If I understand the concept correctly wouldn’t custom made products decrease, to some degree, Commodity Fetishism? — I like sushi
The next step is the transaction between producer and consumer. Someone loves the pot, they’re ecstatic, their response adds further to this value. What shall you sell this pot for? If it’s not your only source of income, then fine, except you still have to pay for your physical resources. But if not then you need to make a living. What is the worth of this pot in monetary terms? How do you avoid this trap of monetary value? — Brett
This is a good question. It does, however, get entangled with the general conditions that Marx saw the formation of individual aesthetics. The problem as drafted by Marx was not that individual desires were substituted for something not-individual but that what an individual wants is shaped by systems of exchange. — Valentinus
Are people able to become less alienated despite all the elements that would encourage them to stay within the lines? Do market conditions ever permit degrees of freedom to create others? — Valentinus
My point is then that people would attach status to possession of more ‘original’ products and thus seek out more original products and - key point - this would eventually become more about refine aesthetic/artistic tastes than about owning items as a status symbol. — I like sushi
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It does, however, get entangled with the general conditions that Marx saw the formation of individual aesthetics. The problem as drafted by Marx was not that individual desires were substituted for something not-individual but that what an individual wants is shaped by systems of exchange. — Valentinus
But anyway, your OP was about the possibility of custom made products creating a decrease in Commodity Fetishism. I guess my thoughts now are, no they can’t. — Brett
The point being ‘custom made’ items in this way are not entirely about the exchange of money and services. There is a human interaction in the form of collaborative investigation. Being treated like a ‘human’ rather than taking part in an activity viewed only as purchasing goods and services. — I like sushi
Personally I see this as no more than a conflict between wanting to be part of a group and wanting to be different/unique. — I like sushi
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value. - Wiki ‘Commodity Fetishism’
The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom. For simplicity’s sake we shall henceforth account every kind of labour to be unskilled, simple labour; by this we do no more than save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction.
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While, therefore, with reference to use value, the labour contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple. In the former case, it is a question of How and What, in the latter of How much? How long a time? Since the magnitude of the value of a commodity represents only the quantity of labour embodied in it, it follows that all commodities, when taken in certain proportions, must be equal in value.
My understanding of what Marx is calling the mysterious quality of what is produced does not come from stuff being put on a market but from producers of things being commodities in their own right. — Valentinus
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