#Commodity Fetishism

[blorbocedes]

his bag is unzipped and his luggage is louis vuitton

sent to me by: @cuthechicane

[valenciamidknight]

“Distraction”, July 2024.

[deepdrearn]

Ok I need an audience to talk to this about and dear Tumblr I have decided it is you. I'm reading this book on Marx' theory of alienation and just discovered that this "thing" that has been bothering me since forever where people speak of "the economy" as if it's this universe of its own, governed by it's own natural laws has a name!!! It's apparently an exponent of commodity fetishism, which tbh I haven't fully grasped yet but it has to do with the distorted relationship between people and objects (as a result from alienated labor) and it's a very wild concept.

[talking-theory-with-chatgpt]

How is the concept of a commodity a foundational concept in Marx's definition of and critique of capitalism?

In Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism, the concept of a commodity is fundamental to understanding the nature of capitalist production and exchange. Marx defines a commodity as a good or service that is produced for exchange on the market, with a use-value (i.e., usefulness) and an exchange-value (i.e., price). In other words, a commodity is something that has both a physical or functional purpose, as well as a value that can be expressed in terms of money.

According to Marx, the production of commodities is the driving force behind capitalist production. In a capitalist society, workers produce commodities for sale on the market, and capitalists accumulate profits by buying and selling these commodities. The value of a commodity, in Marx's view, is determined by the amount of labor that is necessary to produce it.

However, Marx argues that the capitalist system creates a fundamental contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of commodities. While commodities are produced to satisfy human needs, their value is determined by the labor time required to produce them, not by their usefulness. This means that under capitalism, production is driven not by the needs of society, but by the need to accumulate profits.

Moreover, Marx contends that the process of commodity production and exchange leads to the exploitation of workers. In a capitalist system, the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor required to produce it. However, capitalists pay workers only a fraction of the value they create, while keeping the surplus value for themselves. This exploitation, according to Marx, is the root cause of the inherent instability and inequality of capitalist society.

Therefore, the concept of a commodity is crucial to Marx's critique of capitalism, as it highlights the contradiction between the use-value and exchange-value of goods, and exposes the exploitation of labor inherent in the capitalist system.

And what does "commodity fetishism" denote?

"Commodity fetishism" is a concept developed by Karl Marx to describe the way in which the social relations involved in capitalist production are masked by the process of commodity exchange.

According to Marx, under capitalism, people tend to see commodities as having a value that is inherent in the objects themselves, rather than as a product of social relations. This "fetishism" arises from the fact that the value of a commodity is expressed in its price, which makes it seem as though the value is an inherent property of the object itself. In reality, however, the value of a commodity is determined by the labor required to produce it, and the price is simply a reflection of the social relations involved in the exchange.

In other words, "commodity fetishism" refers to the way in which the social relations involved in the production of goods are obscured by the market exchange of those goods. This leads people to view the market as a natural and inevitable aspect of human society, rather than as a social construct that can be changed.

Marx argued that commodity fetishism is a key feature of capitalist ideology, as it serves to reinforce the dominant social relations of the capitalist system. By making it seem as though the value of commodities is a natural and objective fact, rather than a product of social relations, commodity fetishism helps to conceal the exploitation of labor and the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

[quirkymarshmallows93]

Something interesting from 2010

I found this thinkpiece about Trader Joe's, a company I think about a lot, that touches on their perpetuation of commodity fetishism and post-Fordist consumption, among other thinks.

[shax-from-nerus]

Only on twitter.com 

[esmamig]

Miss Modular

Sur la boîte cartonnée un trompe-l'œil Avoue volontiers qu'il est trompe-l'œil

On the cardboard box, a trompe-l'oeil Confesses readily that it is a trompe-l'oeil

Donne l'idée du jeu et du mystère Un spectacle intime donne l'idée du jeu et de l'humour Spectacle qui rime, qui suscite dans les yeux un éclair Une découverte, une idée qui peut jouer des tours Une muse, certes, donne l'idée du jeu et du mystère Un spectacle intime

Gives the idea of play and mystery An intimate spectacle gives the idea of play and humour A spectacle which rhymes, which arouses in the eyes a flash A discovery, an idea which can play tricks A muse, certainly, gives the idea of play and mystery An intimate spectacle

[kw1q51lv3r]

I think I know why I don’t like Jacob Collier.

I've come to the realisation that in the past 7 years I've done a full 180 on my opinions on art. 23 year old me would argue that art needs to be understandable and technically appreciable even when divorced from its context, because he didn't understand that WHY the art was created is just as important as HOW the art was created.

He discarded the socio-cultural context of the art because he thought himself separate from it; he thought he could ignore the noise when he himself was the noise, in a toxically defensive overly self-deprecating "it's not my fucking fault i don't know!!" inferiority complex kinda way.

This is an opinion that he’s made many times to many people online, and they’ve basically agreed to disagree with him or even outright ignore him, mostly because it was obvious that he was coming from a place of not actually having figured his own shit out; he’d get there eventually, he just needed to grow the fuck up.

He was obsessed with the idea that there existed something he called “pure art”. Art that wasn’t “contrivance”, art that didn’t need to be explained but was instead self-evident, art that chased the perfection of the craft as its end goal, art that had absolutely no meaning whatsoever beyond appealing to “unspoken” notions of “beauty” or “wit” or “sophistication” or “skill”.

Obviously, he was wrong.

His own idea was that in order to achieve his ideas of intellectual artistic appreciation, he’d have to put aside what was “popular”... Blithely ignoring how he was just doing it to feel any sense of superior “coolness”. He thought only morons would bring all their historical and emotional baggage to the table, and tried to make of himself someone who would leave that at the door, who would witness art through a lens of objectivity, neutrality, and intellectuality... Not at all recognising that that attitude in itself was historical and emotional baggage that he was bringing along with himself, and that he was one of those morons all along.

That exclusively technical widdly-woo shred guitar enthusiast that was me in my early 20s would’ve gone absolutely fucking gaga for Jacob Collier.

And that’s why I don’t like Jacob Collier.

[zmyaro]

What OP describes sounds like moving from the commodity fetishism version of punk to what punk is actually about.

[codswallopia]

379 days until submission

9am-5pm Karl Marx

5pm-12am Carl Barks

no changes to report some 300 years onwards

[platonicpolycule]

I dream of one day meeting someone who will make feel as safe and comfortable as I do in my aikido pants.

[cinnamaya]

It’s so absurd to try to assign market value to something which doesn’t actually ever exchange on the market. The fact that anyone thinks this will actually work is an example of how far commodity fetishism has gone. The idea that value is an intrinsic physical property of things (as opposed to a reflection of economic relations) has gotten so ingrained in our society that literal economists are trying to assign value to things outside the system of production and exchange. They think value can come from measuring something, as if value has any economic meaning outside the mode of production itself.

You can’t measure the “value of nature” because it has no quantitative effect on the cost of production.

Capitalism only values nature by how it can be exploited.

[deepdrearn]

My university be like 🙃

[luxuria-morningstar]

reflections on the art of the future

lately i have been thinking about the mainstream--insofar as my social circles are considered to be mainstream--attitude toward AI art.

and clearly, if the length of this post is anything to go by, i have a lot of thoughts on it.

let me begin by stressing that i agree that training a neural network on the work of artists without their express permission is, at the very least, not very nice. i think that artists should be supported however possible by those who appreciate their work, not have their corpus appropriated for sale as an NFT.

given that AI art is a bit of a hot-button subject right now, fixating on it as being the problem du jour is not a very nuanced position to have. a lot of what i see online is just the same echoed sentiments of 'it's bad because it's theft', or 'it's bad because AI art is soulless', or what-have-you. rarely, if ever, do i see much more than that.

i do agree that it is a problem, but what does one do about it? sure, we could rely on the state (through copyright law, for example), but is that really a sustainable solution in the long run?

let's think about it in more detail. indulge me if you will, by reflecting on the premise that "AI art is bad because it's used to profit off of the labor of someone else."

we can agree that this is clearly a form of exploitation. perhaps we might even call it theft. how might we outline the nature of this exploitation?

is the exploitation the use of an artist's intellectual property without their permission? you could certainly call it that, and i wouldn't disagree. if we're using that definition, though, i wouldn't call this a unique phenomenon to AI art... not to mention that this presumes intellectual property law holds some kind of objective sway.

is the exploitation in this case the devaluation of the hours spent honing and practicing the craft? that is, training a neural network on an artist's work exploits the time and labor that the original artist put into its creation. this is better because time and effort are in fact, observable things, and the form of exploitation is at least somewhat clear.

now that we have an idea of how, specifically, it is used as a means of exploitation, let's interrogate why we think that, namely whether the value being 'stolen' here is . let's say that we have two artists of vastly differing levels of experience (A having more, and B having less) and have them take the same amount of time to produce a work of art each, given the exact same materials and subject.

now, without thinking about it too hard, how would you express the value of each artwork?

common sense would presume that A's work would be valued higher. some might say that that's common sense, but why is that?

"it's because A is more skilled."

this isn't much to go on; after all, skill is relative. any comparisons of technical skill are ultimately made in the abstract; even objective measures of technique are founded in matters of taste and are informed by the standards and sensibilities of the age. it's possible that later assessments made generations from now will conclude that B's technique aligns more with their particular social attitudes and that well actually B was the more skilled artist (etc., etc.).

"it's because the more experienced artist has put more time and effort into it."

this is stronger reasoning, at least; unlike bringing up the artist's skill, this is at least consistent with our earlier assertion that value correlates with time and effort.

while both artists have invested the same number of labor hours in the production of their respective art pieces, you can argue that the more experienced artist has invested labor hours in improving their craft, which translates to additional labor invested in the production of their art. okay.

what happens, then, if we compared the two works of art in our example with a third piece of art produced by artist C, but with half the time and materials? let's go even further and say that C has zero artistic experience whatsoever, but is otherwise an extremely famous public figure.

now: is it still true that the relative values still reflect a correlation with the time/labor investment when we consider this third piece of art? unless we argue that, somehow, C's time is inherently 'worth more' than that of A or B, if that connection between value and time (even tangentially) existed before, it's certainly gone by now.

what is the value of art, then? it can't simply be the labor and effort, as we've seen. how, then, does society value art? or, to revisit an earlier tangent: how does society define art?

in fact, if we're going to make assertions over whether AI art is, or is not art, we might as well go all the way.

what is art?

"the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination [...] producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power."

this is from the google dictionary definition, which centers the production of art as being specifically human. if we were to take this at face value, then indeed, AI art cannot be art. but what does that say about works capable of being appreciated for their beauty but not produced by humans, say, a chimpanzee, or a pig? are those not artistic in their own way?

"the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects."

the Merriam-Webster definition, by contrast, does not actually define the production of art as being necessarily human, merely that it is conscious. while we could then argue over whether Pigcasso was consciously using her creative imagination, we would then have to prove what consciousness is. 'are non-human producers of aesthetic objects conscious' is a discussion that, in my view, is best left to philosophy freshmen and the writers of visual novels.

other definitions (e.g., OED), as you might expect, define art in more or less similar terms. rather than bore you further, we can at least distill all of them down in terms of their common elements, namely:

art is a skilled productive process

it results in the production of objects or works

works of art are produced and appreciated based on social factors such as beauty or aesthetics

we've identified that art is, a.) a productive force, and b.) created and appreciated based on social factors. in other words, the manner in which society values art is an intrinsic part of it. but how is that?

let's revisit the earlier example with artists A and B: when i asked you to express the value of their art, in what way did you express value?

i'm not at all saying that i believe that artists, or anyone for that matter, should therefore not sell their labor to support their livelihoods, especially when it is the only means of survival available to far too many people. wishing it did not have to be so will not make it not so, and we all do what we must to survive.

but let us not pretend, however, that AI art is a unique and inexplicable form of exploitation that exists independently of the economic conditions that precipitated it.

i would go so far as to suggest the opposite, that it was inevitable; just as it was inevitable that chatbots and machines were built to replace call center agents and factory workers, just as it is inevitable that AI-generated prose and code are built to replace writers and programmers. what drives this inevitability is how society incentivizes the ruthless pursuit of profit, no matter the human cost.

no matter the technology, or the shape that the exploitation that the technology enables takes, the end result is the same: our continued reduction of value to purely its price on the receipt. and so long as that continues, can we really rely on the same institutions that enable a culture founded on commodity consumption to save us?

is AI art exploitative? given the manner in which these neural networks are trained, yes, it is.

is this necessarily different from how, as with any commodity, technology will inevitably be used to automate, and thereby replace, human labor? i don't think so.

what, then, is to be done?

[quirkymarshmallows93]

A few years ago I joined a couple Rae Dunn trading/discussion Facebook groups because I was fascinated by the cult following of the brand. Looks like times are tough…

[determinate-negation]

amerikkkans when you tell them not to apply tv tropes language to a genocide