The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

4 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
tures to account for the phantom objectivity with which capitalist
culture enshrouds its social creations.
Time, space, matter, cause, relation, human nature, and society itself
are social products created by man just as are the different types
of tools, farming systems, clothes, houses, monuments, languages,
myths, and so on, that mankind has produced since the dawn of
human life. But to their participants, all cultures tend to present
these categories as if they were not social products but elemental
and immutable things. As soon as such categories are defined as
natural, rather than as social, products, epistemology itself acts to
conceal understanding of the social order. Our experience, our understanding,
our explanations—all serve merely to ratify the conventions
that sustain our sense of reality unless we appreciate the
extent to which the basic "building blocks" of our experience and
our sensed reality are not natural but social constructions.
In capitalist culture this blindness to the social basis of essential
categories makes a social reading of supposedly natural things deeply
perplexing. This is due to the peculiar character of the abstractions
associated with the market organization of human affairs: essential
qualities of human beings and their products are converted
into commodities, into things for buying and selling on the market.
Take the example of labor and labor-time. For our system of industrial
production to operate, people's productive capacities and nature's
resources have to be organized into markets and rationalized
in accord with cost accounting: the unity of production and human
life is broken into smaller and smaller quantifiable subcomponents.
Labor, an activity of life itself, thus becomes something set apart
from life and abstracted into the commodity of labor-time, which
can be bought and sold on the labor market. This commodity appears
to be substantial and real. No longer an abstraction, it appears
to be something natural and immutable, even though it is nothing
more than a convention or a social construction emerging from a
specific way of organizing persons relative to one another and to nature.
I take this process as a paradigm of the object-making process
in an industrial capitalist society: specifically, concepts such as labor-time
are abstracted from the social context and appear to be real
things.
Of necessity, a commodity-based society produces such phantom
objectivity, and in so doing it obscures its roots—the relations
between people. This amounts to a socially instituted paradox with
bewildering manifestations, the chief of which is the denial by the
society's members of the social construction of reality. Another
manifestation is the schizoid attitude with which the members of