This sheds little light upon Marx's ideas. He reads a good chunk of Marx's dense, abstract prose. Quoting is not explaining. When he does offer his commentary, it sounds little different from the Marx he quoted.
@AnalgesicBalm Argumentum ad homien, the point is that Marx explicates economic determinism with capitalist alienation of the worker. Lenin further analyzes imperialism through the rise of the banking bourgeoisie over the industrial bourgeoisie and the exploitation of labor internationally.
In my mind a fetish is a weird obession with a certain thing or person. So I have a negative connection of this theory as a result of that. How something is named plays a big role in how I view something, so solely because of the name I am not a fan of this theory.
Well, Marx actually agrees with you. In naming the phenomenon "commodity fetishism" Marx wasn't promoting fetishism--he was criticizing the way people look at the things they produce in a capitalist economy, and arguing that this habit of mistaking the "thing" for the life process makes people unhappy.
It may be helpful to know that by the time Marx wrote 'Das Kapital', the terms 'fetish' and 'fetishism' were not yet used with a sexual connotation, but merely meant the belief, typical of 'primitive' religions, that certain objects could have magic qualities and powers . It wasn't until after Marx's death that the French psychologist Alfred Binet applied the terms to describe a form of sexual fixation.
speaking of marx, i received as a hand-me-down the book "the theory of poverty" by ep thompson. all i can make of it is some kind of critique on althusser, but its way beyond my grasp. has anyone else stumbled upon this book?
Thompson rejects Althusser's theory of ideological interpretation for its determinism--Althusser boxes himself in so that there seems to be no way to think outside the box of ideology. But if it leaves us wondering where to find revolutionary agency, Althusser's theory nonetheless offers a powerful lever of critique.
thank you for the response. this will greatly help when tackling the book...but perhaps i need to go back and read althusser first anyway..can't read a critique without first knowing what is being critiqued...
I feel so stupid. This stuff is really hard to understand I wish that someone preferablely Ron Strickland would post a response video and explain this stuff in plain English instead of quoting Marx and expecting his audience just to get it. I need some one to go over this stuff sentence by sentence. btw who studies this for fun?
Marxism seems difficult because we live in crapitalism and the ideology of this society has blinded us from concrete and scientific thinking about society. Studying Marxism is an arduous but ultimately rewarding activity - and also an important prerequisite of progressive politics.
If I could just be a real ass and put it in something approaching plain English:
Commodity fetishism is about value.
A radio, for example, has value (like how much money it costs), but take the radio apart and dismantle it and you'll find no physical lump of 'value' in it.
According to Marx, an object's 'value' is not something actually to do with the object (e.g. a lump of 'value' in our radio), but to do with the entire workings of the society in which the object was made.
Marx thought that 'value' is 'socially necessary labor-time': the average amount of time spent laboring that's needed to reproduce the object (e.g. radio) under the current social and economic conditions.
Therefore, an object's (radio's) value is really a story about society, not about the object: a story about how much effort humanity is putting into developing radios at the moment compared to fridges or cars, how advanced radio-making technology is, etc., etc.
But, we see value as a quality of an object (e.g. the imaginary lump of 'value' in our radio), not a story about society, which is what it is.
Therefore we worship (fetishize) commodities (e.g. radios): we treat them like primitive tribes' 'fetishes' (objects they think are magical), by giving them qualities (i.e. 'value') that in fact belong to society.
Therefore, we have Commodity Fetishism, and see the simple efforts and workings of humanity, which we can control, as impersonal mystical 'market forces', just as humanity has been oppressed by the imaginary rule of gods, which are nothing more than inventions of humanity's own minds.
There will always be classes within mankind. Think of putting rocks, gravels, sands, impurities, into a cylinder and shake it. Gradually these materials will find their own space. In communist country there are at least three classes: the communist party leader, the communist members, and the prisoner of the communist doctrine.
Education to eliminate ego and ignorance, teaching morale conducts are the key to harmonious social orders.
What you say is typical idealistic right-deviationist counter-revolutionary malarkey.
The aim of the communist movement is to abolish classes. In communism, there is no class. In communism there is no communist party, and there are no prisoners, because everyone is the member of the community of conscious revolutionary workers.
Lol, man, you must be black yourself. No offense to you, but the "unfair" thing about classes is that they ACTUALLY EXIST. And to the other ignorant guy, the countries that you call "communist" are not communist, simply because of the facts that you pointed out - there is a party and there is a state.
@arguingplentifully I'm not sure if this argument holds weight, although I agree that there is still prejudice around. I see many of the great financial powers around as deriving from great historical riches that have 'passed down', so to speak, over time. Even large banks and reserves have initial investors who 'prop-up' and help germinate their growth. Therefore much of the monetary power of the world remains amongst the peoples ( through religious or blood ties) who've held it for centuries.
@arguingplentifully ...following that line thought, it's a sad truth that it's only been a relatively brief amount of time that certain races have been allowed to trade equally and freely across the world. It's like turning up to card game half way though; your opponents will, of course, have more winnings than you at that point.
Hi, I'm curious to know what marx' thoughts were on how a transparent and actual relationship between people is characterized by. How do we see eachother when not alienated from eachother according to Marx?
Thanks for your question. I think Marx and Engels' position was that it is impossible to articulate an un-alienated relationship from our current material/discursive framework. That is, humans would have to get closer to transparency before they could see what transparency would actually be like. I derive this answer mainly from Engels' critique of Utopian Socialism in "Socialist: Utopian and Scientific." There, Engels critices Utopian socialists for their "top-down" vision of the future.
i think a good example of commodity fetish is japanese luxtury cars. toyota created a fancy name lexus to create a image of prestige to sell luxtury cars in north america and other countries.but in japan they are all toyotas.mitsubishi and mazda sold their luxtury cars under same brand as their regular cars and had poor sales compared to toyota and other brands from japan using the fancy name in the american market place.
How can all of you just simply understand this so quickly????? Are you all scholars or something? Gee whiz. What does he mean by social phenomena and social relations & exchange???? Im clueless here.
It is complex, but let me give an example, the comic PJ O'Rourke likes to say "just because I have a big bundle of money does not mean that you have any less money".
This makes a "fetish" of money, since money (bits of paper and coins) we know is not magically valuable in itself, but represents a socially agreed or enforced way of exchanging things (money is an extreme commodity).
O'Rourke talks of money as purely physical. It is complex because this appears to be (and is) the case in our social reality. Money does appear as something purely physical, in the store it works as if there were no social relation, I do not even have to say a word and I can, having paid, walk out of the shop with whatever product.
Wall street's daily prices give the appearance that commodities have a kind of life, today they are depressed, tomorrow they are upbeat, etc.
What a crackpot Karl Marx really was. Hard to believe so many people have fallen under his spell.
breezeman199 2 weeks ago
what's the background music in the debut???
JusufJan 5 months ago in playlist Cultural and sociological talks
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Still having a hard time grasping the concept...
MakeItJungle 6 months ago in playlist Cultural Theory 1
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cheristessa 1 year ago
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JohananRaatz 1 year ago
This sheds little light upon Marx's ideas. He reads a good chunk of Marx's dense, abstract prose. Quoting is not explaining. When he does offer his commentary, it sounds little different from the Marx he quoted.
scott92507 1 year ago
thanks for posting this!
brownonrice 1 year ago
Sir, I really appreciate your video and I currently have sent three of your videos to members of my Marxist group.
MonsieurLeninist 2 years ago
I bet you aren't enough old enough to remember the USSR.
AnalgesicBalm 1 year ago
@AnalgesicBalm Argumentum ad homien, the point is that Marx explicates economic determinism with capitalist alienation of the worker. Lenin further analyzes imperialism through the rise of the banking bourgeoisie over the industrial bourgeoisie and the exploitation of labor internationally.
MonsieurLeninist 1 year ago
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titalminarisa 2 years ago
i found this very helpful
00samarkand00 2 years ago
THANKYOU
mikeyjayable 2 years ago 2
What is de different between 'production fetishism' and 'commodity fetishism'??
MisssM23 2 years ago
Thank U so much. It has helped me al lot with righting my Essay.
MisssM23 2 years ago
good luck 'righting' your essay
tommyfourleaf 2 years ago
Ha ha.
bapyou 2 years ago
If you compose college writing the way you do YouTube comments, you are fucked.
AnalgesicBalm 1 year ago
Thank you for these lectures, please do more.
mindovermattjr 2 years ago
I wish this talk would would not rely so heavily on the original text. It is that with which I am having problems.
canaan1967 2 years ago
In my mind a fetish is a weird obession with a certain thing or person. So I have a negative connection of this theory as a result of that. How something is named plays a big role in how I view something, so solely because of the name I am not a fan of this theory.
ramsfan920 3 years ago
Well, Marx actually agrees with you. In naming the phenomenon "commodity fetishism" Marx wasn't promoting fetishism--he was criticizing the way people look at the things they produce in a capitalist economy, and arguing that this habit of mistaking the "thing" for the life process makes people unhappy.
rlstrick 3 years ago 3
It may be helpful to know that by the time Marx wrote 'Das Kapital', the terms 'fetish' and 'fetishism' were not yet used with a sexual connotation, but merely meant the belief, typical of 'primitive' religions, that certain objects could have magic qualities and powers . It wasn't until after Marx's death that the French psychologist Alfred Binet applied the terms to describe a form of sexual fixation.
michaelmichael5555 2 years ago 3
@ramsfan920 what you just said is such stupid shite it makes my teeth ache. cheers though we all like to rage and feel superior
BlunderCats 7 months ago
@ramsfan920 i say just said, just noticed this was from 2 years ago
BlunderCats 7 months ago
speaking of marx, i received as a hand-me-down the book "the theory of poverty" by ep thompson. all i can make of it is some kind of critique on althusser, but its way beyond my grasp. has anyone else stumbled upon this book?
iaeruo 3 years ago
Thompson rejects Althusser's theory of ideological interpretation for its determinism--Althusser boxes himself in so that there seems to be no way to think outside the box of ideology. But if it leaves us wondering where to find revolutionary agency, Althusser's theory nonetheless offers a powerful lever of critique.
rlstrick 3 years ago
thank you for the response. this will greatly help when tackling the book...but perhaps i need to go back and read althusser first anyway..can't read a critique without first knowing what is being critiqued...
iaeruo 3 years ago
if you want to understand it you will have to read it yourself to really get it. you can't rely on others to think for you.
but there is plenty of introductory texts to marx' theory. the best of course are those who remain close to the original text.
psaikoski 3 years ago
I feel so stupid. This stuff is really hard to understand I wish that someone preferablely Ron Strickland would post a response video and explain this stuff in plain English instead of quoting Marx and expecting his audience just to get it. I need some one to go over this stuff sentence by sentence. btw who studies this for fun?
goldenvocals369 3 years ago 2
at the end of the video he says if you have questions send him an email.
it takes some time reading and thinking about these concepts but it will come to you once you have the terminology down.
joefish77 3 years ago 2
Marxism seems difficult because we live in crapitalism and the ideology of this society has blinded us from concrete and scientific thinking about society. Studying Marxism is an arduous but ultimately rewarding activity - and also an important prerequisite of progressive politics.
bolshevikML 3 years ago 3
If I could just be a real ass and put it in something approaching plain English:
Commodity fetishism is about value.
A radio, for example, has value (like how much money it costs), but take the radio apart and dismantle it and you'll find no physical lump of 'value' in it.
According to Marx, an object's 'value' is not something actually to do with the object (e.g. a lump of 'value' in our radio), but to do with the entire workings of the society in which the object was made.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago 3
Marx thought that 'value' is 'socially necessary labor-time': the average amount of time spent laboring that's needed to reproduce the object (e.g. radio) under the current social and economic conditions.
Therefore, an object's (radio's) value is really a story about society, not about the object: a story about how much effort humanity is putting into developing radios at the moment compared to fridges or cars, how advanced radio-making technology is, etc., etc.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago 3
But, we see value as a quality of an object (e.g. the imaginary lump of 'value' in our radio), not a story about society, which is what it is.
Therefore we worship (fetishize) commodities (e.g. radios): we treat them like primitive tribes' 'fetishes' (objects they think are magical), by giving them qualities (i.e. 'value') that in fact belong to society.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago 3
Therefore, we have Commodity Fetishism, and see the simple efforts and workings of humanity, which we can control, as impersonal mystical 'market forces', just as humanity has been oppressed by the imaginary rule of gods, which are nothing more than inventions of humanity's own minds.
Hope that helps, which it probably doesn't.
I think I'll go and get a life now.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago 4
That was amazingly helpful, thank you.
annecowarrior 3 years ago
There will always be classes within mankind. Think of putting rocks, gravels, sands, impurities, into a cylinder and shake it. Gradually these materials will find their own space. In communist country there are at least three classes: the communist party leader, the communist members, and the prisoner of the communist doctrine.
Education to eliminate ego and ignorance, teaching morale conducts are the key to harmonious social orders.
nmqtabtp 3 years ago
What you say is typical idealistic right-deviationist counter-revolutionary malarkey.
The aim of the communist movement is to abolish classes. In communism, there is no class. In communism there is no communist party, and there are no prisoners, because everyone is the member of the community of conscious revolutionary workers.
bolshevikML 3 years ago 3
But the important point at the moment is that the class system is very unfair.
For example, nobody can claim that blacks are biologically inferior.
But it's clear that blacks are very disproportionately poor.
If the class system was fair, blacks (who are naturally no more or less able than anyone else) would be spread proportionately among the classes.
But they're not. Therefore, a class system can be unfair, and surely a lot of the non-black poor needn't 'deserve' to be poor either.
arguingplentifully 3 years ago 6
Lol, man, you must be black yourself. No offense to you, but the "unfair" thing about classes is that they ACTUALLY EXIST. And to the other ignorant guy, the countries that you call "communist" are not communist, simply because of the facts that you pointed out - there is a party and there is a state.
R2rGangstaFC 2 years ago
@arguingplentifully I'm not sure if this argument holds weight, although I agree that there is still prejudice around. I see many of the great financial powers around as deriving from great historical riches that have 'passed down', so to speak, over time. Even large banks and reserves have initial investors who 'prop-up' and help germinate their growth. Therefore much of the monetary power of the world remains amongst the peoples ( through religious or blood ties) who've held it for centuries.
tobiaswarwick 1 year ago
@arguingplentifully ...following that line thought, it's a sad truth that it's only been a relatively brief amount of time that certain races have been allowed to trade equally and freely across the world. It's like turning up to card game half way though; your opponents will, of course, have more winnings than you at that point.
tobiaswarwick 1 year ago
This comment has received too many negative votes show
Marxism is fucking bullshit.
Get jobs and earn money and get rich you fucking douche bags!
swansandtyphus 3 years ago
Oh yeah. Why didn't I think of that?
rouchambeau 3 years ago
Hmmm...I seem to be working forty hours a week, and somehow I'm not rich. Please tell me what I'm doing wrong. swansandtyphus.
electronicoffee3 3 years ago 2
Awesome program, sir. Your videos have answered many of my questions about Marxism.
thebenallen 3 years ago
Hi, I'm curious to know what marx' thoughts were on how a transparent and actual relationship between people is characterized by. How do we see eachother when not alienated from eachother according to Marx?
Samanmotlagh 3 years ago
Thanks for your question. I think Marx and Engels' position was that it is impossible to articulate an un-alienated relationship from our current material/discursive framework. That is, humans would have to get closer to transparency before they could see what transparency would actually be like. I derive this answer mainly from Engels' critique of Utopian Socialism in "Socialist: Utopian and Scientific." There, Engels critices Utopian socialists for their "top-down" vision of the future.
rlstrick 3 years ago
i think a good example of commodity fetish is japanese luxtury cars. toyota created a fancy name lexus to create a image of prestige to sell luxtury cars in north america and other countries.but in japan they are all toyotas.mitsubishi and mazda sold their luxtury cars under same brand as their regular cars and had poor sales compared to toyota and other brands from japan using the fancy name in the american market place.
libertariananarchist 3 years ago
How can all of you just simply understand this so quickly????? Are you all scholars or something? Gee whiz. What does he mean by social phenomena and social relations & exchange???? Im clueless here.
Xproletariatx 4 years ago
It is complex, but let me give an example, the comic PJ O'Rourke likes to say "just because I have a big bundle of money does not mean that you have any less money".
This makes a "fetish" of money, since money (bits of paper and coins) we know is not magically valuable in itself, but represents a socially agreed or enforced way of exchanging things (money is an extreme commodity).
plenipotentiarius 4 years ago
O'Rourke talks of money as purely physical. It is complex because this appears to be (and is) the case in our social reality. Money does appear as something purely physical, in the store it works as if there were no social relation, I do not even have to say a word and I can, having paid, walk out of the shop with whatever product.
Wall street's daily prices give the appearance that commodities have a kind of life, today they are depressed, tomorrow they are upbeat, etc.
plenipotentiarius 4 years ago
I have been to the home where Marx was born in Trier, Germany. "Karl Marx Haus" on Karl Marx Strasse.
Thanks for posting this videos
kerwinlrogers 4 years ago
Wonderful, Ron. Thanks.
solidaritynow 4 years ago
Having just read chapter 1 part 4 of Capital, I would say this is an accurate description of commodity fetischism.
Thanks!
stefankangas 4 years ago
Thanks for the great effort. Fantastic series!!
shinji212 4 years ago
I enjoyed the series very much. Thanks for creating and uploading it.
battousai567 4 years ago
I'm glad all of you found it interesting... I plan to add new videos to the series from time to time.
rlstrick 4 years ago
BEST series on youtube!
sailaway786 4 years ago
Interesting series.
Congest 4 years ago