#commodityfetishism

[riotready]

#commodityfetishism ⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #anarchy #anarchism #anarchist #nogodsnomasters #praxis #anticapitalism #ancom #communism #communist #anfem #feminist #feminism #activism #standup #socialist #socialism #protest #fight #riotready #leftistmemes (at Inglewood, California) https://www.instagram.com/riotreadyrecords/p/BwLG2z8Afhd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1aj2obhvov9ru

[haliging-dilag]

Commodity Fetishism

by DIANZON

[kelseyshinn-blog]

The above image is an image of three Ugg boots of varying colors. Boots and other styles from the multi-million dollar company of Ugg are very popular in the young-adult demographic, especially for the females of the demographic. The Ugg company was very popular in Australia for several years before it spread to the United States. Even though the actual boot itself is slightly ugly, the reputation is very popular in the United States after several major media figures started to promote the product. Have you ever wondered as to why such an ugly boot would be so popular among a demographic that would seemingly be inclined to being fashionable? A possible answer to this question might lie in the definition of a term named “commodity fetishism”. Commodity fetishism is a Marxist theory that “is the process of mystification that exists in capitalism between what things are and how they appear”, according to the book Practices of Looking. According to this definition, people are more likely to buy a product that has the popular trending brand-name even though the quality of those products may not be the highest. This is part of the reason that consumers buy so much product from ‘brand-name’ companies as opposed to other companies that are not known as well as the brand-names but have a higher quality. There may be other products out in the world that are of higher quality, but it would very difficult for that company to push past the commodity fetishism of Ugg boots.

[timofeymalyshev-blog]

Поэма товарного фетишизма

[theworkersadjutant]

The dialectics of ketchup.

A tomato sits and looks at a bottle of ketchup, ketchup looks back at the tomato, the tomato sees a potential future. the ketchup sees its forgotten past. are they not the same? yet at the same time are they not different? there is a dialectic at play here, a negation of identity through an interpretation of the transition of one thing to its opposite.

at the same this challenges the mediation of our perception through the capitalist production process, through the medium of the process of the mechanical creation and commercial distribution of the ketchup, the history of its creation is hidden away, as we associate it with the bottle, the shelf, the market, but through the defiant act of thinking through the movements of its history one unmasks the hidden transformation and the relations involved to show us the truth within the falsity. what is the true essence of ketchup? And what is the subjective factor that has created this new object from its previous forms? When we answer these questions we now are exposed to the event of the ketchups creation, the real origin, history, and reality of the ketchup itself and in that process we are exposed to our own alienation from our labor/being/history/essence.

it is true the assimilation of other identities has negated the ketchup's existence as solely a product of the tomato and created a new identity a new reality. In this transformation the history of the ketchup is the history of all the negated identities which have merged through this dialectical movement of quantity to quality. the ketchup in reality is each of these ingredients and at the same time it is none of them. As these past identities have been negated and just as our own past they can never be reassembled in the same way and reconstituted again.

[panopticore]

[bethbreeden]

"commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value.[1]"

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)

[porquerias1312]

This is a prime example of the alienation and anomie created by capitalism. These men work all day harvesting a plant for a purpose they do not know of. The main interlocutor works with cocoa and knows it is used by wealthy foreign others to make "a good food" that he has never tasted: the others believe it is used to make wine. Their alienation from the product of their labor results in awe when the commodity-fetish object of the chocolate bar is produced almost magically from the reporter's pocket.

The cocoa workers ask the reporter questions like "Is your skin whiter because of the chocolate?" as an attempt to re-frame the interview and negotiate the cultural gulf between them by understanding the reporter's approach, and the connection between their labor and the finished, transformed, standardized and pristine foil-wrapped chocolate bar. 

Like them, we must question the intent behind such a pseudo-ethnographic stunt. The report is obviously meant to show a privileged Western audience the deprivation experienced outside their daily milieu. Yet the reporter himself also belies an ethically questionable stance of casual privilege when the reporter, who places himself firmly on the side of "us Westerners" (those who can afford to eat chocolate regularly) in the introduction, demonstrates his privilege by simply pulling out another bar from his pocket after the first bar is gone. By doing so the first bar, shared between many and treated as a unique treat, which it is "a privilege" to taste, is revealed to be interchangeable with all the others, showing the workers the tip of the iceberg of processes by which the unique fruits of each plant, gathered by the labor of unique people, are bought, sold, homogenized, the depth of life and human experience flattened to produce standardized products for consumption by well-fed, wealthy others who never experience the commodity's production or the labor used to produce it. 

That is why the workers ask if eating chocolate is why white people are so healthy. 

Next, the station showed a bunch of white Dutch people some cacao pods, and they had no idea what they were. However, it's likely they edited out a few Dutchmen who knew their stuff.