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This article analyzes how Juan Cárdenas’ novel, The Devil of the Provinces, narrates the complex relationships between monocultures, political corruption, religious manipulation, and organized crime. Within the novel’s universe, these elements configure a set of mysterious and strange forces, and illuminate a series of structural power relations that govern the distribution of labor, violence, access to education, and control over life in the Colombian reality. This reflection articulates decolonial theory and the critique of capitalism to analyze Cárdenas’s reinterpretation of the literary canon around the plantation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: On its 150th anniversary, as contemporary capitalism shows some signs, albeit fitful, of mutating beyond neoliberalism toward a new form of authoritarianism rooted in economic nationalism and protectionism, Marx’s Capital helps to illuminate the system’s underlying structure and the way out, especially if we allow that he has something to tell us not only on capital and class, but also on race and gender. Among the most salient concepts in Capital I are the dehumanization of the worker via commodity fetishism, a problem rooted in the production processes of capitalism, and the concomitant quest for free and associated labor by the working people. Equally salient today is the absolute general law of capital accumulation, which shows that mass unemployment is a permanent feature of highly developed capitalism, as machines replace human labor in a process that also leads to stagnation and the tendency toward a decline in the rate of profit. Finally, Marx’s mature theory of revolution shows not only labor rising up against capital, but also how in particular capitalist societies, this process can be either retarded or hastened by ethnic and national divisions within the working classes.

This research critically analyzes Saba Imtiaz’s novel Karachi, You’re Killing Me! to explore the postmodern paradigm shift within urban Pakistan, particularly among the female working class. The study investigates the subversion of metanarratives, focusing on themes such as consumerism, commodity fetishism, and the power-knowledge nexus. Drawing from Lyotard’s theory in The Postmodern Condition, Foucault’s ideologies on power and knowledge, and Jameson’s views on consumerism, the protagonist’s actions are scrutinized to reveal the postmodern landscape. Employing textual analysis, the findings highlight Imtiaz’s portrayal of Karachi’s shifting societal norms, where Western influences challenge traditional Pakistani values and religious constraints. The study recommends further exploration of postmodern impacts on urban societies, suggesting strategies for balancing cultural preservation with evolving freedoms while addressing the complex dynamics of globalization and identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human labor and animal inputs required to manufacture meat products are kept physically and symbolically distanced from the consumer. Recently however, meatpacking plants received significant news media attention when they emerged as hotpots for COVID-19 — threatening workers' health, requiring plants to slow production, and forcing farmers to euthanize livestock. In light of these disruptions, this research asks: how did news media frame the impact of COVID-19 on the meat industry, and to what extent is a process of defetishization observed? Examining a sample of 230 news articles from coverage of US meatpacking plants and COVID-19 in 2020, I find that news media largely attributes the cause for the spread of COVID-19 in meatpacking plants to the history of exploitative working conditions and business practices of the meat industry. By contrast, the solutions offered to address these problems aim at alleviating the immediate obstacles posed by the pandemic and returning to, rather than challenging, the status quo. These short-run solutions for complex issues demonstrate the constraints in imagining alternatives to a problem rooted in capitalism. Furthermore, my analysis shows that animals are only made visible in the production process when their bodies become a waste product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the German current of Value Criticism has been proposing to rework a critique of capitalism based on the mature works of Marx. Starting from the primary categories of capital – value, abstract labor, commodity fetishism – they intend to overcome the traditional contradictions of Marxism, capital/labor, proletariat/bourgeoisie, etc. The Canadian thinker Moishe Postone has, independently of value criticism, developed a thought that is close to the German current while distinguishing itself on certain important points. However, it is appropriate to question these new readings of Marx which, if they can be fruitful, pose many problems, both philosophical and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores Adorno’s understanding of fetishism and melancholy as immanent to the artwork’s autonomous structure. In order to understand the relation between them, the Freudian understanding of fetishism and melancholy has to be considered along with the more explicit reference to the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Analysing the implications of Adorno’s claim that commodity fetishism is at the origin of artistic autonomy, the article shows how it should be understood not only as a materialist demystification but also as a reaffirmation of art’s apparent self-sufficiency and its capacity to resist the commodification of society. Nevertheless—the article claims—thas this is only possible if art’s fetishism is dialectically opposed to its melancholy, through which art establishes a relation to the heterogeneous element of the lost object produced by its autonomous form.

This article uses Marx's idea of commodity fetishism and subsequent theories of reification to understand the social construction of race. Race is typically defined as a socially-constituted category that is mischaracterised as a natural one. The goal of this article, in contrast, is to explain how this mischaracterisation arises. In addition to this main objective, the article uses this explanation of race to contest recent attempts that locate the 'persistent entanglement' of race and capital in their functional relationship. Finally, the article engages with related, commodity-based theories of race and racism and concludes with thoughts on what the socially-constructed category of race can teach us about the nature of value and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies a variety of magical motifs that appear in ads and that consequently shape the popular practices of consumerism. In this context, magic refers to visual and textual content that suggest the world is suffused with supernatural forces and agencies. The author briefly discusses some basic approaches to the study of magic in advertising, proceeds to identify the range of magical themes that reliably appear in ads, and discusses an assignment that can be used to guide students towards a deeper understanding of this key aspect of consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a statement from an anthropological lens in the context of sanitary exceptionality under an institutional and citizenship crisis. It refers to a young population of Haitian residents with difficulties in exercising their right to a city inside the principles of sustainability, democracy, equity, and social justice who are integrated in a subaltern way. We revised some of the actions performed by the Chilean authorities in 2020 during the pandemic analyzing how they are affected from the perspective of their civil rights, focusing on informality, work, access to a living place, and the evaluation of the roots of the migratory project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudios de Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: On its 150th anniversary, as contemporary capitalism shows some signs, albeit fitful, of mutating beyond neoliberalism toward a new form of authoritarianism rooted in economic nationalism and protectionism, Marx’s Capital helps to illuminate the system’s underlying structure and the way out, especially if we allow that he has something to tell us not only on capital and class, but also on race and gender. Among the most salient concepts in Capital I are the dehumanization of the worker via commodity fetishism, a problem rooted in the production processes of capitalism, and the concomitant quest for free and associated labor by the working people. Equally salient today is the absolute general law of capital accumulation, which shows that mass unemployment is a permanent feature of highly developed capitalism, as machines replace human labor in a process that also leads to stagnation and the tendency toward a decline in the rate of profit. Finally, Marx’s mature theory of revolution shows not only labor rising up against capital, but also how in particular capitalist societies, this process can be either retarded or hastened by ethnic and national divisions within the working classes.

This article seeks to analyze American penal law, ideology, and culture through the lens of Marxist theories of commodification and commodity fetishism. It first introduces the “first-order commodification of justice,” that is, the positing of a quantitative equivalence between offense and punishment. Next, it introduces the “second-order commodification of justice,” that is, the notion that the benefits of a particular penal regime can be reckoned alongside other social goods, mediated by the general currency of “utility.” It then considers some of the consequences of this commodification for the cultural meanings of justice and punishment in American culture. It pays particular attention to how the commodification of justice interacts in a mutually reinforcing way with racism. It concludes by arguing that commodified justice can perhaps be overcome through a transition to restorative/transformative justice paradigms, effectuated by an anti-capitalist, prison-industrial-complex abolitionist political praxis.

This article contributes to research on materialism, art and education by introducing the aesthetic, political and pedagogical theories of Louis Althusser. It begins by situating the argument within the contemporary conjuncture of the global class struggle, particularly in the West, which is defined by an ideological break with the Marxist tradition in which the actuality of revolution is denied. Such a conjuncture demands not only scientific critique and persuasion but also, more importantly, an aesthetic experience in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of society. Analysing Althusser's writings on aesthetics and politics and applying this analysis to Althusser's own writing, it develops a theory of an aesthetic pedagogical encounter through which we can experience the actuality of revolution and the materiality of thought itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arete Journal of Political Philosophy / Arete Politik Felsefe Dergisi is the property of Arete Journal of Political Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Neoclassical economics is sometimes said to overlook the institutional character of markets, treating them as 'natural.' I address whether this criticism applies to Léon Walras. Walras's position is complex. Walras insists that market institutions are 'artificial' and that a purely naturalistic view of them reduces persons to mere things. However, he simultaneously characterizes market laws as natural. Specifically, he argues that exchange value is natural because it is determined by the natural property of scarcity. This argument is wanting: scarcity as defined by Walras is not exclusively natural, and, by Walras's own logic, only accounts for exchange value given the non-natural institution of the market. I suggest that Walras's attempts to give exchange value a natural foundation can be understood as a form of commodity fetishism. I further suggest two complementary explanations for this fetishism. First, Walras infers exchange value's naturalness from its autonomy with respect to individual agents in a competitive market. Second, he assumes that the use of the natural sciences as a formal model implies that the market has some natural cause. I additionally discuss his Baconian view of economics as an example of naturalistic reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critiques conspicuous displays of morality within public discourse, recently framed as 'moral grandstanding', from the perspective of an intersubjective Critical Realist theory of ethics. Drawing on Honneth's recognition theory as the basis of a 'qualified explanatory critique', I argue that these practices are not mere aberrations within moral discourse, but a necessary consequence of the neoliberal imperative to turn all aspects of the self into market assets. Neoliberal commodity fetishism also and especially involves the commodification of moral character as a means of economic competition, as exemplified in recent discussions of 'ethical capital'. This objectification categorically precludes intersubjectivity as the basis of ethical life, and produces a cognitive structure resembling narcissistic pathology, characterized by the pervasive objectification of self and other. Critical Realists should therefore reject moral grandstanding not only for its detrimental effects on public discourse, but because in subordinating morality to the market, it is fundamentally anti-ethical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides analysis of the football (soccer ball). Specifically, we focus on the manufacture of the World Cup ball through the lens of commodity fetishism and the journey that the football makes to become a commodity. Three aspects of this journey are outlined: symbolic fetish of the World Cup ball in the build-up to tournaments; scientific fetish in the corporate marketing of footballs; and corporate fetish in the form of corporate social responsibility. It is concluded that each aspect together and taken in isolation are mechanisms through which commodity fetishism operates to fragment understanding of systemic contradictions between profit and social justice and obscure the nature of exploitation in the industry that produces footballs, placing limits on intervening policies when they arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Christianity's ambiguous relationship to capitalism by engaging Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities as a way of rethinking Marxism's critique of religion from the standpoint of political economy. Following Etienne Balibar's distinction between the theory of ideology and Capital's theory of fetishism, I examine how the later Marx conceived of religion as socially conditioned by the society of commodity production, which takes on religious dimensions. Commodities are the basis for a concept of fetishism which commands total subjection, alienating human beings under capitalism. This critical focus also reveals Christianity in its totalizing role as a symbolic structure shaped by the inescapable logic of exchange‐value, money, and universal equivalents. Nonetheless, Christianity retains the impetus to anti‐fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception. This anti‐fetishistic union focuses on the transparent and revolutionized social relations of real presence as the nonalienated reverse of fetishism's false presence. A critical apophaticism, tempered by the materialist amendments of Marika Rose and Slavoj Žižek, offers the bridge to such a union and highlights the anti‐fetishistic avenues of failure and utopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Café is one of the contemporary products that has become an arena of lifestyle battles. Supported by a culture of consumerism and commodity fetishism, the Café then transformed into a lifestyle representation of urban society. There are many phenomena that support this thesis. Those who come to the Café are not only to fulfill their basic needs (the need to drink coffee), but more than that, which is to show others their existence with all the success they have achieved. Drinking coffee in a café with the aim of imaging is the core of the culture of consumerism and commodity fetishism, which Anthony Giddens (1991:198) calls a human identity project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Guillermo de Ockham is the property of Revista Cientifica Guillermo de Ockham, Universidad de San Buenaventura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture.

Doing research on fishery commodities in Portugal led us to an enigma: for a dead fish to be fresco (fresh) it must be alive. This paradox manifests at a popular, commercial, and legal level. It denotes the interruption of the difference between being dead and being alive in the commodity form. In Portugal, we suggest, the commercialization of peixefresco (fresh fish) is based on the production and consumption of edible 'zombis': seafood corpses technologically and symbolically crafted as undead. An open concept, 'edible zombis' is part of an experimental vocabulary that foregrounds the productive agency of undeadness, both biological and commercial, in the seafood economic complex. It relates to the ordinary practice of necromancy in the commodity‐based world. Edible zombis are commodity fetishes that fetishize their producers and consumers, suspending them from the capitalist system in which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My purpose is to rethink the meaning, importance and relationship between alienation and commodity fetishism (CF) in Marx. Both are reconstructed and analyzed insofar as they integrate the strange social power macrocategory. My thesis maintains the latter allows us to notice the nuanced continuity between alienation and CF, and that both are central in Marx because they constitute the guiding problem that articulates the young and the mature Marx. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Philippines' response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this article examines two key objects used to mitigate the widespread transmission of the virus. To answer the research question, "What is the meaning of face masks and shields in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic?" a patchwork ethnography research method was used to triangulate data from a variety of sources, including academic scholarship, mass media, grey literature, and personal experience. Using Tom Scott-Smith's theoretical interpretation of Karl Marx's "commodity fetishism" as a framework, the article traces the concealment, transformation, and mystification of face masks and face shields as humanitarian objects , and explores the social, political, and cultural role they play in the lives of Filipinos during the COVID-19 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Language & Literary Studies / Folia Linguistica & Litteraria is the property of Journal of Language & Literary Studies / Folia Linguistica & Litteraria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Overproduction, consumerism and commodity fetishism — it seems like these tendencies are omnipotent and omnipresent in the modern world. The difference between the society criticized by Marx and the reality encompassing us is that in the postmodern societies, it is the information and images that serve as an object of consumption and consequently commodity fetishism. In other words, the service sector produces images that become the means of mediation. In the article, the author looks into the work of Stanislaw Lem Futurological Congress and contemporary French movie The Congress following the same plot. The analysis being founded on the theories of Guy Debord, Slavoj Žižek and Karl Marx, as well as the recent investigations of a journalist Naomi Klein, the author uncovers implicit consequences of the consumerist way of life, imposed on us by the capitalist system as well as media and transnational companies. Arguing, after Žižek, that the criticism of late-capitalism is directly linked to the understanding of the human psyche’s recesses, the article attempts to explain the consumer turning into a marionette of large businesses. This position is further strengthened by the natural necessity for an individual to embrace the system’s core impositions, in particular, to recognize the non-existing authenticity behind a brand. The tendency further leads to the alienation from real merit and overconfidence in the fairness inherent in the existing system. Overproduction and the ubiquitous loss of Walter Benjamin’s Aura result in actual poverty behind the mask of abundance, nature of the art and authenticity becoming extinct. This leads to the natural drive to substitute the lost identity for the (re-) invented one and manifest individualities, sometimes aggressively and vigorously. As Lem’s characters balance on the verge between reality and hallucinations, modern-day consumers lose the established coordinate system, distracted by the absolute and seemingly non-restricted liberty of choice, the virtual reality permitting to act out any repressed impulses and instincts fully and with impunity. Citing Debord, ‘the poverty unites everyone involved in the spectacle and its controversies’. The author is of the opinion that Lem’s Futurological Congress aims at forewarning the reader from the possibility of the imaginary system progressing irreversibly, the idea further reflected in the movie. There is no hope for a society abandoning the boundaries of reality and moral guidelines for good. The analysis could possibly describe the broadening sphere of influence of the multinational corporations and contribute to the lively discussions on the digital divide and the social networks’ actual/ impact on society.

This paper compares the development of the tourism industry in two different Latin American locations: a municipality of Chile's Araucanía and Venezuela's Gran Sabana. In both locations, part of the indigenous population shows interest in the development of this industry, which presents potential as a source of locally generated income. This comparison focuses on examining how property rights and relations shape and are reshaped by the expansion of tourist activities in these locations, shedding light on two additional questions: first, the socioeconomic conditions that help explain the increasing participation of the indigenous population in the expansion of tourism in these regions; second, a cultural phenomenon that this expansion stimulates: the circulation of discursive representations of local environments as permanently inscribed with a particular form of collective labor. This paper will conceptualize this labor as "cultural labor" and, drawing from theorizations of the fetishism of commodities, will argue that the widespread appeals to this labor constitute a (paradoxical) form of discursive defetishization that is fostered by the logic of the tourist industry. This form of defetishization discursively subverts the principle of concealment that pervades commodity fetishism as theorized by Marx, but it is nonetheless a functional part of a social process that reinscribes and rearticulates capital as a social relation among the populations of these regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research has the purpose of analyzing the fetishism of merchandise as an epistemic foundation of the current globalization, driven by the neoliberal market. In this sense, it is proposed to cover the following aspects: 1) Describe the violations of human rights, which means conditioning social relations to the confluence of selfishness. 2) mention the sacralization of abstractions and the individual and collective alienation that provoke mercantile totalitarianism. 3) Promotes, against all dogmatism, emancipation as the sum of solidarity actions that human beings have when recognizing the rational and sensitive capacity they contain. 3) Destructuring the cultural impositions by the pluralities that the inflammation provokes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no neat division between the economic and the domestic. Not only are they connected, but their meaning, structure, and value are decidedly conditioned by one another. Yet, since it is capitalism’s nature to conceal exploitation, domesticity becomes outwardly coded as the domain of tradition, despite the productive forces of the market shaping domesticity through the process of social reproduction. Lise Vogel asks how the worker is produced in capitalism, analyzing the peculiar way women are exploited in this process. Using Vogel’s theory of labor and Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, this thesis analyzes Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park as a remarkable and salient example of capitalist relations invading and determining the realm of the domestic in the early 19th-century. At the beginning of the novel, Fanny Price, the protagonist of the novel, is intimately involved in social reproduction, but when she is displaced to the extravagant halls of Mansfield Park, her uncle’s estate, she enters the commodity sphere and becomes an ideological weapon, emptied out of her original and unique value to fervently justify the ruling class's power.

Taking up the geographer's task of following and defetishizing the commodity, this research taps into the United States (US) federal banking data to locate the commodity "money". Law is used to specify money's locations. Relative to the size of its economy, Utah's banks report a lopsided share of US money. This paper unmasks important social relations embedded in the money commodities located in Utah's banks by tracing the history of US banking law, which has played a leading role in the processes responsible for Utah's outsized share of the sub-national monetary landscape. Banking law determined the scope and type of business in which banking firms and their corporate affiliates could engage. Throughout the 20th century, investment banks and commercial firms struggled to claim legal rights to engage in business combinations once deemed illegal: combining non-banking business with a commercial bank. The state of Utah, in coordination with financial and commercial firms, has expanded the legal and financial space of Industrial Loan Banks (ILBs), historically idiosyncratic chartered banks exempt from regulations separating banking firms from non-banking business. Utah marketed their banking charters to global, systemically important financial institutions and large commercial conglomerates, which then established or acquired ILB subsidiaries within the state. From Utah, the die had been cast: the largest non-banking firms on the planet were now legally empowered to accumulate capital in ways that had heretofore been forbidden at other locations. American banking had been transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a visual analysis of 1,236 Instagram posts from cannabis brands during the immediate period after Canada's 2018 cannabis legalization. Promotional texts crafted by brands, whether print advertisements or social media content marketing, are rich sociocultural communicators. For decades critical scholars have analyzed deeper ideological stories from the common tropes, codes, and clichés of consumer advertising. Situated in this established body of literature but applied to a novel and recently introduced consumer product (legal cannabis) on a twenty-first-century promotional platform (Instagram), this research identifies the common visual clichés used by cannabis brands and analyzes their underlying sociocultural meanings. The findings locate seven visual clichés that ultimately fetishize cannabis as a commodity by hollowing out its labor contexts, objectifying it, and then re-filling it with arbitrary desires and feelings. The analysis suggests that commodity representations of legal cannabis are aided by the use of long-deployed advertising codes. The reliance on these codes can be attributed to a unique combination of factors: the meta-marketing goal of normalizing cannabis in addition to promoting individual brands, the necessity of navigating regulations, as well as the hyper-stylized visual culture of Instagram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]