Showing posts with label commodity fetish. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commodity fetish. Show all posts

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Dead Weight Of The State

Michael Taussig is one of the few Marxist Anthropologists to study magick. Over twenty years ago I came across his book;The devil and commodity fetishism in South America"; which deals with the beliefs of Bolivian Miners about the devil living in the caves they mine. Many of these miners are children as documented in the film;The Devils Miner.

And they are of course indigenous peoples, enslaved by their Spanish colonizers hundreds of years ago to mine for the old Empires of Europe. They have transfered the belief in animistic spirits from their earlier native religions, to the god forms of their adopted religion; Catholicism. As with most colonized peoples the old gods become the devils of the new religion.

Commodity Fetishism and the Devil had a major influence on me in looking at a historical materialist/dialectical interpretation of magick.

I recently came across an interview with Taussig, about his book The Magic Of the State and his comments are worth reprinting here, in light of my post on Gothic Capitalism.

In The Magic of the State, you write about the relation between traditional magical rites and rituals of spirit possession and the workings of the modern nation-state. You base this book on fieldwork on a magic mountain in the middle of Venezuela, where spirit possession is practiced, and where theres something about spirit possession which is amicable toward hierarchy, stratification, and maybe even the State.

This book concerns spirit-possession on the mountain of Maria Lionza in central Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s, where pilgrims in large numbers become possessed by the spirits of the dead under the rule of an imaginary spirit queen, Maria Lionza. Especially important are the spirits of the Indians who allegedly fought the Spanish in the sixteenth century and the independence soldiers of the early nineteenth century, including many black foot soldiers as well as white officers, most notably Simón Bolívar—as highlighted in the state’s school textbooks, in the unending stream of state iconography from postage stamps to wall murals on bus stops and outside schools, from the standardized village, town, and city central square, the naming of mountain peaks, and of course in the physiognomy of authority wherever it be.

The dead are a great source of magical élan, grace, and power. This has been present in many cultures since the first burial. Indeed Georges Bataille (to whose ideas The Magic of the State is greatly indebted) argued from archaeological evidence and physical anthropology that the corpse is the origin of taboos, respect for the dead being what separates the human from the animal... Just imagine, then, the power that can accrue to the modern state, that great machine of death and war!

People today gain magical power not from the dead, but from the states embellishment of them. And the state, authoritarian and spooky, is as much possessed by the dead as is any individual pilgrim. The current president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, is the embodiment of this. In a sense he was predestined by this mystical foundation of authority as writ into the post-colonial exploitation of colonial history. The success of the Patriot Act and of the current US administration owes a great deal to this, too, after 9/11.

However my argument is that such spirit possession is a dramatization not only of the Great Events but also of the more subtle imageric- and feeling-states present in the artwork of the state any and everywhere, from the traffic cop and tax clerk to the pomp and ceremony of national celebrations, from a Latin American pseudo-democracy to the US and Western European states as well. Hobbess Leviathan is mythical yet also terribly real. This is where the rationalist analysis of the state loses ground. Foucault was amazingly short-sighted in dismissing blood and the figure of the Ruler.
It is not only the capitalist state which rules based on the rites of the dead but capitalism itself as Marx reminds us.

Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.
Karl Marx
If Capitalism is vampiric then the modern Terror State and its perpetual State of Terror (an extension of the Cold War) is very much a Zombie state, a state that has created a fictional monster; the terrorist, who once upon a time was the Anarchist of the 19th Century and today is Islamic Jihadists. Terrorists/Zombies are everywhere, they are out to get us, they are going to overwhelm us in shopping malls. The popularity of modern Zombie culture is a reflection of the cultural terror created by the politics of fear.


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Saturday, February 16, 2008

Insurance Woes and Whines


Insurance firms feel profit pinch
Industry giants blame roiling markets, high loonie for dampening fourth-quarter earnings and outlook


Sez the headline. But the reality is that it has less to do with the loonie, and more about their investments in the U.S. including of course their exposure to the sub-prime credit mess. Ah the joys of global capitalism. The reason that banks want to merge of course is to compete for positions in the global financial markets, that is the U.S. market. And this is what happens when they do.....

Manulife is Canada's largest insurer. Approximately 64 per cent of its earnings are generated in the United States and Asia. Smaller rival Sun Life faces a similar predicament with about 52 per cent of its earnings originating from the U.S., U.K. and Asia.

For the October-December quarter, Sun Life reported earnings of $555 million or 97 cents per share. That compared with net income of $545 million or 94 cents per share for the same period in 2006. "This quarter was also marked by significant market turbulence," McKenney said.

Chief executive Donald Stewart said that volatility would likely affect the industry's outlook in the near term. Echoing those sentiments, Manulife CEO Dominic D'Alessandro suggested that "unsettled markets" would likely affect wealth businesses.

Sun Life also disclosed it has $84 million in direct exposure and $961 million in indirect exposure to monoline bond insurers. Those companies, which provide insurance against default in securitized debt, have become a source of worry because certain firms have had their credit ratings downgraded.

Chief investment officer Jim Anderson said Sun Life's direct exposure to monolines is with two insurers that are "AAA rated with a stable outlook." Its indirect exposure is to insurers with "investment grade" ratings, adding most of its exposure is in the U.K.

Insurance companies used to be the most risk adverse and conservative of financial institutions. However with the shift to globalization of the marketplace in the eighties and nineties from production to FIRE (financial services, insurance, real estate,) this all changed. A renewed financial market dominated the market, as it once had prior to WWI, the result of this financial exuberance, and shift from investment in production to investment in investment instruments bailed out New York and London from their Reagan/Thatcher excesses and declines. In doing so insurance companies as well as the banks and other financial businesses exposed themselves to the dangers of the balloon and bust market. Chickens, home, roost.

Just as people meet and authorize someone from among their own number to take specific action on their behalf, so commodities must meet to authorize a single commodity to confer full or partial citizenship in the world of commodities. The act of exchange is the occasion for such a meeting of commodities. The social activity of commodities on the market is to capitalist society what collective intelligence is to a socialist society. The consciousness of the bourgeois world is concentrated in the market report. It is only after the successful completion of the exchange that the individual can have any insight into the process as a whole, or any guarantee that his product has satisfied a social need, as well as the incentive to begin his production anew. The object which is thus authorized by the common action of commodities to express the value of all other commodities is – money. The authority of this particular commodity develops along with the development of the exchange of commodities.

Finance Capital, Hilferding 1910


SEE:

Lenin Was Right

Petro Dollars Bail Out The CITI


Bank Smack Down


U.S. Economy Entering Twilight Zone

Lenin's State Monopoly Capitalism


40 Years Later; The Society of the Spectacle


Commodity Fetish a Definition

State Capitalism in the USSR

Plutocrats Rule


The Right To Be Greedy


Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid


China: The Truimph of State Capitalism

Deconstructing Hayek

Social Insecurity- The Phony Pension Crisis


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Sunday, April 15, 2007

Commodity Fetish a Definition

I like to find short sharp clear (humorous) definitions of Marx's ideas to share with my readers. This is another one: Commodity Fetish. LOL this ones got that JimBobbySez kinda of style....

One of the most charming witticisms of Marx is the term "commodity fetishism". "Fetishism" spoofed Hegel, who had concocted a famous lengthy, crackpot, faux-learned justification for racialised subjection, imperialism and slavery in the Philosophy of History founded on the infantile, primitive nature of neeeegrows as evidenced by their relations to fetishes. Fetish=degradation. To Hegel's mystical ecstasy of yerupeen triumph over fetishes and fetishists, Marx replied; And who are you, my fine fellow, to sneer at fetishes? At least those guys utilise their fetishes and create them in moderation. Your fetishes proliferate like fungus, lord it over you like gods; you grovel before them in every minute of life.

I came across it after coming across a critique of Hegel's view of Africa showing the author knew where of he spoke.

Hegel’s Europe (Spirit) Hegel’s Africa (Nature)


For Hegel, Africans fail at achieving substantial notions of the universal. Hegel
says that, “in Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet
attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example, God, or
Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his
own being.”xxiv African religion is, for Hegel, actually magic and fetishism. Law is
nothing but unruly despotic control. African social organization is the slavery of Africans
by each other, resulting in cannibalism, violence, and chaos in the interior of Africa.
Specifically, in Africa, Hegel finds “the most reckless inhumanity and disgusting
barbarism” be displayed by the people of the continent.

In reference to the African, according to Hegel, “we must put aside all thought of
reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him;
there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.”xxvi For
Hegel, a sense of humanity, as cultivated from a conception of the universal, is lacking in
Africans. The African lacks the ability to see beyond himself, in the humanity of another,
or in the necessity of the community. The African tries to organize socially, but fails.
Hegel says, “the political bond can therefore not possess such a character as that free laws
should unite the community.”xxvii They try to express themselves religiously, but exist in
fetishism. Hegel refers to Africans as believers in “sorcery” in which they have no “idea
of a God, or a moral faith.”

For Hegel, it is impossible for the African to actualize concepts of religion, law,
or society due to their own sensuousness. Hegel manipulates the ways in which the text
displays the manner in which the African character expresses itself in terms of religion,
law, and social organization.”xxix For Bernasconi, “An examination of Hegel’s sources
shows that they were more accurate than he was and that he cannot be so readily excused
for using them as he did.”xxx Myth creation and African esoticization occur in Hegel.
Hegel is constructing an archetype of what and where the unhistorical would be in Space
and History. As the archetype of the unhistorical, Bernasconi says that in Hegel, “Africa
served as a null-point or base-point.”

Why would Hegel proceed to have these declarative statements about a people
that he claims he does not understand? Hegel says that Africa is unknown only to proceed
in explaining the intricacies of its identity. Is this a problem of inherent duplicity? Hegel
makes the African an incomprehensible element to compliment the comprehensible. In
Hegel, “awakening consciousness takes its rise surrounded by natural influences alone,
and every development of it is the reflection of Spirit back upon itself in opposition to the
immediate, unreflected character of mere nature. Nature is therefore one element in this
antithetic abstracting process.”

The development of Spirit out of Nature requires Nature to antithetically reflect
Spirit’s identity and see this reflection, and movement away, as an antithesis in all aspects
to its stagnated self. For this reason, Hegel must construct Africa as an incomprehensible,
irrational, unreasoned, and unhistorical entity. Hence, Europe blossoms historically out of
Africa as an opposite posed specifically for Europe’s ascension. This incomprehensibility
forces Africa to remain outside the realm of logical, historical development. The African
has no hopes of cohabiting the same conceptual space as the rest of humanity. They fail
to rise out of Nature for they lack the mechanism of the threshold and antithesis that they
exist as for Europe, against which this rising can occur. Rising above the threshold is
impossible when a culture is that threshold. Africa does not have the capability of rising
because this rising has to occur over and against Africa.
And here are a couple of more definitions of Commodity Fetish

A commodity, for Marx, is an object which is
1.)
the product of human, creative labor, that is, human labor manifested in an object and 2.) an object of human labor which is put in relation to other objects of human labor, that is, it is an object which is circulated.

If you sat down and build a bird-house for yourself, you have produced an object, but not a commodity. If you sit down and build a bird-house and sell it to someone else, you have produced both an object and a commodity. Marx's central argument here is that the world of commodities, of objects which circulate in an economy, takes on a life of its own. When you go to the store and see a bird-house for sale on a shelf, you see only the object, not the labor that went into it.

The commodity seems to you to have magically appeared on the shelf for you consumption. That sense that commodities have a life of their own, that they magically appear for people to purchase or exchange, is what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities.


The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism

After having clarified Marx’s methodological point of departure I shall now carefully discuss his laying out of what the "mystical character", the "metaphysical subtleties", "the sensory supernatural character” and the "theological manners" of the commodity specifically consist in.

The term fetish or to fetishize which originally derives from religious discourse means to invest something with powers it does not intrinsically possess. But while the religious fetish, if my picture of the world is not totally mistaken, does not through an act of being thought about or believed in acquire powers which previously were foreign to it, the situation is different in the case of the kind of fetish Marx is concerned with. ( The commodity fetish is being realized, not created by the minds of the individual actors and thus needs to be sharply distinguished from allusions to hallucinations, false illusions and the like. The kind of fetishism Marx is describing, can neither be understood as a mere individual misrepresentation nor as an abstract phenomenon of social consciousness. It has to be seen in light of the society as a whole. Fetishism is not merely an ideological category. While ideology in Marx understanding of it as "necessary false consciousness" is not confined to capitalist societies, but is closely linked to all societies that are divided into classes, the notion of commodity fetishism is a historical distinct phenomenon of capitalism. Marx goes as far as claiming that commodity fetishism is inseparably linked to Capitalist modes of production. He writes:

[In capitalist societies] it is o­nly the definite social relationships of men themselves, which in their eyes takes o­n the phantasmagorial 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 products of the human mind appear as independent beings endowed with life, as entering into independent relations both with o­ne another and the human race. The same way are in the world of commodities the products of men’s hands. This I call the fetishism which is attached to the products of labor, as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which therefore is inseparable from the production of commodities.

And a more sinister meaning of it as an aspect of Gothic Capitalism.


The Ends of the Body--Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs

SAIS Review - Volume 22, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2002, pp. 61-80

Amidst the neoliberal readjustments of the new global economy, there has been a rapid growth of "medical tourism" for transplant surgery and other advanced biomedical and surgical procedures. A grotesque niche market for sold organs, tissues, and other body parts has exacerbated older divisions between North and South, haves and have-nots, organ donors and organ recipients. Indeed, a kind of medical apartheid has also emerged that has separated the world into two populations--organ givers and organ receivers. Over the past 30 years, organ transplantation--especially kidney transplantation--has become a common procedure in hospitals and clinics throughout the world. The spread of transplant technologies has created a global scarcity of viable organs. At the same time the spirit of a triumphant global and "democratic" capitalism has released a voracious appetite for "fresh" bodies from which organs can be procured. The confluence in the flows of immigrant workers and itinerant kidney sellers who fall prey to sophisticated but unscrupulous transnational organ brokers is a subtext in the recent history of globalization. Today's organ procurement transactions are a blend of altruism and commerce; of science and superstition; of gifting, barter, and theft; and of voluntarism and coercion. International Organ Markets, Bioethics, and Social Justice The problem with markets is that they reduce everything--including human beings, their labor, and their reproductive capacity--to the status of commodities that can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen.

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another
example relating to the commodity-form.
Could commodities themselves
speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men.
It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as
objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it.
In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values. Now listen
how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist. "Value"
(i.e., exchange-value) "is a property of things, riches" (i.e., use-
value) "of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges,
riches do not."(35) "Riches" (use-value) "are the attribute of men,
value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a
pearl or a diamond is valuable... A pearl or a diamond is valuable" as a
pearl or a diamond.(36) So far no chemist has ever discovered
exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers
of this chemical element, who by-the-by lay special claim to critical
acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs to them
independently of their material properties, while their value, on the
other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this
view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is
realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the
objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only
by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to
call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal,
that, "To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and
writing comes by Nature."



The Fetish Speaks

Fredy Perlman's graphic rendition of Karl Marx's "Commodity Fetishism"

Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live — as William Burroughs said we did — in a “magical universe.”

And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….



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