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[–] 42 points 5 months ago* (10 children)

No, he did not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

In the first chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), commodity fetishism is used to explain how the social organization of labour manifests in the buying and selling of commodities (goods and services). In the marketplace, social relations among people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, etc.—are represented as social relations among objects.[3]

In the process of commercial exchange, commodities appear in a depersonalized form, obscuring the social relations inherent to their production.[4] Marx explained the sociology of commodity fetishism:

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities.[5]

According to Marx, the operation of commodity fetishism requires the owners of capital to actively ignore or maintain an indifference to the relational whole that produces a commodity.[6]

tl:dr, Marx described that capitalism produces a semi-religious veneration for and obsession with products themselves, as a byproduct of alienating the worker from the work, from themselves, from their humanity, and from others.

An extremely rough, modern, internet slang way to say it might be 'you being a shopping addict is basically you just being kinky for capitalism, which is something captialism itself produces in people'.

Ya'll need to read some theory and up your meme game.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago* (3 children)

    Marx's analysis doesn't make the meme incorrect. He could be aware of the visible effect without fully understanding it's mechanism and potential magnitude. Let's not forget that Marx was working on Capital while the cutting edge of behavioral and cognitive science was phrenology ffs. His pool of knowledge and prognostic fidelity were fundamentally limited.

    Shopping and commodity addiction are no doubt exploited by capitalism but the neurobiological causes will exist independent of any economic system. You could live in a socialist utopia, and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.

    In the language of the meme, Marx considered "Shopping is fun" but not "Shopping is so fun! ❤️"

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Ok, then I can say that Marx could say 'shopping is so fun' these days... because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.

    Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.

    But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power... that didn't need neuroscience.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Marx could say 'shopping is so fun' these days... because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.

    That's a complete distortion of Marx's theory to support your own ideological priors. Marx calls out capitalism as an active driver of alienation, as shown in his analysis of commodity fetishism. By his reckoning, commodity fetishism can more-or-less only exist in capitalism where a nebulous value is assigned to your shopping independent of its use value. But if there's a neurological vulnerability for fetishizing a commodity at your own expense, the alienation happens no matter what.

    Modern technology enables workers to produce an unfathomable volume of goods and the logistics to efficiently distribute them to unknowable corners of the world. Who owns the means of production is irrelevant, but I'm sure those laborers will be happy to get the full value of their production. And even if they do know the harm caused to the shopper, their guilt is shared by every other laborer with a product in that store. They couldn't rectify the alienation if they tried.

    The underlying problem is not some struggle with Gattungswesen, it's quantifiably electrical and chemical. So his prediction here is flat wrong unless you insist on twisting his theory to fit reality, à la Nostradamus.

    That's the thing that makes people fans of Marx: his work can be aspirational philosophy/commentary or hard science. Just appeal to his authority with a quote and you're in a quantum superposition, collapsing to whatever you need it to be later in the conversation.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    No, its not a complete distortion.

    A society that is abstracted away from the literal, material and human processes of production and trade... basically begins to treat commodities in a more perverse manner.

    The specific neurological mechanisms that underly this and explain it more mechanically, in greater detail... yeah he did not talk about those because he did not know about them.

    But again, he didn't need to know about them, in great detail, to observe and explain what I just said two sentences ago.


    As far as I can tell, you have invented some kind of prediction that Marx made, relative to what we are talking about, commodity fetishism, that turned out to be wrong.

    ... What? What is this wrong prediction?

    I genuinely do not see where you described this.

    Marx objectively was wrong in his prediction that a socialist revolution would come out of urban/manufacturing cores... it actually largely came out of agrarian areas.

    So yeah, there's an example of something he got wrong.

    But I'm not aware of how the second sentence of this comment has in anyway been shown to be broadly wrong.


    Modern technology that hacks your brain's dopamine pathways to make you feel more happy when you see a new thing ... that could be yours! ... that markets an identity or emotional state that will be conferred upon you when you buy the thing...

    That's a hypercharged form of alienation, directly furthering you and your mental framing away from the literal material and human reality of the thing.

    Historical materialism was the foundation, the 'priors' that Marx worked from... look at the actual state of the physical reality of people and stuff and how they are related and interact, and that can tell you things about how societies will change.


    That you can imagine a utopia with shopping malls or digital shopping malls, and also imagine that that could be socialist... that doesn't make Marx wrong about how alienation produces commodity fetishism in a society.

    I think that Marx would argue that...

    You could live in a socialist utopia, and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.

    ... this is problematic.

    I don't think he would call that a socialist utopia, because I think he would find the concept of an online marketplace, as we have them now, massive in scope, totally minimized human to human interactivity, streamlined for your convenience... I think he would call that alienation, alienation that produces commodity fetishism.

    I think Marx would literally call an American shopping mall from the 80s or 90s 'a cathedral of capitalism'.

    I think Marx could imagine a way that an online market place could exist in a 'socialist utopia', but that would be to the extent that it would be designed in such a way that forced human to human interactions, that it was stripped of manipulative marketing and dark patterns, that directly made you fully aware of the truth of the manufacturing and shipping processes, and all of the costs that go into all elements of that.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    In capitalism, the consumer need only care about two things: the product, and the price. This makes it easy for consumers to compare products and prices, and pick the best "bang for the buck". This fuels competition, which in turn, incentivizes production efficiency.

    Sometimes externalities are factored in. For example carbon taxes. But these are simply factored into the price, so the consumer can still compare products and prices like before.

    This "commodity fetishism" that Marx complains about, is exactly what makes capitalist economies so effective and efficient.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    In capitalism, the consumer need only care about two things: the product, and the price.

    Not true, not since at least the 1950s, or at least incomplete and misleading.

    The consumer also cares about what the object implies about them, how them having that object will make them feel about themselves and others feel about them.

    Commodity Fetishism.

    This is why almost nobody does the extremely literally grounded-to-the-product marketing of the 1800's anymore, they all switched to selling emotions, identities, concepts... attached to the object, conveyed by the object.

    Doing that, that literally is the old school definition of a 'fetish', an object imbued with extra, essentially magical meaning, considerably detached from the base material reality of the object.

    Its why capitalist economists have for over a hundred years been plauged by things like 'animal spirits'.


    This, and other things like this, contibute to actors in capitalism being not actually rational, neither at a micro or macro level.

    A vast chain or network of irrational decisions, compounded over time, is not what I would call flatly 'efficient'.

    JIT logistics are efficient in the short and medium term.

    They're catastrophic in the long term.

    You can say thats because the externalities of all the fuel consumption are not properly factored in, I can say the predictable future price/cost rises in many forms of insurance that will be created by climate change are being irrationally ignored... because the logic of capitalism incentivizes that delusion.

    Hopefully I do not need to explain that it is extremely obvious that capital markets are also not rational, that 'efficient markets' are ... not.

    "Guys lets spend $5 bazillion dollars on AI! Oh whats that? 90% of companies saw no to negative productivity gains from the largest reallocation of capital in human history?'

    Capitalism may be efficient in the short to medium term, but its extremely inefficient in the long term.


    Capitalism also has within it many forces and effects that redistribute and concentrate real wealth upward as it generates new real wealth.

    Eventually, broadly predictably, the credit supercycle peaks and then crashes... and you get a mass immiseration, as the sum of years or decades of delusion must now be reckoned with.

    Short to medium term efficiency and stability.

    Long term, predictably inefficient and chaotic.


    So basically, yes, commodity fetishism is part of what makes capitalism 'efficient', but that efficiency is short to medium termed, and it reliably produces delusion and long term instability... which I would struggle to describe as 'efficient'.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Wow that is pretty weak reasoning entirely focused on his perogative.

    Counterpoint: Take a craft market where the people selling are actually immediately the people making the thing. Isn't it nice to buy something pretty there? And isn't it an added bonus that you actually got to talk a bit to the people there?

    So the effect of being happy to have something nice works beyond disembodied consumerism. And is even heightened by personal contact.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The entire point is that capitalism makes craft markets exceedingly rare, it makes that experience you describe more uncommon, it makes everything more abstract.

    The commodity fetishism grows out of that, the more abstracted away the thing is, the more mystically and irrationally products are treated by people.

    Hell, in the US right now, you can find tons of stuff at 'Farmers Markets' that are actually just some product of a massive corporation being rebadged, repackaged, and trying to get flipped for a margin.

    That 'authentic', 'small-batch', 'bespoke' product? Yeah that's just a marketing tactic now, in many cases.

    Stanley cups? Beanie babies? Fast fashion? Pokemon cards? Fancy pantsy sneakers?

    Perfect examples of fetishized commodities, consumed and 'shopped' for with essentially crazed, religious zeal.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I don't think the described commodity fetishism is a particular feature of capitalism though. Because the exact same can happen in a planned economy. Hence my example of a crafts market where you personally know people.

    There are some famous examples of this commodity fetishism happening similarly in the GDR with for example the Trabant.

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