Perhaps there is no better example of Karl Marx’s “fetishism of
commodities” than the clothes we buy. Since “Capital” refers almost
continuously to the textile industry that was the lynchpin of the
burgeoning capitalist system, this makes perfect sense. As Sven Beckert,
the author of the highly acclaimed “Empire of Cotton”, put it in a
Chronicle of Higher Education article in December, 2014, the raw
material and the manufacturing system it fed were midwives to a global
system that continues to punish the workers who remain its captives:
Just as cotton, and with it slavery, became key to the U.S. economy, it
also moved to the center of the world economy and its most consequential
transformations: the creation of a globally interconnected economy, the
Industrial Revolution, the rapid spread of capitalist social relations
in many parts of the world, and the Great Divergence—the moment when a
few parts of the world became quite suddenly much richer than every
other part. The humble fiber, transformed into yarn and cloth, stood at
the center of the emergence of the industrial capitalism that is so
familiar to us today. Our modern world originates in the cotton
factories, cotton ports, and cotton plantations of the 18th and 19th
centuries.
Not very much has changed since Karl Marx wrote about the textile
industry except the geography. In the 1840s it was the factories of
Birmingham, England and the cotton plantations of the slave states that
were connected. Today it is China and India that are the largest
producers of cotton, while the textile mills are no longer in the
countries that were in the vanguard of capitalist development. They have
relocated to places like Cambodia and Bangladesh, the places that
director Andrew Morgan visited in the course of making “The True Cost”,
a documentary that opens on May 30 (see http://truecostmovie.com/ for
screening information).
full:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/24/the-political-economy-of-fashion/
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