This article explores the financialisation of the world’s most important commodity, oil. It argues that much of the literature on the financialisation of commodities tends to adopt a dualistic approach to financial markets and physical producers, where financial and non-financial activities are assumed to be externally-related and counterposed to one another. The article locates the roots of this analytical separation in a mistaken acceptance of the fetish character of interest-bearing capital (IBC) – a view that the exchange of (...) loanable sums of capital represents a relationship between money-capitalists rather than a relationship to the moment of production. Against such dichotomous readings, the article argues that the financialisation of oil needs to be understood as part of the reworking of ownership and control across the oil commodity circuit, expressed through the combined centralisation and concentration of capital over the money, productive and commercial moments. This argument is demonstrated through an original empirical investigation of the US oil industry, including 20 years of weekly trading data on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and a detailed study of more than 160 oil and energy-related firms in the US. By mapping the structural weight and connections between different capitalist actors involved in accumulation across the oil sector, we gain a better understanding of the ultimate dynamics (and beneficiaries) of the carbon economy. (shrink)

One of the prestige of young people’s identity today is through fashion. Fashion has even become a “religion” that binds the identity of the individual who wears it. The Sneaker, a form of fashion, also has a big role; even now, it has become a commodity and prestige with a fetish nuance. Therefore, this study aims to identify how the sneaker fetish becomes a space for simulating the lives of young people in Indonesia. Furthermore, this study also (...) examines the problem of the representation of youth-lifestyle simulations in Indonesia. This research uses a qualitative case study approach to play on Jean Baudrillard’s approach to simulacra and hyperreality, which also discusses David Chaney’s approach to fashion. Data collection was obtained from audience studies by examining tagging on social media, Instagram, from July 2022 to October 2022. The results of the study show that the sneaker trend does not only act as a complement to appearances, more than that, but it can also display the personal identity of the wearer. A sneaker community also facilitates the lifestyle of young people towards sneakers. Finally, the community shifted the concept of young people towards sneaker consumption to be more consumptive than before. On the other hand, young people do not realize that what they have done is a hyperreality that tries to identify itself with the best possible image and continues to shape it through massive consumption activities. This is where the sneaker concept shifts from a “community” to a “commodity”. (shrink)

This article draws on a five-year, multi-sited transnational research project on the global traffic in human organs, tissues, and body parts from the living as well as from the dead as a misrecognized form of human sacrifice. Capitalist expansion and the spread of advanced medical and surgical techniques and developments in biotechnology have incited new tastes and traffic in the skin, bones, blood, organs, tissues, marrow and reproductive and genetic marginalized other. Examples drawn from recent ethnographic research in Israel, the (...) Palestinian Authority and Turkey serve to cast light on the dark side of organs harvesting and transplantation. The article focuses on the dangers of the `fetishized kidney' for both sellers and buyers, for whom this new commodity has become an organ of opportunity and an organ of last resort. The bodily sacrifice is disguised as a donation, rendered invisible by its anonymity, and hidden under the medical rhetoric of `life saving' and `gift giving'. It suggests that the ultimate fetish as recognized long ago by Ivan Illich is the idea of `life' as object of manipulation. (shrink)

This article examines what happens when local gender rights activism is taken up by international allies and appropriators, using case studies of activism in Saudi Arabia and India. The relationship between local and transnational activists is shaped by histories of Euro-Americans writing about the gendered organisation of Eastern societies. In an economic system where nongovernmental activist groups compete for donor support, political causes are commodities with value, and value is generated through representations (e.g. of patriarchal oppression). These representations of the (...) sexuality and gender organisation of other societies are fetishes in the Marxian sense, essential to the commodity-cause that generates value in circulation. These representations gain value through the accretion of cultural images and texts that adhere to the cause, e.g. the stereotype of the violent brown man and oppressed woman. Such images in the cultural repository allow transnational consumers to make sense of issues they are called to support. But such images also reify stereotypes that activists seek to undermine, even at the same time that these representations generate an international audience. We analyse this process and identify strategies for how transnational allies can show solidarity without overshadowing or devaluing the voices of local activists, with primary focus on the case of activism against male guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion (...) that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

The struggle for domination clearly persists in The Homecoming as it does in almost all of Pinter’s works. Because of the vague atmosphere, enigmatic characters, and dark, tragicomic dialogue and action, a single decisive meaning for the play cannot be identified. Many character analyses have been carried out on the play, frequently focusing on Ruth and her decision at the end. Moreover, critics have sought to read the play in the light of psychoanalysis, centering on the characters’ past and complexes. (...) By adding a sociopolitical dimension to purely realistic or symbolic readings, this article attempts to analyze the relationships of domination and servitude between characters at the micro-level of the family structure through Marx’s notions of fetishism in relations between individuals, and commodity fetishism as expounded by Slavoj Žižek. With the help of Žižek’s ideas on ideology, a new layer of sociopolitical signification to the relationships held between characters is added, particularly that between Ruth and the men, which is seen as a parallel to the macro-level fetishized relationships in pre-capitalist societies and commodity fetishism in a capitalist one. (shrink)

There are at least three senses of sexual objectification: the moral sense of treating a person as if she were primarily a sexual object, the political sense in which women socially count as instruments for men’s sexual pleasure, and the epistemic sense of forming a belief that a person is as one sexually desires them to be. These different senses have been treated as rivals, competing about what the correct account of sexual objectification is, or they have been treated as (...) entirely different projects. I argue for a third relation between them: each sense grasps an aspect of the existing social phenomenon of sexual objectification. Each further points out a wrong involved in sexual objectification. And the three aspects interact—we cannot fully explain any one sense of sexual objectification without the other two. To properly understand this interrelation I lean on an analogy: commodity fetishism as described by Marx helps make sense of the complex social reality of sexual objectification. (shrink)

In the present essay, I argue that portions of Frantz Fanon’s L’an V de la révolution algérienne significantly contribute to, develop, and advance the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism. First, I describe and chart Fanon’s theorization of the transformations of the veil, the radio, and medicine in revolutionary Algeria, and map the homologous moments of each of these studies. Next, I give a brief synopsis of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism and argue that this theory leaves open questions (...) about the way in which use-value plays a role in commodity fetishization in colonial contexts, and, by extension, in actual anticolonial political revolutions. The foregoing then paves the way for a re-evaluation of the central insights of Fanon’s studies of the veil, the radio, and medicine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.2 (2001) 3-8 [Access article in PDF] The Two Secrets of the Fetish Jean-Luc Nancy "Commodity fetishism": Marx's formula has been imprinted on the largest and most resistant of cultural memories. It has become almost anonymous, or rather synonymous with Marx's very name, as is the case with certain coined terms(cogito, categorical imperative...). This privilege could only be due to a very particular virtue. Such a (...) virtue is that which not only consists in characterizing, in the strict sense of the word (to typify a property or an essence), but even in characterizing in such a way that the character (the stamp, the seal) is somehow inscribed on the thing itself and can no longer be detached from it, or at least without some loss in the substance of the thing.In Kantian terms: the intuition presented under the word "fetishism" is printed or traced indelibly onto the concept of "commodity," giving rise to a schema "commodity," from which a new image, and thus a new idea, ensues. Not just the commodity as the fetish—as if this were one of its traits or one approach among others—but rather the essence of the commodity revealed as fetish, so that the fetish character would remain once the approach was shifted or the "secret" of its "mystical character" was revealed. (As we know, these are all Marx's own terms.)As is also known, the secret consists in that the commodity value (or exchange value) of the object (or product), which seems to be its intrinsic or immanent property (parallel in this way to its use value, which is extrinsic and completely relative to its utilization in a given sociotechnical context) only covers, masks or represses the origin of its pure or absolute value—this last value being nothing other than the living human labor of the producer, which the act of production incorporates into the product. But the commodity value deflects this incorporated creative life toward equivalence within an exchange, where the producer (the worker) finds himself surreptitiously stripped of the part of the value that the mercantile calculation does not exchange for the maintenance of its labor force, but rather sets to the account of capital. * * * Here we are not concerned with addressing the problems associated with the evaluation or the appreciation of living work as it is related to the intensification or the very creation of value ("the surplus-value"), nor with respect to the extortion suffered by the creator of value (the valuable and value-making man, the living man as maker, as giver of prices in an absolute fashion) to the benefit of the one who accumulates value in the form of general equivalence, creating mercantile prices through a common currency. Currency is the fetish, where fetishism is fixed: belief in the value of the market price itself. The critique of political economy—that is, the critique of the economy as politics—reveals the inanity of this belief, and if this critique cannot measure the hidden and mysticized or mystified value in monetary terms, the principle of this critique remains [End Page 3] no less, but even more so, the incommensurability of the value creator and the marketed product.Alienation is not measurable. It is at the same time the principle of the critique and its impasse from the moment that we would like to, and indeed that we should, oppose one measure to another: the critical measure of the fetish against the mercantile measure through the fetish.In contrast, what we would like to sketch out here would have the following hypothesis as a point of departure: does not the strength of Marx's formula derive from a power other than that of the only critique thus broached? Is there not another energy, and another enigma, slipped into the first, adding itself to the revelation of the secret, even exceeding this revelation and perhaps in this fashion displacing just a bit the secret itself (precisely because it is not measurable)?This other power would derive from "fetishism" itself. That is to say... (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the literature on Marx’s systematic-dialectical method through a critical reading and discussion of the significance and presentational ‘architecture’ of the section on commodity fetishism in the dialectical sequence of form-determinations inCapital. In order to undertake this task, the paper firstly explores the content and expositional structure of the first three sections of Chapter 1 ofCapital. This sets the stage for a methodologically-minded close examination of Marx’s presentation of the fetish character of the (...) commodity, which shows that there is a precise systematic sequence which gives unity to the flow of his argument within the section on ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’. The conclusion is that only through a proper grasp of the dialectical method can the full systematic significance and implications of Marx’s account of commodity fetishism be uncovered. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between revolution and corruption in Jean Genet’s accounts of the Palestinian movement in his final work, Prisoner of Love. For Genet, corruption does not simply expose the actions of a revolutionary subject as an empty impersonation, performed for the actual ends of acquiring personal power and fortune. Rather, it exposes the ‘pretension’ inherent in the revolution it undermines as well as in the accumulation of value. For Genet, the misappropriation of money by the Palestinian leadership (...) makes manifest the imaginary character of both devotion to a revolutionary cause and greed for the commodity-fetish. Corruption, in other words, betrays revolution as well as the ‘imaginary wealth and power’ which the ‘game of revolution’ attempts to destroy. (shrink)

Culture is considered as a key term in anthropology, now in critical mode, and to be worked through powerful tropes that lead to issues in politics, interpretation, translation, stereotype and racism. Anthropology is described as a cultural system itself, with a large supporting institutional apparatus, not unlike the culture industry as critiqued by Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The high mass culture/high culture distinction is considered and some distortions explained (away). Street culture and culture as (development) resource are evaluated, leading (...) to an assessment of culture as souvenirs, trinkets and the ephemera of tourism as a modern commodity fetish. How this measures up to political struggles is again considered in the light of work by critics such as Fanon and those engaged with anti-imperialist struggles worldwide. (shrink)

The debate about pornography has been a debate about censorship as a way of reducing circulation. Three waves of anti-pornography thinking have reached for censorship. The First Wave invoked the Family Values familiar from religious rhetoric, the Second and Third Waves were both were motivated by feminist considerations. All thought they could justify the imposition of censorship. But even if such an imposition could be justified, should we want censorship anyway? I argue that censorship does not reduce the circulation of (...) pornography. Instead, I propose developing an alternative, informed by the Second and Third Waves, which relies on educating consumers in order to reduce the circulation of pornography. This could be the basis for a Fourth, truly effective, Wave. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Marx's central concern, consistent throughout his works, is to challenge and overcome hierarchical oppositions, which he considers as the core of modern, capitalist societies and the cause of alienation. The young Marx critiques the hierarchical idealism/materialism opposition. In this opposition, idealism abstracts from and reduces all material elements to the mind (or spirit), and materialism abstracts from and reduces all mental abstractions to the body (or matter). The mature Marx sophisticates this critique with his (...) theory of the commodity fetish. The commodity fetish abstracts the exchange-value (the mind) from the commodity's use-value (the body). Although Marx aims to challenge capitalism by abolishing the hierarchical relation among binary oppositions, I show that in his early and later writings on the working-class woman, he reinforces hierarchical binaries, pointing at the gendered unconscious structure of capitalism. (shrink)

Friedrich Engels’s “History of the Rifle” was among the longest and most detailed studies of technological development that either he or Marx produced. Yet the piece has been almost entirely forgotten. I recover Engels’s essay as a model for the historiography of technology and for the study of the politics of the technical object today, demonstrating its continuity with the larger critical project he was engaged in with Marx in these years. In a famous footnote to Capital, Marx suggested that (...) the method appropriate to a “critical history of technology” in society should be developed by analogy to Darwin’s revolutionary history of organic life. I show that Engels’s study of the rifle works out such a method in practice, recasting technological development as a nondeterministic interplay between the successive mutations of the artifact and the pressures of its social environment. Moreover, Engels’s technological materialism has a socially engaged and emancipatory end, for it is here directed against a particularly pernicious form of the commodity fetish: the fetishism of weapons. (shrink)

In The Theological Metaphors of Marx, Enrique Dussel provides a groundbreaking combination of Marxology, theology, and ethical theory. Dussel shows that Marx unveils the theology of capitalism in his critique of commodity fetishization. Capitalism constitutes an idolatry of the commodity that undergirds the capitalist expropriation of labor. Dussel examines Marx's early writings on religion and fetishism and proceeds through what Dussel refers to as the four major drafts of Capital, ultimately situating Marx's philosophical, economic, ethical, and historical insights (...) in relation to the theological problems of his time. Dussel notes a shift in Marx's underlying theological schema from a political critique of the state to an economic critique of the commodity fetish as the Devil, or anti-God, of modernity. Marx's thought, impact, and influence cannot be fully understood without Dussel's historic reinterpretation of the theological origins and implications of Marx's critiques of political economy and politics. (shrink)

Derrida's Specters of Marx asks whether and how we could inherit Marx today: whether we might find, in a certain spirit of Marx, the critical resources to challenge resurgent liberal ideals, without this challenge assuming a dogmatic or totalitarian form. Derrida's own response to this question involves a curious move: a material transformation of Marx's text, in which Derrida first foreshadows, and then carries out, the excision of a single sentence from the pivotal passage in which Marx christens the (...) class='Hi'>commodity fetish. The excision subtly transforms the meaning of Marx's text and, in the process, acts out a vision of inheritance as an active, transformative performance, rather than as a passive transmission of inherited content to its heirs. In this paper, I explore the way in which Derrida foreshadows and then effects this curious elision. I highlight the distinctive understanding of transformative inheritance at the heart of Derrida's text, and also pose the question of why Derrida should effect this particular transformation in the search for a certain deconstructive spirit in Marx's work. (shrink)

In this paper we use a critically reflective research approach to analyze our efforts at transformative learning in food systems education in a land grant university. As a team of learners across the educational hierarchy, we apply scholarly tools to the teaching process and learning outcomes of student-centered inquiries in a food systems course. The course, an interdisciplinary, lower division undergraduate course at the University of California, Davis is part of a new undergraduate major in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. (...) We provide an overview of the course’s core elements—labs, exams, assignments, and lectures—as they relate to social constructivist learning theory and student-centered inquiries. Then, through qualitative analysis of students’ reflective essays about their learning experiences in the course, we demonstrate important transformative outcomes of student-centered inquiries: (1) most students confronted the commodity fetish and tried to reconcile tensions between what the food system is and ought to be, and (2) students repositioned themselves, their thinking, and social deliberation in relation to the food system. Students’ reflections point to the power of learning that emerges through their inquiry process, including in the field, and from critical self-reflection. We also highlight the importance of reflective essays in both reinforcing experiential learning and in helping instructors to better understand students’ learning vis-à-vis our teaching. (shrink)

Commodity fetishism and the fetish of capital as an effect of western civilisation. Marx was aware that economic categories do not live an autonomous conceptual life, that they presuppose, in particular, the material and practical relations which humanity, as an organic living species, establishes with non-human nature. Such relations are to be examined in terms of their development in various historical and geographical milieus. The aim of the article is to highlight the importance of such variable conditioning. To (...) do so, it addresses the categories of fetishism and value, looking at the quantitative orientation of the production of material goods which has developed in western-type civilisation over the last 5,000 years. (shrink)

THE DOUBLE INVERSION - THE CONCEPT OF FETISHISM IN THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMYKarl Marx’s critical analysis of ‘the secret of the fetishism of commodities’ – according to which the universal domination of the commodity form makes social relations appear in the form of relations between things – is today widely regarded as a central element of the critique of political economy. The concept of fetishism was generally neglected until in the 1920’s, and the debates around this concept did (...) not really take off until the 1960’s. Since then, there have essentially been two predominant interpretations of Marx’s concept of fetishism: on the one hand those who regards fetishism as an ideological phenomenon, as something that has to do with the way in which social reality is represented for and in the social agents. On the other hand there are those who insists that fetishism refers to a certain displacement or inversion at the level of social practice itself, and not its ideological representation. In this article, I review these conflicting readings in the light of a close reading of Marx’s use of the term fetish in all of his writings from the Grundrisse onwards. I argue that Marx used this term to refer to an ideological phenomenon, and that he was right in doing so. I also point out that this does not entail subscribing to a naïve view of ideology as false consciousness or class manipulation that can be abolished by enlightenment and criticism. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s psychological theory of the drives calls into question two common assumptions of ideology critique: 1) that ideology is fetishistic, substituting false satisfactions for true ones, and 2) that ideology is falsification; it conceals exploitation. In contrast, a Nietzschean approach begins from the truth of ideology: that capitalism produces an authentic contentment that makes the concealment of exploitation unnecessary. And it critiques ideology from the same standpoint: capitalism produces pleasures too efficiently, an overproduction of desire that is impossible to sustain (...) indefinitely. Nietzsche’s concept of the drives (Trieben) is grounded in his theory of the will to power. In contrast to Freud’s view that drives aim at satiation, pleasure through stimulus reduction, in Nietzsche’s view, they aim primarily at the “feeling of power” and the “happiness of high tension.” Nietzsche sees the desire for satiation as a symptom of weakness, a secondary, contingent aim that is incompatible with the fundamental drive to sustain and heighten the feeling of tension that accompanies strong desire. While the Freudian subject desires satisfaction, the Nietzschean subject is paradoxically frustrated by satisfaction, finding happiness in desire sustained by resistance and tension. If individuals desire desire as such, then exploitation and immiseration are not necessarily incompatible with their happiness. Consequently, we must reject the view that ideology is fetishistic: capitalism does not depend on an ersatz satisfaction in the commodity, a transferal of value from quality to quantity, use value to exchange value. Capitalism authentically satisfies desire precisely through its exploitative economic structure. The independence and unpredictability of the value of commodities and the immiseration of laborers produces discontents that enhance rather than frustrate desire. By continually introducing new, initially inaccessible commodities, then overcoming their inaccessibility through overproduction, capitalism sustains and intensifies desires. It promotes happiness not by satisfying wants but generating them, feeding the desire for desire, for the intensity of feeling that the brief pleasures of satiation would destroy. The commodity is not, then, a fetish, not a false satisfaction or aim, but a means, a prop that supports and sustains satisfaction as continued desire. Consequently, we must also reject the view that ideology is falsification: capitalism’s efficient production of happiness obviates the need to conceal its nature. Individuals tolerate capitalism not out of ignorance of exploitation but indifference to it; they prefer real happiness to a merely possible justice that might come at its expense. The critique of ideology must begin by acknowledging its truth. Rather than deny the real satisfactions of capitalism, it must demonstrate that they are unsustainable. (shrink)

In this chapter, Michael Quinn argues that although Bentham’s only works on international trade were discussions on “the balance of trade” and “colonial trade,” these works reveal several new aspects of Bentham’s broader political economy. Like Smith, Bentham considered international trade to be mutually beneficial and strongly criticized mercantilist fallacies concerning balance of trade and the fetishization of precious metals. However, Bentham’s views differ from Smith’s on the issues of paper money and inflation. The chapter explains Bentham’s struggles to combine (...) elements of both commodity and credit theories of money in a coherent package. (shrink)

In the present work, we propose to explore the passage from critique to commodity fetishism and, in general, of capital in Karl Marx to the critique of the fetishism of power in Enrique Dussel. Marx's category of fetishism and its use in the political field has been suggested by the Latin American philosopher for the negative critique moment of his Politics of Liberation, however, it has not been explicitly developed in his passage from the economic field to the political (...) field. We think that its explicit thematic treatment is important since it seems to us the central category in the critique of politics and the possible alternatives towards a new order. The text is presented in three parts: The first part reviews the historical necessity of the State form and its inevitable possibility of fetishization. In the second one, it recovers the category People and their Will-of-life as anti-fetishist fundament of the political power. And, in the third, we made the exposition of the logical passage from the economic field to the political field, that is, from the fetishism of capital to the fetishism of power between Marx and Dussel. (shrink)

Arnošt Kolman (1892–1979) was a Czech mathematician, philosopher and Communist official. In this paper, we would like to look at Kolman’s arguments against logical positivism which revolve around the notion of the fetishization of mathematics. Kolman derives his notion of fetishism from Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism. Kolman is aiming to show the fact that an entity (system, structure, logical construction) acquires besides its real existence another formal existence. Fetishism means the fantastic detachment of the physical characteristics of real (...) things or phenomena from these things. We identify Kolman’s two main arguments against logical positivism. In the first argument, Kolman applied Lenin’s arguments against Mach’s empiricism-criticism onto Russell’s neutral monism, i.e. mathematical fetishism is internally related to political conservativism. Kolman’s second main argument is that logical and mathematical fetishes are epistemologically deprived of any historical and dynamic dimension. In the final parts of our paper we place Kolman’s thinking into the context of his time, and furthermore we identify some tenets of mathematical fetishism appearing in Alain Badiou’s mathematical ontology today. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where humans take (...) on the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Fantasy Matters Too MuchJack Zipes (bio)In September 1997 a fairy-tale princess and a holy saint, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, died within a few days of each other. Millions of people openly and dramatically expressed their grief and mourning. Their pictures along with many different images of Diana and Mother Teresa were beamed all over the world through television and the Internet. The mass media carried all sorts (...) of stories and acclaimed the two of them as the fairy-tale princess and the saint, so that little was left to the imagination. Fantastic spectacle was all that mattered.We speculate with the fantastic. Fantasy is a celebrity and money-making machine. As a module in our brains, it has the capacity to transform plain junk into gold that glitters. Fantasy mobilizes and instrumentalizes the fantastic to form and celebrate spectacles that exist and have always existed—illusions of social relations of exploitation based on power. Spectacles violate and drain our imaginations by glorifying social relations of power that are made spectacular and involve the magic of fetishism. Generally, the results bring about delusion and acclamation of particular sets of social relations that are commodified, sold, and consumed. We acclaim commodities that we don’t know, products that are not of our own making and that we consume mentally and physically. We reproduce images consciously and unconsciously that are not of our own making. The media and the corporate world occupy our psyches and manipulate our fantasies even when we [End Page 77] dream. Our relations are mediated through fantastic spectacle and through fetish abetted by the latest technology that connects us to each other while also disconnecting us from our minds and feelings. Simultaneously, we seek to project our desires in the form of fantasies onto reality and endeavor to occupy a space in which our most profound wishes and desires can be realized. We seek cognition and recognition. In each instance—in the tension between corporate determination of the fantastic and individual projection of desire—we seem to anchor our understanding of reality in artworks dependent on the fantastic, such as the Bible and fairy tales. Hence, Mother Teresa the saint. Diana the fairy-tale princess.It is through fantasy that we have always sought to make sense of the world, not through reason. Reason matters, but fantasy matters more. Perhaps it has mattered too much, and our reliance on fantasy may wear thin and betray us even while it nourishes us and gives us hope that the world can be a better place. We have imagined gods, the kingdom of a single god, the miraculous feats of divine and semidivine characters, and the commandments that have been established to lead us to the good life, if not paradise. It is through the fictive projections of our imaginations based on personal experience that we have sought to grasp, explain, alter, and comment on reality. This is again why such staples as the Bible and the Grimms fairy tales have become canonical texts: unlike reality, they allegedly open the mysteries of life and reveal ways in which we can maintain ourselves and our integrity in a conflict-ridden world. They compensate for the constant violation of nature and life itself and for the everyday violation of our lives engendered through spectacle. They contest reality and also become conflated with reality.But our fantasy and the fantasies that we conceive have become desperate because they are outstripped by real existing conditions that instrumentalize them at every waking second of our day, and even when we slumber. It is a commonplace today that fiction, especially science fiction and what we label fantasy in the world of art, cannot keep pace with the devastating and disturbing fantastic of real occurrences, or what I call the incredible credibility of the real. When the normal is so fantastically abnormal, what role can fantastic artworks play in our lives? Is the violence that we encounter in our everyday lives so much more fantastic than in literature, film, and the arts that we seek to consume the fantastic like harmless junk food as quick fixes and consolation? Can our joys really and realistically... (shrink)

The election of Barack Obama corresponding with the dramatic implosion of the neo-liberal world order of finance, represents a dramatic return of history as attempts are made to forge the new consensus of global capitalism. The financial crisis has come to represent the culmination of Third Way neo-liberalism with Obama signifying the commodity logic and emancipatory potential of the new spirit of capitalism. Obama’s biography has allowed for a self-confident re-articulation of American imperial power, while fetishizing a civil society (...) notion of transformation that has eclipsed the anti-capitalist left. Resistance to Obama’s vision of a reconciled America, leading the moral correction of capitalism, has come in the form of a right wing populist campaign of delegitimization. The Tea Party populists speak to the return of the political and the ontological necessity of antagonism as they present themselves as the only radical alternative to actually existing neo-liberalism. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 1035-1053, September 2022. The article aspires to cast light on aspects of the radical character of Walter Benjamin’s work, that, sadly, have not, to date, provoked much discussion in the literature on him. The main issue it elaborates is his dialectic between fetishized, reified social form, and content-essence, which forms the core of the concept of critique in his philosophy. In Benjamin’s case, the concept of illusion, or, as the notion is (...) described in his texts, of phantasmagoria, or of the image, holds a special gravity that comes to the fore if it is connected not only to commodity fetishism but also to the fetishism of social forms as a process, and the concept of cracks in capitalism. (shrink)

Straipsnyje bandoma atsakyti į klausimą, kaip Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari geismo samprata atsispindi jų politinėje filosofijoje. Tyrinėjama geismo mašinų ir jų gamybos koncepcija, jų santykis su sociumo struktūra ir kapitalo logika. Savo veikaluose šie du autoriai teigia, kad geismo mašinos kuria materialią revoliucinę energiją, kuri nuolat konfrontuoja tiek su sociumo normomis, tiek su kapitalistine priespauda. Tačiau, pasak jų, tokią energiją sociumas mėgina represuoti, paversti revoliucinį geismą fašistiniu „tvirtos rankos“ geismu, o kapitalas fetišizuoja, suprekina ir pritaiko savo tikslams. Šiame tekste, (...) remiantis tiek Deleuze’o ir Guattari, tiek jų sekėjų tekstais, daroma prielaida, kad geismo mašinos sociumo represijoms ir kapitalistiniam suprekinimui gali priešintis pasirinkdamos atstumtųjų terpėje gimstančias kūrybingas ir radikalias mažosios politikos strategijas. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: geismas, geismo mašinos, sociumas, reakcija, kapitalas, suprekinimas, revoliucija, mažoji politika. Desire and Liberation in Political Philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari Kasparas Pocius Summary The article analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and desiring-machines, their origins and workings in the organized structure of socius and in the capitalist regime as well as the revolutionary strategies and milieus that these desiring-machines engender. Contemporary social critique often distorts the notion of desire while linking it exclusively with capital that forces people to consume identities and commodities. Meanwhile, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari desire is a material revolutionary energy which constantly aims to confront the norms of both socius and capitalist repressions. Unfortunately, this energy is continually under the threat of being appropriated and inactivated by socius, and it also undergoes the risk of being fetishized and commodified by capital, which makes desire serve its aims of seeking profit and extracting surplus value. Desiring-machines attempt to break through to the other side of socius and capital, the former of which is decoded and deterritorialized, whereas the latter is too limited to deal with desire as an absolute limit of socius. Capital is unable to commodify potential revolutionary energy or to absorb it in another way. However, in the structure of socius active and creative desire may be reversed into reactionary fascist desire of hierarchy, exploitation, humiliation, slavery and death. The molar order of socius is distinguished by a clear structure and hierarchy where individuals have fixed identities. However, capital tries to demolish those structures and deterritorialize socius by following the desiring-machines. The discipline, laws and norms are substituted by the flexible axiomatic of capitalism, which can adjust itself to the demands of desire or regenerate to the former repressive forms of command. Such milieu gives rise to a single monolithic molar class. Therefore, today the conflict lies not between the capitalist class and the working class but between the class and those who are outside the class – minor people, creating minor politics in molecular milieu. There is a paradox in the conception of minor politics by Deleuze and Guattari. Although this kind of politics originates in the space that is oppressed by socius and capital, however such space can become highly active, creative and radical. Desire as a material basis for creativity becomes a powerful revolutionary potential. Minor politics is based not on identification or representation of somebody’s interests, but on permanent creativity. This politics emerges within the milieu of mutual communication and intellect as well as uncommodified affectivity and sexuality and it embodies revolutionary desire in everyday practices of self-valorization. Keywords: desire, desiring-machines, socius, reaction, capital, commodification, revolution, minor politics. (shrink)

At first blush values such as diversity appear to be worth striving for. The question is whether or not such values—which have become increasingly prevalent the institutional credos of academia—are values as such, that being that they are things of moral worth (Value, n.d.), or if they are something else altogether. My unpopular suspicion leans toward the latter. Personal opinions, of course, can hardly be said to be good justification for a withering critique, however, these opinions of mine mirror similar (...) concerns held by moderate and conservative opinions of the matter (Pew Research Center, 2017). As such it is beneficial to examine these issues rigorously separated from the pathological rhetoric that typically insulates them from outside reproach. Anecdotally speaking, since "diversity" seems to be the chief concern among these groups both in the academic setting and the world at large, the crux of this article will be anchored by a Marx-influenced assessment of the actuality of diversity as a social work in the academic environment, and the effect such projects might have if my suspicions prove to be correct. (shrink)

In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a (...) posthumanist theorization of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light. (shrink)

Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of (...) self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import. (shrink)

To this day, many theorists regard the commodity theory and the credit theory as the two main rival accounts of the nature of money. Yet cryptocurrency has revolutionized the institution of money in ways that most commodity and credit theorists could hardly have anticipated. Given that cryptocurrency is a new form of money, the question arises whether the commodity and credit theories can adequately account for it. I argue that they cannot. I first offer an interpretation of (...) the commodity and credit theories according to which these theories uphold differing claims about the origin of money, the ontology of money, and the function of money. I then argue that thus understood, neither theory can accommodate cryptocurrency. Finally, I develop a novel hybrid hylomorphic account of money which draws on aspects of both the commodity and credit theories, and I argue that this hybrid account can accommodate cryptocurrency. (shrink)

By most accounts Deleuze's engagement with Marx begins with the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia he co-authored with Félix Guattari. However, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition alludes to a connection between Deleuze's critique of common sense and Marx's theory of fetishism, suggesting a connection between the critique of the image of thought and the critique of capital. By tracing this connection from its emergence in the early texts on noology, or the image of thought, to the development in the critique (...) of state thought in A Thousand Plateaus, it can be argued that what initially appears as an entirely infra-philosophical problem, concerned with the presuppositions of philosophy, is not only a political problem as well, but ultimately bears on the very nature of the conjunction between thought and politics, making possible a re-examination of what is meant by revolutionary thought. It is a transition from noology to noopolitics. In the end it can be argued that revolutionary thought is no longer an eschatology, attempting to discern the signs of the future revolution in the present, but a thought oriented towards everything that exceeds the fetish of society, towards the virtual relations and micropolitical transformations that constitute society but exceed its representation. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The article presents grounds for defining the fetish of artificial intelligence (AI). We highlight the fundamental differences of AI from all earlier technological advances, as they are primarily related to its introduction into the human cognitive sphere and generating fundamentally new uncontrollable consequences for society. We provide solid evidence that the leaders of the globalist project are the main beneficiaries of the AI fetish. This is clearly manifested in the works of philosophers who are close to major technology (...) corporations and their mega-projects. We suggest considering the problem of how to use the capabilities of AI to overcome the growing international conflicts and the global crisis. The focus is on the problem of agency, which solution from the standpoint of an anthropomorphic approach to AI is fraught with serious negative consequences. Endowing AI with agency, responsibility is implicitly removed from the person who uses the technology, and the established legislative practice is also destroyed. We present AI as an agent endowed with a set of invariant generalized qualities that is similar to natural subjects. These qualities include: the ability to deliberation, reflexivity, communication and elements of sociability. Such a representation of AI as an agent (pseudo-subject) is consistent with the principle of distributed control in biology and psychology, which was called the principle of a dual subject. In combination with the systems of principles and ontologies specified in the concept of post-nonclassical cybernetics of self-developing environments, this will allow the use of AI as a means of social innovation, while maintaining control over AI technologies. This will also help to pose and solve the problem of integrating formations of artificial and natural intelligence while maintaining the basic qualities of carriers of natural intelligence. (shrink)

The article presents grounds for defining the fetish of artificial intelligence (AI). We highlight the fundamental differences of AI from all earlier technological advances, as they are primarily related to its introduction into the human cognitive sphere and generating fundamentally new uncontrollable consequences for society. We provide solid evidence that the leaders of the globalist project are the main beneficiaries of the AI fetish. This is clearly manifested in the works of philosophers who are close to major technology (...) corporations and their mega-projects. We suggest considering the problem of how to use the capabilities of AI to overcome the growing international conflicts and the global crisis. The focus is on the problem of agency, which solution from the standpoint of an anthropomorphic approach to AI is fraught with serious negative consequences. Endowing AI with agency, responsibility is implicitly removed from the person who uses the technology, and the established legislative practice is also destroyed. We present AI as an agent endowed with a set of invariant generalized qualities that is similar to natural subjects. These qualities include: the ability to deliberation, reflexivity, communication and elements of sociability. Such a representation of AI as an agent (pseudo-subject) is consistent with the principle of distributed control in biology and psychology, which was called the principle of a dual subject. In combination with the systems of principles and ontologies specified in the concept of post-nonclassical cybernetics of self-developing environments, this will allow the use of AI as a means of social innovation, while maintaining control over AI technologies. This will also help to pose and solve the problem of integrating formations of artificial and natural intelligence while maintaining the basic qualities of carriers of natural intelligence. (shrink)

In the United States today, the human body defines a lucrative site of reusable parts, ranging from whole organs to minuscule and even microscopic tissues. Although the medical practices that enable the transfer of parts from one body to another most certainly relieve suffering and extend lives, they have also irrevocably altered perceptions of the cultural values assigned to the body. Organ transfer is rich terrain to investigate—especially in the American context, where sophisticated technological interventions have significantly shaped understandings of (...) health and well-being, suffering, and death. In _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_, Lesley Sharp probes the ideological assumptions underlying the transfer of body parts, the social significance of donors' deaths, and the medico-scientific desires surrounding complex forms of body repair. Sharp also considers the experimental realm, in which nonhuman species and artificial devices present further opportunities for recovery and for controversy. A compelling scientific investigation and social critique, _Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies_ explores the pervasive, and at times pernicious, practices shaping American biomedicine in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the ...

In recent years, the free market position has been gaining strength. In this book, Radin provides a nuanced response to its sweeping generalization.

There have been several criticisms of Object-Oriented Ontology from the political Left. Perhaps the most frequent one has been that OOO’s aspiration to speak of objects apart from all their relations runs afoul of Marx’s critique of “commodity fetishism.” The main purpose of this article is to show that even a cursory reading of the sections on commodity in Marx’s Capital does not support such an accusation. For Marx, the sphere of entities that are not commodities is actually (...) quite wide, including all the beings of nature not subject to exchange, as well as bartered goods, and tithes and rents paid in kind to feudal lords. In short, the theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of v a l u e, not an anti-realist theory of b e i n g, and thus does not touch on OOO at all. In closing, I make some brief comments on Marx’s relation to Kantian formalism and to Heidegger’s famous account of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. (shrink)

We revisit the Marxist debate on the commodity form. By following the thought of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek, we attempt to understand the commodity form through the Kantian categories a priori. Sohn-Rethel explores the proposition that there can be no cognition independent of its historical and social conditions and puts forward the daring conclusion of an ontological unity between knowledge and commodity exchange. We suggest that Sohn-Rethel’s thought finds new relevance nowadays, under the prevalence of a (...) cognitive capitalism. We discuss the reformulation of relations of production and consumption under cognitive capitalism and show how knowledge-led immaterial and affective labour adds a higher value to the commodities into which it is embodied. Above all, the commodity form in cognitive capitalism becomes biopolitical. (shrink)

For over two and a half millennia human beings have attempted to invent strategies to “discover” the truth of time, to determine whether time is infinite, whether eternity is the infinite duration of a continuous present, or whether it too rises and falls with the cycles of universal creation and destruction. _Time-Fetishes_ recounts the history of a tradition that runs counter to the dominant tradition in Western metaphysics, which has sought to purify eternity of its temporal character. From the pre-Socratics (...) to Ovid and Plotinus, and from Shakespeare to Hegel, Schelling, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, _Time-Fetishes_ traces the secret tradition of the idea of eternal recurrence and situates it as the grounding thought of Western philosophy and literature. The thinkers in this counter-history of the eternal return lingered long enough on the question of time to learn how to resist separating eternity from time, and how to reflect on the possible identity of time and eternity as a way of resisting all prior metaphysical determinations. Drawing out the implications of Nietzsche’s reinvention of the doctrine of return, Lukacher ranges across a broad spectrum of ancient and modern thinkers. Shakespeare’s role in this history as the “poet of time” is particularly significant, for not only does Shakespeare reactivate the pre-Christian arguments of eternal return, he regards them, and all arguments and images concerning the essence of time and Being, from an inimitably ironic perspective. As he makes transitions from literature to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Lukacher displays a theoretical imagination and historical vision that bring to the forefront a host of pre- and post-Christian texts in order to decipher in them an encounter with the thought of eternal recurrence that has been too long buried under layers of rigid metaphysical interpretation. (shrink)

Call the ethos understanding rightness in terms of spiritual purity and piety, and wrongness in terms of corruption and sacrilege, the “fetish ethic.” Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues suggest that this ethos is particularly salient to political conservatives and non-liberal cultures around the globe. In this essay, I point to numerous examples of moral fetishism in mainstream academic ethics. Once we see how deeply “infected” our ethical reasoning is by fetishistic intuitions, we can respond by 1) repudiating the fetishistic (...) impulse, by 2) “sublimating” our fetishism into liberal rationales, or by 3) accepting the fetishism on its own terms. Of these options, I argue that sublimating our fetishism is not advisable, and that embracing our ethical fetishism isn’t as obviously misguided as some suggest. (shrink)