My take on Commodity Fetishism

Marx’s concept of Commodity Fetishism has to be one of the most spectacular mindfucks I’ve ever experienced in my life, simply because of how basic and  everyday commodities (or in basic terms, shit that’s for sale) are. It’s always nice to discover something new, and it’s especially nice to realize you’ve been thinking a certain way without even realizing it. It’s like what Zizek says about unknown-knowns: it’s the things that you don’t know that you do know that keep you trapped. When understood, you walk away with this inverted understanding of daily capitalist life, as all of your upbringing under capitalist society is put on its head. It’s one of my favorite mindfucks.

Let’s say you need a new pair of shoes, and you go to the shoemaker. The shoemaker knows you. He knows you, your personal tastes, your whole family, your family’s personal tastes, what you’ll need the shoes for, what the latest trends are, the way that you walk, what other people will think about your shoes, etc. And not only does he know all of those things, but he knows how each of those things will influence the other things he knows, for example how the use of a certain type of material will influence the way that you walk, what your parents will think about the style of shoe, you get the point. He is an absolute master of his trade. He promises you to take all of these things into consideration when making your shoes, and he does. He gives you the best damn shoes you’ve ever seen. In order to make sure that he can continue to do this type of work in the future, what do you give him?

That type of scene could have happened under any social system, but let’s now shift over to a capitalist universe. The shoemaker is still there, you’re still there, and you’re just about to give him something so that he can continue to do this work for other people. What do you give him? Cash. Simple answer, cash. And then you walk away. Does this seem strange to you at all? If the answer is no, then we need to explain the process of creation better.

In order to make the shoes, the shoemaker draws inspiration from his years of experience living in society, resources from the environment, and assembles the resources in a culturally appealing way, and hands them to you. By giving him money you’re not returning any of those things to him, not directly at least. The money isn’t inspiration, the money isn’t the years it took get his trade down. It’s entirely unconnected and unrelated from the process of creation itself. He could buy the leather and rubber with the money you gave him. That would mean he would have to go to another leather and rubber master, give them more of these slips of paper that are also disconnected from their work in order to get what he needs. And here we come across one profound realization of Karl Marx: everywhere where man takes cash, man experiences alienation from life itself. Cash is like a finger pointing at the moon, but is not the moon itself.

And just to bring the alienation point home, I’d like to engage in an exercise with you and ask you to look around and try to guess the price value of the objects around you as if they were suddenly sold in a tag sale. You can imagine it. That bowl will go for a dollar each, that pair of shoes for five dollars, you get the idea. But there’s nothing “one-like” about a bowl, or “five-like” about about a pair of shoes. The shoes and the bowls just exist, and we imagine “one” or “five” and then implant our ideas of what they might be worth onto those items. They have physical properties, sure. But they don’t have a kind of number-spirit about them. Again, there’s nothing one-like or five-like about these items.

Y’all ready for this? This is where Marx tells you that capitalist society is just as insane and strange as all of those “primitive” people of the world capitalist society takes a dump on. Marx says where else in the world do we see behavior like this, where man puts value onto an object and suddenly that object really does appear to have those values? The Third World! He cites an example of a tribe who, when their child gets sick, they put them in front of a totem pole, and by the belief that they actually put the child in front of a god and asked the god for forgiveness, the child becomes healed. Just as blocks of inanimate wood become gods, green slips of paper and cotton becomes an invisible life force that unites all objects. And that’s why it’s called commodity fetishism, because ordinary objects are taking on religious qualities.

And after all of this, you can nice and neatly wrap up this whole system of thought into two words: false consciousness. As long as we genuinely believe that objects have numerical value and that money is the holder of that value, we are not thinking freely.

Responding to GMO/Vaccination Skepticism

People who can make authoritative claims to knowledge are called experts. Experts are consulted to govern every aspect of our lives, so many people who are anti-GMO or vaccination have some gripe with the establishment or authoritative knowledge. So that’s Foucault and governmentality for you right there. Here’s a reading on the topic.

So here comes the Zizek. Okay, so things aren’t going well in society, wages haven’t kept up with inflation, something just smells foul to the average person. What will replace the faith that people had in institutions? Other things. New statues will come in to replace the old statues. Instead of scrutinizing over the nutrition facts side of the box of cereal, people will move to organic or gluten free stuff in the belief that such things are any better. This idol Zizek calls the Big Other, the total sum of what you tell yourself that will maintain order in your life.

And then finally something of my own observations. It’s getting really bizarre seeing everything getting contested in the public media in all the wrong ways, like a politicalization of everything. Suddenly climate scientists have agendas and can’t be trusted, food scientists and GMO food can’t be trusted, drug companies can’t be trusted (that one is probably true though). People are kind of cherry picking their facts and then putting a reassuring story over everything else they don’t understand. (Like I don’t understand how global warming actually works or how bad it will be but I accept it because it makes sense that after thousands of years of trashing the planet something would go wrong. So perhaps that’s to be expected, no one can know everything, but if nothing’s unbiased anymore common discourse has failed.) And this is happening on both sides of the aisle in America; conservatives are obfuscating economic outrage with moral outrage, and liberals aren’t talking about that a key part of Obamacare was an increase in taxes if you don’t have health insurance and are just dismissing it as Republican nonsense. It’s like, pick your worldview and we’ll hook you up with an appropriate fact sheet to convince you your way of life is the only way to live. The matrix of common ground is shrinking and independent cultural-political ways of life are growing.

All of this makes me think that objectivity is getting harder and harder to sustain, if it was ever possible.

You may be living in the last days of the republic, friend.