Friday, September 27, 2019

Commodity fetishism revised

The commodity-form, a hundred and fifty years ago, could be described as "the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things"*

Today however, in the context of social media, the frontline of the real subsumption of consumption under capital, this condition has been reversed. Today, the relation between things assumes the fantastic form of social relations.

*Capital volume 1, part 1, chapter 1, section 4 'The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret; page 165 in the Penguin/NLR translation.