Exploitation works through "a very Eden of the innate rights of man" where "alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham." Commodity fetishism is not a conspiracy. It works through the _manifest form_ of the commodity, through which classical economists _thought_ they _scientifically_ discovered its _hidden content_. Marx, in contrast, writes in _Capital_, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 4:
***** The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value -- this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.
...Because, in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange-relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears. The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.
Man's reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. _The characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning_. Consequently it was the analysis of the prices of commodities that alone led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and it was the common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as values. It is, however, just this ultimate money-form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production. (emphasis added) *****
Therefore, I sympathize with Angela and Zizek when they say the distinction between "science" and ideology is futile -- they got it half right. However, Marx counterposed _history_ to the "science" of economics, and it is this fact that both posties and empiricists neglect. (BTW, this -- the neglect of history -- is also the cause of misunderstanding of sex, gender, and sexuality. "Instinct" my ass!)
>From a different perspective, Walter Benjamin said with regard to fascism:
"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in
which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a
conception of history that is in keeping with this insight."
Marx gives us the necessary theoretical insight into the fundamental mechanism of exploitation, through the science of history that allows us to see commodity fetishism for what it is. Benjamin reminds us of the constant necessity of the repressive power of the state to protect the "very Eden of the innate rights of man."
Commodity fetishism & the National Security State are normal, and conspiracy theories hide this fact from workers. That is why the opinion-making caste live by "plausible denial," which encourages people to think it necessary to expose The Secret. Whereas commodity fetishism is out in the Open, and the National Security State is our Common Sense.
As Brecht said in _Threepenny Opera_, "what is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?" What is the assassination of a president compared to the election of a president? What is McCarthy compared to Truman?
Yoshie