this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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GenZedong

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If there is such thing as commodity fetishism, then there must be a term like "firepower" fetishism (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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"God is on the side with the best artillery, bombs, drones, machine gun fire, tanks etc." Very industrial, very killing

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Commodity fetishism is the relationship between the consumer and the product, where the consumer lacks any perception of the labour required in the creation and distribution of the product. The value of the product is determined by the market, the value is completely removed from the people. Before industrialisation you would buy goods from local artisan businesses, for example a piece of furniture would be sold by your local carpenter who is a part of your community. You know the time and skill it took to create the product, you know the person who created the product and their working conditions. Now under hyper capitalism you go onto Amazon and you order your funkopops with same day shipping. Completely removed from how the product is created.

So with respect to the weapons industry, firepower fetishism would be placing a purely market value on weapons while divorcing the products from its purpose and the people who use it and the people who they are used against. Its like the linkedin posts from weapons industry employees exciting about the growth in business shortly after 07/10/23.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure commodity fetishism was about treating commodities as fetishes (in the older religious sense), that is, objects that appear out of thin air, by miracle or as the result of rituals.

Effectively, commodity fetishism is the psychological tendency amongst liberals to erase the origination of commodities and treat their creation as something of a magical or spiritual or cultural process.

I think it is easy to see the commodity fetishism inherent in the countless bourgeois news outlets which ignore the actual material production or historical development process when talking about anything in economics.

As for the "firepower fetishism" you have described, the term makes sense for how we use the word "fetish" today, but it could theoretically become a bit confusing. Although I believe this is more the fault of the broader marxist tradition which has been resistant to updating its terminology

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Great answer, a better term today would be commodity mysticism.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Commodity fetishism is not the fetishizing of individual commodities

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I didn't assume that, but I thought its the power we attribute to it on its own, and to an extent, the economy, right? We just treat it as something that came out of the skies, like God, and hold dearest idealistically

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago (3 children)

No, that's what fetishizing individual commodities means. God given magical commodities!

Commodity fetishism is the fetishizing of the "commodity form", which is super unclear language, so I have to illustrate with an example.

You wake up every morning, head outside, and do a little dance. Your friend stays over one night and sees you do this. They say "Hey, you could turn that into a wonderful 1-person interpretive dance theater event. I bet a bunch of people would buy tickets!"

Or

You make yourself a lunch from the vegetables in your garden every week. One day your neighbor stops by and you offer them some of your meal. They say "This is so good you could package this up and put it on supermarket freezer aisles!"

Or

You are playing piano and your parent stops you and say "Why are you doing that? You're not pursuing a career as a musician, and you're not making any money by playing it. It's a waste of your time. Stop playing the piano and find something that you can make money with."

Or you are talking to your coworkers and they say "What did you do this weekend?" and you reply "I did some reading on carpentry and started learning how to build a chair" and they reply "Oh! Are you planning on selling chairs some day?" and when you say no they say "Then why are you learning carpentry?"

That's commodity fetishism.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

Good examples! Perhaps it could be said other way around too: fetishising commodification.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

So it's like the tendency in liberal society to turn good or service into monetized commodities, due to the capitalist base demanding it so?

I guess it's also got to do with how the economic base and superstructure subconsciously influence our decisions in its favor and make it seem immutable.

It seems more like commodity evangelism, to be more accurate, but thanks for the alternative view

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 days ago

This is really helpful thank you