"...it has nothing to do with individual psychology" ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Quite right... But it has everything to do with Social Psychology. It eventually comes back to the realm of the individual and their place within that society.
Leigh Meyers leighcmeyers at yahoo.com
[excerpt] A simple example will illustrate this process: the person who owns a Cadillac (or Lexus or Bentley) has more prestige than the people working on the assembly-line that produced it. But commodity fetishism refers to more - the belief that the car (or any manufactured object) is more important than people, and confers special powers (i.e., beyond the power to travel sixty miles in an hour, or flatten hedgehogs) to those who possess it.
In general, commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object. Similarly, the consumer can only see his relationship with the object he uses, being unaware of the people who produced that object. Thus, commodity fetishism ensures that neither side is fully conscious of the political and social positions they occupy.
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Commodity_fetishism
[excerpt] Commodity fetishism occurs, according to Marx, when an inanimate object is treated as if it required a religious, or even sexual, devotion. In pre-modern societies fetishes were hand-made or rare natural objects thought to embody a spirit that protected the owner from misfortune or disease. Commodity fetishism arises under capitalism because the market system has become much more real and immediate to us than the underlying social relationships (based on inequality and exploitation) which made goods sold in the market possible in the first place. [Cohen, R. and Kennedy, P. 2000, Global Sociology, MacMillan, London, p. 375.]
http://www.soci.canterbury.ac.nz/resources/glossary/commodf.shtml
----- Original Message ----- From: Carrol Cox To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2004 8:41 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: light of my life, maybe not the fire of my loins
Michael Dawson wrote:
>
> Commodity fetishism must be one of the top 3 most over-rated and misused
> Marxist concepts.
Misused, yes; and all the recent uses of it on this list have no relation whatever to what Marx meant by it. Buying something for snob value or for display is _not_ commodity fetishism. Following fashion is _not_ commodity fetishism.
But, it is not over-rated. It is absolutely core to the whole of Marx's thought. It has to do with the structure and dynamic of capitalism, and it has nothing to do with individual psychology. It is also the most difficult concept in all of Marx. People should swear off using the phrase until they have read and reread Rubin on Marx.
Carrol
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