Beyond reification: reclaiming Marx!s concept of the fetish character of the commodity

Title:

Beyond reification: reclaiming Marx!s concept of the fetish character of the commodity

Creator:

Pepperell, Nicole

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:60201792-5505-4378-bf69-392658a1791b
uuid:60201792-5505-4378-bf69-392658a1791b

Subject:

Marx, Lukács, Hegel, Capital, commodity fetishism, critical social theory, and reification

Type:

model:article and TEXT

Format:

bez média and svazek

Description:

György Lukács’s infl uential interpretation of commodity fetishism as “reifi cation” shapes many contemporary critiques of the apparently objective and impersonal form taken by capitalist social relations. Such critiques seek to debunk the false veil of objectivity that results from fetishism, revealing the real character of the social relations underneath. Th is line of criticism, however, often attributes totalising power to capitalism, which undermines its own critical standpoint. I argue that the solution to this dilemma lies in understanding the fetish not as an ideological veil that needs to be debunked, but instead as a novel form of social interdependence that is genuinely – not illusorily – impersonal. Th is impersonal form is generated by a diverse array of disparate social practices whose interaction yields this unanticipated and unintended result. Within this framework, the diversity of the underlying social practices off ers a practical potential basis for constituting new forms of social interdependence that lack not only the semblance, but also the reality of capitalism’s oppressive objectivity.

Language:

Czech

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
policy:public

Source:

Kontradikce: časopis pro kritické myšlení | 2018 Volume:2 | Number:2

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false