Question

1. What is fetishization? Discuss examples of how people give symbolic power to commodities and the impact on cultures

Answer 1

Summary

In Karl Marx's critique of political economic system, commodity fetishism is the notion of certain relationships (especially manufacturing and trade) now not as relationships among people, however as social relationships amongst matters (the money and commodities exchanged in market exchange). As a shape of reification, commodity fetishism perceives monetary fee as something that arises from commodity goods themselves, and no longer from the interpersonal family members that produce them.

Commodity Fetishism and its Impact on Culture

The theory of commodity fetishism is offered within the first bankruptcy of Das Kapital (English: Capital. Critique of Political economic system) , at the belief of the analysis of the cost-form of commodities, to provide an explanation for that the social employer of exertions is mediated via market change, the shopping for and the selling of commodities (goods and services). consequently, in a capitalist society, social members of the family among human beings who makes what, who works for whom, the manufacturing-time for a commodity, et cetera are perceived as social relations amongst items; relying on the social feature of the change, items gather a positive form (as an example, if the characteristic is to render possible exchange, the object acquires fee; if its characteristic is considered one of hiring an employee, then the item becomes capital). On the market, the commodities of each individual manufacturer seem in a depersonalized shape as separate exemplars of a given type of commodity irrespective of who produced them, or in which, or wherein unique conditions, therefore obscuring the social relations of production.

Marx defined the sociological idea underlying commodity fetishism consequently: As in opposition to this, the commodity-form, and the fee-relation of the goods of labour within which it appears, have without a doubt no connection with the bodily nature of the commodity and the cloth members of the family springing up out of this. It’s far nothing but the exact social relation between guys themselves which assumes right here, for them, the high-quality shape of a relation among matters. so as, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain seem as independent figures endowed with a life in their own, which enter into members of the family both with every other and with the human race. So it is inside the international of commodities with the goods of guys's hands. I name this the fetishism which attaches itself to the goods of labour as quickly as they're produced as commodities, and is consequently inseparable from the manufacturing of commodities.

The commodity fetishism existence is from Marx's references to fetishes and fetishism, he analyzed that non-secular superstition by Max, and criticized of the idealistic political economists. Marx borrowed the concept of fetishism from The Cult of Fetish Gods by way of Charles-de-Brosses, which proposed a materialist principle of the starting place of religion. Moreover, within the year 1840, the philosophic discussion of fetishism through Auguste Comte, and Ludwig Feuerbach's mental interpretation of religion additionally stimulated Marx's improvement of commodity fetishism.

Marx brushed off that argument and Hermes's definition of religion as that which elevates man "above sensuous appetites". Rather, Marx stated that fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites", and that the myth of the appetites hints the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate item will yield its herbal individual to gratify the dreams of the worshipper. Consequently, the crude urge for food of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish while it ceases to be of carrier.

The next mention of fetishism changed into within the 1842 Rheinische Zeitung newspaper articles approximately the "Debates at the regulation on Thefts of timber", in which Marx referred to the They celebrated a dinner party in its honour, sang in a circle round it, and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages have been gift on the sitting of the Rhine Province assembly, could they no longer have seemed wooden because the Rhinelanders' fetish? but a next sitting could have taught them that the worship of animals is hooked up with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the ocean that allows you to store the people.

Inside the financial and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx stated the ecu fetish of valuable-metal cash: The international locations which are nonetheless dazzled with the aid of the sensuous glitter of treasured metals, and are, consequently, nevertheless fetish-worshippers of metal money, aren't yet absolutely advanced cash-countries. The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the project of exercise, and is effected via exercise, the extent to which proper practice is the situation of a real and fine principle, is proven, as an instance, in fetishism. The sensuous attention of the fetish-worshipper isn't like that of the Greek, because his sensuous life is unique. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is vital so long as the human feeling for nature, the human experience of nature, and, therefore, additionally the natural experience of man, aren't but produced by using man's very own labour.

In the ethnological notebooks, he commented upon the archæological reportage of The starting place of Civilisation and the Primitive situation of guy: intellectual and Social situations of Savages (1870), with the aid of John Lubbock. inside the Outlines of the Critique of Political financial system (Grundrisse, 1859), he criticized the statist, anti-socialist arguments of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat; and about fetishes and fetishism Marx stated that In real history, wage labour arises out of the dissolution of slavery and serfdom or of the decay of communal property, as with Oriental and Slavonic peoples and, in its adequate, epoch-making shape, the shape which takes ownership of the entire social being of labour, out of the decline and fall of the guild economic system, of the device of Estates, of labour and earnings in kind, of industry carried on as rural subsidiary profession, of small-scale feudal agriculture, and so forth. In a lot of these real historic transitions, salary labour appears because the dissolution, the annihilation of family members wherein labour become constant on all aspects, in its income, its content, its area, its scope, and so on. As a result, as negation of the stableness of labour and of its remuneration. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political financial system , Marx cited A Discourse on the upward push, progress, bizarre gadgets, and significance of Political financial system, via John Ramsay McCulloch, who stated that "In its herbal nation, count number is continually destitute of fee", with which Marx concurred, announcing that "this indicates how excessive even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German 'thinkers' who assert that 'fabric', and half a dozen similar irrelevancies are elements of price".

Moreover, in the manuscript of "results of the on the spot manner of production, an appendix to Capital: Critique of Political economic system, Marx stated that: we discover inside the capitalist process of manufacturing [an] indissoluble fusion of use-values wherein capital subsists [as] way of manufacturing and items described as capital, when what we are clearly confronted with is a specific social courting of manufacturing. In outcome, the product embedded on this mode of production is equated with the commodity, by using those who have to address it. It is this that paperwork the muse for the fetishism of the political economists.

Hence did Karl Marx practice the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from financial and ethnologic research, to the improvement of the theory of commodity fetishism, in which an monetary abstraction (cost) is psychologically converted (reified) into an object, which people select to trust has an intrinsic price, in and of itself.