>>> dhenwood at panix.com 10/03/00 02:08PM >>>
Jim heartfield wrote:
>Not consumption, but the campaign against consumer goods is the
>expression of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism.
[Along those lines, a quote from Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism I like to trot (ha) out from time to time, which sort of splits the diff between the two Jims.]
6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the wageearner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content by capitalist commercialization).
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CB: An example of trivialization by commercialization is automobile model changeover EVERY year, no matter what new has been discovered. These are artificial new "needs/wants".