Subject: Re: [Marxism] Query on fetishism

[Ilyenkova@xxxxxxx]

Derek,
Lance Murdoch's response to your query on commodity fetishism is excellent
and needs no elaboration. Ollman, Meszaros, and Rubin are good references on the
subject. I would add Paul  Sweezy's treatment of the subject in his "The
Theory of Capitalist Development." A professional economist with an unusually
intelligible prose style, Sweezy placed commodity fetishism at the center of his
theorization of capitalist development, and identified commodity fetishism with
Gyorgy Lukacs' concept of reification-- Loosely, when something socially
living and vital assumes the appearance of an inert thing as when in the process
of producing commodities  " the basic relation between men (sic) assumes in
their eyes the fantastic form of a relation between things." While Lance is
correct to ground commodity fetishism in Marx's value theory, Sweezy's 
explication
emphasizes the generalized distortion of knowledge at all social levels that
accompanies the maturation of the system of commodity production. (See Sweezy,
*Theory* Ch 2, pt 7.)
Ilyenkova
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