its the movement of those individual products that magically transform into money (read their economics textbooks, they really think its magic)

Further, wage labor is "free" and voluntary.

In fact, value only sustains and reproduces and expands itself through the reproduction of the same enormously entangled and variegated manifold of social interactions that underlies value in the first place. Value in isolation is something of a misnomer.

At any rate, making a nice epigram out of the above one might say that nature of capitalism is occluded because capitalists are occluded by/to their own nature. Thats a little rough, probably sound better in German

[blindpig]

curt_b
01-15-2010, 08:59 AM

In light of the Kid's reply, I think I completely misunderstood the question. He's right, it's an attempt to make tangible, economic theories that lack a material foundation. Others here know the evolution of Bourgeois Economics (I don't). Most academic disciplines (at least those concerning Social Sciences) have developed as apologies for ruling class ideologies.

It's not some phenomena that appears across many different human experiences. It a lie.

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anaxarchos
01-15-2010, 09:43 AM

You are dead on. Keep talkin'. Fetishism predates "economic theories" of any kind by a few thousand years. It is inherent in "the form itself", that is in the advent of commodities... exactly for the reasons you have laid out.

Barter exists for as far back as we can discern. The production of surplus and the normalization of trade transforms the trade of products of one kind into the possibility of access to human products of all kinds. The social "interest" in labor time becomes formalized in a way that "sticks" to products in exchange. The "invention" consists of production for exchange... for sale. From here, it is a hop, skip, and a jump to buying and selling labor itself (as opposed to buying and selling the laborer) and the realization that surplus can be extracted from the production process. In truth, it is nothing other than the developed expression of the existence of "surplus" labor itself, the fundamental pre-condition for the development of commodities and formalized exchange.

Value isn't a "plot", let alone an ideology. It is real. Yet the form in which it "congeals" (remember that word), brings with it a huge confusion, precisely because of the reasons laid out above. It shares with religion the trait of giving special powers and an independent existence to the figments of the human brain, but it is not an "idea". It is a social product.

"Gold has a special luster... well, it really doesn't but as money it has luster because it allows you to buy anything... well, that is really because money is a repository for value and the command of it commands all commodities... but the command of commodities is the command of labor because all the labor which produces commodities counts as one labor... so, the private appropriation of dead labor essentially allows those who appropriate it to command the labor of the living... so, it ain't gold but class relationships based on private property and the enforcement of them that really has "luster", but..."

Shit. And we think that the unbelievable muddle of feudal relations and obligations were complicated and ridiculous...

[blindpig]

Kid of the Black Hole
01-15-2010, 09:52 AM

Or is the latter confined to capitalist society?

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Kid of the Black Hole
01-15-2010, 09:53 AM

and I was thinking mine wasn't necessary since you'd already said the same thing

PS and Anax is right, you've been on fire for this whole thread

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Dhalgren
01-15-2010, 11:24 AM

This is why the world is turned upside down regarding jobs and labor and unemployment (among other things). Workers are seen as being employed as some kind of boon from the society or the corporations; when in fact they are the very sources of all the wealth, everywhere. But workers are forced to relate with "gratitude" to the Bosses for their jobs, when it is their jobs which are the basis for all profits everywhere.

So the fetish comes in by sourcing the value of a commodity as being an invisible quality of the commodity and thereby making the labor source of value "disappear". It is the Emperor's New Clothes...

Thanks curt and Kid and everybody for being patient with me on this. I hope I have finally got it.

[blindpig]

Dhalgren
01-15-2010, 11:28 AM

I think I know what that means, but I have been mistaken before. Could we get a little more on "dead labor" - maybe from curt, the Human Torch!