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

[Dhalgren]

I was off track, for sure.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

I am not trying to "weigh in" as an expert at all, I am just trying to discuss things without getting it all cluttered in my head.

I was mainly posting the Engels piece because 1. I really like Socialism: Scientific or Utopian because it is so direct and straightforward and 2. I wanted to make sure what we were talking about was as transparent for other readers as possible

I don't think its helpful to break society into a bunch of individual "Is" who are all producers. In fact, I think Marxs leads off in the preface of Capital (to one of the German editions) by saying you CAN'T do that because you immediately find you have a hollow abstraction and have to delve into the next level.

That next level being that some people are different from others in that they do not work but instead live off the work of others (ie class). And then you have to keep digging from there because "class" is an abstraction outside of being placed into specific historical contexts. And from that "reduction" you can then start to reconstitute the empirical reality you started with -- with all of its peculiarities and in all of its specific glory -- but in a much more coherent framework, a much more structured way.

This methodological approach is almost straight Hegel by the way.

[Dhalgren]

has almost no meaning if individuals are not, at the very least, implied. To say that fetishism is the warping of human relationships to the point where they are dealt with as though the relationships were between inanimate objects (commodities) and not human beings (producers) - and then say you cannot discuss this in the context of individual human beings makes no sense to me. It is precisely the impact upon the individual class member that this is to be understood, isn't it? One of the problems, I think, is that these issues and this subject is real world, everyday, meat and potatoes stuff. It is not that "society" be "broken" into "a bunch of individuals". It is that society IS made up of a bunch of individuals.

We are trying to "get" how this thing works and I understand that; and I am very willing to suspend all of these considerations if that will be helpful for me in grasping this better (or at all). But disregarding the individual class member seems to me to be an odd way of going about it. But I will listen...

(Oh, and I love Engels, too.)

[Kid of the Black Hole]

but at the same time, each individual acts against a backdrop that is established by 100s, 1000s, 1000000s of other individuals.

For instance, commodity production of any type including "simple" is only possible with a fairly well-developed set of relations (for starters, otherwise everyone would be too busy hunting/growing their own food to produce commodities)

[curt_b]

But human beings (producers) is just part of the story. There are human beings (expropriators) that enter into those social relationships. They also are necessary for the dance of commodities.

The whole thing is kept in the air by class structure, which can't be considered as an "I", but can be considered as a bunch of us and a few of them. It's not a disregard of individuals, but a recognition that it's all about us v. them. The impact on each of us may be existentially unique, but it can only be understood, as an effect that commodity fetishism has on us as a class.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

That was the point I was trying to make

[chlamor]

Crystal clear.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

those who are always so quick to invoke "The People" as some sort of idyllic unification/culmination of humanity, understand exactly what Curt wrote and are plying on it heavily.

"The People"? What the hell is that?

[Dhalgren]

Anax said that everything that existed after the advent of capitalism exist before its advent. And he asked where did the fetishism come from. That is what I was trying to work through - to answer Anax's question.
OK, it did not come from a change in the "reason" for production. So you are saying that it came from class antagonism? Or from a new arrangement of classes? Or from the growth of one class and the shrinking of the other? Or the creation of a new class, altogether?
Help me out here.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

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.

[Dhalgren]

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...

[curt_b]

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.

[Kid of the Black Hole]

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 ;)

[curt_b]

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.

[anaxarchos]

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...

[Kid of the Black Hole]

Or is the latter confined to capitalist society?

[Kid of the Black Hole]

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

[Dhalgren]

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...

[Dhalgren]

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! :)

[blindpig]

It is the labor used in the production of a commodity, it has been expended by the worker but is infused in the commodity.

Wait a minute...

Or is it the dead labor tied up in money that is not in circulation within the capitalist system?

damn....