On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Devine, James wrote: > > so we need to think critically. so what's new?
Commodity fetishism isn't new. Didn't somebody already write something about that once? Seriously though, is fetishism only a danger when it is eulogistic? I think not. > > so the folks who slave away producing Nikes for dollars a day under poor > > conditions are engaging in discourse? That"s just it, Jim. It ain't the dollars making them slave away. It's the social relationship, which are relations between people disguised as relations between things. The alarm that I am trying to sound is about OUR (and it happens to me, too) tendency to give theoretical lip service to a level of analysis, commodity fetishism, that we then cavalierly dispose of when engaging "empirical facts". Speed up is the cause of which productivity is the effect? Oh yeah? UNDER WHAT SPECIFIC CONDITIONS? I say NOT THESE! NOT THESE CONDITIONS! We have a question here, not a ready made answer. We have a whole suite of urgent questions that the proverbial no one wants to ask because the proverbial everyone thinks the answer is self evident.
