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It’s a chore. And boring. And a chore.
[x] Trigger half of lemmy with one post
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.
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.
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.
You’re just talking about alienation here
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! ❤️”
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.
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.
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 underlying 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 false. 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.
Will the sailors be there?
If they are, I’m not going. Something terrible always happens to whoever they hang out with for the day.
I prefer foraging in the forest.
I do like going shopping but that’s because then I get stuff, and having new stuff is cool. But you don’t need a capitalist hierarchy to make any of this happen
I’m a Marxist girl
In a Marxist world
Life in proletariat
I can bear it
I heard that Marx was, ironically, rather financially irresponsible and often had money troubles. Once he had money he spent it all on parties and nice food and such.
Gauche caviar of him ngl
This is blatant consumerist propaganda!
Also shopping not fun. I want to walk into a store and pick up Balsamic Glaze and leave. I don’t want to have to assess the minute differences in weight, cost, and quality of 30 different products that are all in the same race to win over my dollar and maximize their profits.
That’s one reason why refill store is good.
A couple of years ago they started putting the per kg price under the item price in Germany. At first I thought that’s for idiots who cannot calculate. Now I absolutely love this. I hardly even check the item price anymore, my eyes go straight to per kg. Fuck my idiotic entitled smartass past self, per kg prices are the best thing that ever happened to capitalist supermarkets
In the US we have a mix of:
- Price per individual unit
- Price per entire unit
- Price per weight
- Price per volume
And different products from the same category will choose different ones so you have to do the math anyway.
E.g. Sometimes our berries will be sold in split tubs so you’ll get the price for the whole thing and then on the comparison tag a price for half the tub. That will be sitting next to a different brand of the same berry in a package 2oz smaller and it’s comparison text will have the price per Oz, sitting next to that is an entire other brand and it will list the price of the whole unit and in comparison will list the same price again labeled explicitly as “per unit”.
Like every thing the US manages to shit out it’s an utterly terrible system.
Dear God this gave me an aneurysm - trying to follow this logic at 11:38 pm makes my brain collapse.
(Well written though and I am sorry you have to go through that on a regular basis.)
Tbh I don’t get “shopping”/“retail therapy.” Obviously I have wants for luxuries, but usually I pine after these for months and hold off on the decision until I feel I have saved enough and worked hard enough to justify it. Spontaneously going out to buy luxury items is a much rarer impulse for me.
Yeah, Same here honestly
Ah but have you tried just never thinking through the consequences of your actions? It seems like about 75% of people never do.
I really like shopping for clothes but I don’t buy new I always go thrifting. There is something so satisfy with finding a nice unique dress that fits right for $10.
Iddon’t buy shit I need, but I can get behind the feeling. When I walk through the hardware store I would like to buy a grinder, a saw, a drill and many more things. Not that I need any of them, because most is already in lower quality at home, but I really would have fun buying shit.
You can still shop under communism
No, communism no iphone vuzelevuela
Have you ever been to a free shop?
Exactly! All the stuff is yours AND you didn’t spend a dime!
Only at OPs mom’s house…
Well then do i have an opportunity to preach the good word of syndicalism to you.
I won’t upvote this, but it did make me laugh
