Apolitical Blog

For Marx and Engles, commodity fetishism was crucial for a theory of ideology in a capitalist society. For them, ideology was based upon a distinction between the nature of social reality and the widely experienced distortion of said reality by subjects. Their concern was with the social origins of untruths rather than of truths, the origins of the structures which hide the insights of material reality and the inherently social characteristic of said reality. Commodity fetishism for Marx was the commodity form’s ability to distract the social relations and material labor that went into the commodity, from the minds of the consumers. When subjects consumed commodities, there was a social phenomena he saw occurring where there was a collective forgetting, a collective amnesia you could say, of the labor that went into the commodity, and the social relations that allowed the commodity to get to them.  With this, we can see that Marx’s theory of ideological distortion through commodity...

    Before I begin, I think it is necessary to critique the theory of atomized individualism. The philosophy of atomized individualism believes that “...society is made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms." That last part, the underlying belief that all individuals are acting as completely separate atoms, and just form a collective of individuals called “society” is a belief that doesn’t hold up if we truly dive in and critique it. Before I bring forward a thought experiment, let's first break down “individuality.” At its core, individuality supposes some human difference, a uniqueness. Alright, now let’s dive in with a thought experiment. Think about a human being inside of a vacuum for me. Inside of this hypothetical vacuum, would a human be able to conceptualize their individuality? Would they be able to conceptualize a concept of uniqueness? How about the very concepts that make up our understandin...