At 02:03 PM 9/17/96 MDT, you wrote:
>So reification is the consequence of commodification? And commodification is
>the consequence of capital accumulation and the social relations therein?
I'm not sure what you mean by "commodification". A commodity is often
referred to as a "widget" in elementary economics textbooks. It is
something produced and from which all qualitative characteristics are
abstracted. The fetishism of commodities is the notion that the value of
one commodity (any given widget) is its relationship to other commodities
(different widgets). From the marxist perspective, the real exchange value
is a function of the social labor embodied in the production of the use
value. The commodity is in fact a relationship between producers. Of
course, the issue of commodity fetishism can be and has been developed into
extensive analyses . . . "Commodification" doesn't exist per se. In the
tradition which developed the notion of reification, and into which it fits
and has meaning, capital accumulation is the process of separating the
producer from the means of production and involves much more than the
production of commodities.
>I have been working under the impression that commodification is a socially
>manifested form of the mind's "fetish" for reification (and vice versa).
>But, that reification (as the general function of tending to see
>abstractions or relations as objects) is a necessary component of the
>individual's dual nature of content/process, form/function, sign/signified,
>etc. nature. Is seeing an object as a commodity the same as seeing a fellow
>subject as a commodity?
All of the above seem to be an inversion of the concept of reification
followed by an attempt to make it walk. "Fetish for reification??" I'm
really unsure of what is being indicated here. If reification is, as Marx
intimated and Lukacs proposed, a relationship between people that presents
itself as a relationship between things, then what would a fetish for
reification be? The desire to be an inanimate article of consumption? Most
advertising tries to convince us of the opposite: consume this inaminate
article and you'll gain true subjectivity. I'd be interested to know what
kinds of analyses you've generated from the perspective of your
interpretation..
>
>Are not the implications of Vygotsky's work precisely that the external
>"class determined" roles and identities become, through experience,
>psychologically internalized and hence a source of subjective perception,
>representation and development?
>
This is good but what did Vygotsky mean by "class determined roles and
identities"? What exactly is the difference between "identities" and
"subjective perception, representation, and development". Marx used "class
relations" in two senses: in his historical writings it meant a class in a
sociological and political sense: e.g., a group of historically real people
involved in specific historical actions who could be characterized by their
relative relations to the means of production. Thus in addition to
capitalist and proletarian, we find such classes as: petit bourgeoisie,
peasants, lumpen proletariat, etc. In his economic writings (there is no
hard and fast line between the two, but there are a fuzzy set boundaries)
class relations are quite simply the ideal relations that enable one to
model capitalist production, distribution, and consumption. Here we only
find "capitalist" and "proletariat" or "capital" and "labor". The commodity
is the phenomema in which these economic relations are simultaneously
manifested and hidden.
The ideal individual who has no commodities to exchange, other than their
labor power, is called "a proletarian", the ideal individual who lives
completely off the labor power of other, through the income generated by the
production of commodities, is called a "capitalist." In this context, both
concepts are economic concepts, they are not extensional classes (to use
the language of logic), but intensional properties of the relations of the
capitalist economic system. When the prevailing economic relations are
relations between commodities, all individuals of the society are
primordially determined by that prevailing relation. Their relations with
each other are perceived as relations between things, determined, beyond,
transcendent, reified.
>
Isn't it the case that sociocultural interpretations of mental phenomena do
>not systematically distingusih between "psychological" (as in-the-head
>private phenomena)and social (economic relations, power, etc)frameworks?
>
>
Sociocultural systems don't interpret, individuals do. Sociocultural
systems do, however, determine the forms that the individuals' experience of
subjectivity (the in-the-head, private phenomena) takes.
>
>