Commodity Fetishism Research Articles

HOUSE OF DREAMS, OR NOT

In this paper, we will discuss the role of the built environment as storytelling in the context of Oscar winner Parasite, a film by director Bong Joon-Ho (2019). We will look at the potentiality of the built environment in unveiling film narratives, especially regarding immanent forms of class struggle and exploitation in everyday life. We will investigate the troubling power relations between the rich and the poor in contemporary society and the ways that the concepts of alienation/estrangement, objectification/reification and commodity fetishism can be used to bring these relations to the fore when analyzing the movie. Keywords: Parasite; built environment; inequality; class struggle; alienation; everyday life.

Fish, Fetishization, and Faith in the Arctic Ocean

The ocean is a site of energy, space, movement, depth, and extraction. The biblical creation account begins there, with the energy of movement of the Spirit over the Deep. The exploitation of the ocean can be read as a desecration of the Deep, of divine presence and creativity, where beings of the deep roam. Many of these beings are beyond human knowledge, known only to the Creator. Many disturbances of the ocean floor and ocean dwellers have already occurred; penetrating even deeper into the ocean is a form of sacrilege. Extractive politics in the Arctic Ocean and in Northern Sápmi continue following decades of overfishing, poaching, and repression of indigenous coastal traditions. The Sámi tradition and ecological theologies offer a different way of looking at coastal and ocean regions. As tools to counter the calls for endless extraction, we offer narratives that highlight the importance of the coastal Sámi oral tradition and a decolonial ecotheology of a protective apophasis of the Deep. Countering extraction involves rejecting a hermeneutics of commodity fetish that distorts the ocean and those that live and travel within it by framing them as endlessly extractable. This article seeks to resist the extraction of oceanic waters and remind us of ways to respect ocean-dwelling species, the ocean, and ourselves in a time where we are facing the sixth great extinction.

The Necessary Illusion – Giannotti on Fetishism

The main aim of this article is to investigate the most fundamental meanings that José Arthur Giannotti attributes to the phenomenon of fetishism in Marx. His interpretation, as expounded in Certa herança marxista [Certain Marxist Heritage] and grounded in the concept of a necessary illusion in a predominantly Kantian sense, appears to challenge a fundamental aspect of the new readings that Uspian Philosophical Marxism, with Giannotti as a key figure, has advanced since the 1960s. These new readings have underscored the notion of real abstraction as the foundation of commodity fetishism in a predominantly Hegelian sense. The article aims to clarify that Giannotti's interpretation does not aim to replace one perspective with another but rather to integrate the initial insights of the critique of real abstraction with the illusory measurement practices inherent in the process of production and exchange of commodities.

The Power of a Brand: Paramount, Heartland Narrowcasting, and Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone

Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone is, above all, the story of a brand. By situating the popular series in relation to both the streaming and culture wars, as well as a related schism in academic media studies, this article proposes that the political economy of media corporations and the narrative aesthetics of media texts must be understood in tandem. As the Paramount Network’s signature property, Yellowstone manifested the channel’s demographic mission to include women and “narrowcast” to heartland viewers. By sophisticated generic and narratological innovations, Yellowstone went further to create an aesthetic protocol of brand loyalty where the process of branding, at once ancient and modern, physical and symbolic, was made self-consciously central to the show’s redescription of rural cowboying as a cultural identity and marketable lifestyle. The show’s intertwining of branding and belonging, as well as its vigorous use of product placement and merchandising, modifies prior assumptions in the field of franchise studies. In the gap between brand synergy and brand dilution, Yellowstone presents itself as a paradigmatic case study for the new imbrications of narrative entertainment, commodity fetishism, and identitarian politics.

Veiled Exploitation: The Maintenance of Power through False Consciousness in The Netflix Series Arcane

The focus of this research is to identify and reveal how false consciousness is created and utilized to retain the authority of the industrialist Silco in the Netflix series Arcane. This research aims to show how false consciousness is through the creation of class consciousness, and how it is spread and maintained through state apparatuses and commodity fetishism as a method of exploitation to maintain his authority and status as a leader in Zaun. In this research, the Marxist theory of ideology and state apparatuses by Louis Althusser and commodity fetishism by Karl Marx were employed to answer the research questions. The research used a qualitative method of content analysis. The data is collected and identified by watching the series, where the relevant data is collected from visuals, activities, and dialogues within the series so that it can be analyzed further. Based on the data analysis, the series Arcane depicts false consciousness as a method to exploit the people from the proletariat and bourgeois classes to benefit certain people or groups. Silco creates and maintains false consciousness by utilizing state apparatuses such as ideological state apparatus and repressive state apparatus through ideology. Silco also utilizes commodity fetishism from Shimmer as a way to control the people through false consciousness. As a result, Silco managed to maintain his power as a leader in Zaun, which reveals how false consciousness can be utilized to benefit a certain people, group, or classes to maintain their power within society.

The Pink Shoe: Ornamentalism from Paris to Paris Hilton

Restif de la Bretonne’s Le pied de Fanchette, ou le soulier couleur de rose constitutes the first documented instance of a foot (and shoe) fetish in French literary history. Apart from the evident allusion to Perrault’s Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de vair, the work is littered with references to the oriental tale that have previously been overlooked. I read Restif’s novella as a repurposing of the conte merveilleux, situated in the context of cloth merchants and the textile industry and predicated on commodity fetishism and ornamentalism. Restif preserves yet transforms the magical agents characteristic of the genre. While women are seemingly reduced to their overdetermined signifiers, the foot and the shoe, I argue that they are not only concealed but also constituted by the ornaments they wear, which both acquire and endow them with an agency shrouded in mystique that Anne Anlin Cheng terms “subject-as-object enchantment.” Restif first employs the term “fétiches sacrés” in reference to the queen’s foot. I trace the pink shoe from the streets of Paris to Paris Hilton’s closet in Sofia Coppola’s films Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring, invoking Cheng’s “logic of yellow femininity” as a contribution to a trans-historical, cross-cultural critique of consumer culture and account of “ornamental personhood.”

Money as a “Social Power”: Commodity Fetishism and Financialization

Marx’s concepts of commodity and money fetishism explain the perception that money and commodities have “value,” presumably as part of their intrinsic properties. In fact, the exchange value of commodities and money results from living labor and the extraction of surplus value. With a historic review of the institutions for production, circulation, and credit, this appearance of capitalism can be explained. Further, the view that money is valuable in itself can lead to overexpansion of credit, stagnation, and instability. The attribution of “value” to living labor and the environment instead of money would result in different policies and priorities, and a more stable and equitable economy, rather than “financialization” and crises. JEL Classification: N23, G15, G23, B52

Green konsumerisme Sebagai Kritik Terhadap Peran Manusia Dalam Gerakan Lingkungan

As public awareness and government pressure increases, industries are undertaking "green marketing" efforts. Green marketing is a combination of activities, including product modifications, changes to the production process, packaging changes, and advertising modifications to promote environmentally friendly products (Mishra and Sharma, 2014). Green marketing seeks to tempt green consumers in an effort to expand the market and increase profits. Environmentally friendly production practices are no longer seen as an obligation, but rather as a strategic business tactic that is profitable. Thus, green consumerism is part of green capitalism that seeks to reduce environmental impacts by utilizing market forces and profit motives (Scales, 2014). Scales also adds that green consumerism refers to the formation of a new commodity fetishism, whose impact is greater than it seems. Because in trying to provide information about the "greenness" of a product, green consumerism simplifies what green is. Environmental impacts are simplified and abstract concepts such as "green" are reduced to labels, symbols and metrics. This can direct consumers' focus to one issue and forget about others. Departing from the facts above, this paper will provide an understanding of how biased the role of humans in environmental preservation is today. Using descriptive qualitative research methods by focusing on literature reviews and research data from journals and documentary videos related to invisible hand practices and the ecogreen industry.

Inverted Odysseys: Adventure and homecoming in the global subrogation of women’s care work in Jose Y. Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister

Many Filipina care workers are subrogated to the position of mothers in the more affluent states of Asia. As a consequence, they oftentimes play as the unofficial teachers of the children. In this article, I analyse the process of global subrogation, which often end in what I call an inverted odyssey of the Filipina domestic helper. Using the concept of invertedness in commodity fetishism, this article reads Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister as an inverted odyssey which views the migration of Filipina care workers as an adventure but without the heroic homecoming. The novel represents the adventure as a dialectic of systems of carelessness and selfcare that is symbolically resolved within the narrative through the recurring image of the ‘woman in the box’. Thus, the article argues that unlike Odysseus’ triumphant nostos (homecoming), the heroine of this inverted odyssey falls victim to her own erotic drives, drowns in a far-flung kingdom, returns home in a box, and drowns again in the hands of thieves. The novel weaves a counter-narrative on the Filipina care worker that challenges prevailing Philippine state discourses on its overseas work force, thereby problematizing both the limitations of the heroine’s selfcare and the systemic carelessness of the states that make the subrogation possible. Ultimately, the inverted Odyssey as symbolized by the novel’s central image of ‘the woman in the box’ shatters appearances and unveils the tragic position of the unrecognized ‘teachers’ in the global feminization and commodification of care work.

“The mother of every insane form: fetishistic interest and capitalistic perversion”

ABSTRACT Money is the epitome of Marx’s fetishised commodity. And, in Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism, it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of ‘interest-bearing capital.’ Herein, I perform two complementary gestures, one as regards Marxism and another with respect to psychoanalysis. Apropos Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as per the third volume. Apropos psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defence mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money?

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Commodification

Digitization is taking over every sphere of life—including the arts. Through the process of digital commodity fetishism, major technology companies threaten to efface the very qualities that make creative expression—particularly the performing arts—distinct and meaningful. To resist or even question these forces, we must excavate an invisible digital politics that can displace (and replace) traditional sources of authority in the performing arts. By examining the basic mechanisms of the “creator economy,” this politics can be found and confronted—in the arts and beyond.

“The island is now a big vegetable garden”: Imaginaries of Nature and Carceral Reform at Rikers Island

AbstractThe practice of conflating green with a social and moral good is a historically specific social process. The purpose of this article is to show how that process has made particularly good company for carceral humanism and legitimisation. By tracing initiatives integrating gardening at New York City's Rikers Island jail complex, I argue that projects and narratives cloaked in visions of green, nature, and sustainability obscure and reproduce both popular and institutional claims to expansionist carceral reform in the name of offering an inherently rehabilitative service. Drawing on conversations around commodity fetishism, urban political ecology, sustainability, and carceral reform, this article shows how holding nature as an inherent source of moral high ground that, by default, rehabilitates all who take advantage of it, is to disregard the social mechanisms that in turn naturalise the prison‐industrial complex.

Religion Simulacrum in Open World Video Game

<em>Apart from being a medium for entertainment simulation, video games also provide a representation of the social world. Game industry developers always carry out research to provide socio-cultural, historical and philosophical system content to enrich the content in the game. The story background in video games aims to provide experiences and impressions for the players. This research aims to qualitatively explore forms of religious representation that are simulated in open world video games. So players can play role characters in the game to experience spirituality and religiosity. Either through latent and manifest narratives or through moral choices in the context of developing the storyline and Player character in the Game. This research uses Emile Durkehim's sociological perspective of religion regarding Karl Marx's totemism and commodity fetishism to observe the incarnation of the gaming industry as an altar of worship for its players, as well as Jean Baudrillard's postmodernist perspective with his simulacrum concept to analyze the form of simulation and representation of religious symbols that appear in the game. these open world games... This research finds that the use of simulations and the distribution of representations of religious signs or symbols in games forms a religion simulacrum or a blurring of spiritual boundaries between the pseudo and the real. Video games build the Player's construction of religiosity and spirituality virtually in a simulated world that contains ritual practices, ethics, morality, cosmology, metaphysics, and theology.</em>

Модели генезиса общества потребления: от товарного фетишизма к символическому потреблению

In this article, the author aims to answer the question of why consumer society has emerged as one of the main ways in which society describes itself. Many of the possible answers were outlined by social thought before the very concept of consumer society emerged or without reference to it. Nevertheless, taking them into account is important for understanding the process of consumerization. The author of the article offers a classification of theoretical explanations of this phenomenon, consisting of four possible directions: macro-conflict, individual-conflict, macro-functional, individually-functional. Further, the genesis of consumer society is examined as part of the concept of commodity fetishism by K. Marx, in the works on consumption by E. Fromm, in the concept of the society of abundance and demonstrative consumption by T. Veblen, fashion – R. von Jhering – G. Simmel, in the works of P. Bourdieu and other authors. Based on these concepts, the article provides an explanation of the expansive nature of the development of consumer society.

Race and Reification

Abstract This article uses Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism and subsequent theories of reification to understand the social construction of race. Race is typically defined as a socially-constituted category that is mischaracterised as a natural one. The goal of this article, in contrast, is to explain how this mischaracterisation arises. In addition to this main objective, the article uses this explanation of race to contest recent attempts that locate the ‘persistent entanglement’ of race and capital in their functional relationship. Finally, the article engages with related, commodity-based theories of race and racism and concludes with thoughts on what the socially-constructed category of race can teach us about the nature of value and capitalism.

Just an Illusion?

Just an Illusion?

Consumer society and consumer behavior: The evolution of concepts and modern understanding.

The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis of significant sociological, economic, psychological and related concepts of consumer society and consumer behavior. It is shown that the evolution of these concepts has a pronounced division into stages corresponding to the historical trends of the emergence and development of consumer society as a socio-economic phenomenon. Organically interconnected with the formation of consumer society was the formation of typed consumer behavior practices, which today is characterized by a complex structure, and its specific forms depend on a significant number of factors of the most diverse nature. These forms need to be comprehensively studied in order to use the acquired knowledge in the activities of both commercial enterprises and public administration. Consumption within the framework of this stage was considered most often as a derivative of class or estate, and its most prominent representatives were K.Marx (consumption as belonging to a class), M.Weber, T.Geiger, T.Veblen (theory of prestigious consumption), G.Simmel (theory of fashion), V. Sombart (theory of luxury). Further studies of consumer behavior began to be conducted mainly within the framework of economic theory, behavioral economics and marketing at the beginning of the XX century. The Marxist idea of "commodity fetishism" was continued in the writings of J.Baudrillard (criticism of consumer society), and the concept of M. Weber – in the so-called "class factions" of P. Bourdieu, and the ideas and J.Baudrillard and P. Bourdieu (habitus as an "acquired system of generative schemes") are quite popular today in sociological, socio-cultural and socio-philosophical concepts of human behavior in general and consumer behavior in particular. The "new" theory of consumption was proposed by G. Becker, K. Lancaster and J.Stigler, and M. Friedman and J.Dusenberry formulated the concepts of permanent income and sustainable consumer practices, respectively, to explain "advanced consumption".

Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific: REFUGIO by Roger Palmer and the Marxian theory of economic character masks

ABSTRACT Robinson Crusoe is among the world’s most mythologized fictional characters. As homo economicus, economic man, Crusoe is a byword for rugged individualism. Crusoe has been linked to the emergent bourgeois individual, and this role offers a way to reconsider, after 300 years of circulation, an alternate economic reading of the character. This article rereads Crusoe’s role in Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, prompted by an art installation, REFUGIO – after Selkirk, after Crusoe by Roger Palmer, which explores a visually doubled figure of Crusoe relocated to the Pacific Ocean. This trope of doubling is reinterpreted with Marx’s concept of “economic character masks” and J.M. Coetzee’s postcolonial re-imagining of the Crusoe story, Foe, showing that Crusoe’s economic character mask continues to operate in the capitalist world while his body is absent. Homo economicus is a fiction that obscures the capitalist individual’s imbrication with globalizing networks of exchange, accumulation, and exploitation.

Abstract Labour and Socialism

Abstract Should the regulation of production and distribution in a socialist society be based on the law of value? In this article we ask (1) Is this question not based on an ontological understanding of labour, on a rational and therefore conceptual understanding of abstract labour and, ultimately, a transhistorical understanding of value and the so-called ‘law of value’?; (2) is it not precisely this deception and power of the fetishism of commodities that, by eternalising value and the ‘law of value’, limits the horizon and perspective of ‘realistic politics’ (Realpolitik)?; and (3) whether this question does not treat socialism as a political situation where the solution to its ‘economic’ problem is unrelated to its very identity? In order to answer these questions, we provide a novel understanding of Marx’s fundamental category of value, its substance, form and magnitude, with the help of the German expression Formgehalt, translated as form-content.

Capital, fictions, and ecology

Marx's critique of political economy describes the expanded reproduction of the capital as the basic reality of our societies, and it may seem that Marx ignores two main externalities of the social reproduction of the capital, the domain of symbolic fictions and nature, the presupposed habitat of every social activity. This impression is wrong. marx's capital discovers fiction in the very heart of the circulation of capital: what he calls "commodity fetishism" is a symbolic fiction which is not just an ideology . it structures the very social reality of the capitalist process. Plus ecology was in the very center of Marx's preoccupation in the last decade of his life: he clearly saw how the expanded capitalist production leads to a rift between society and nature, a rift which threatens the very survival of human species. For Marx already, socialism was eco´-socialism.