Monday, July 30, 2012

The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures (and Karl Marx) on "Commodity Fetishism"


Came across this wiki on what appears to be Marx's 19th century concept of "Commodity Fetishism":
...commodity fetishism is the transformation of human relations, derived from the trading of commodities in the market, whereby the social relationships among people are expressed with objectified relationships, between the commodities and the money used to buy them. Commodity fetishism makes the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value. The transformation is achieved by means of reification — the symbolic metamorphosis of an abstract exchange-value into a concrete object, a commodity with intrinsic value, in and of itself....
Yiccchhhhh!  Sicko!  Sorry to say that imo, present day people who seem to have some sort of irrational attraction to gold as a "standard" by which we could base our monetary system, look like they may be suffering from this corrupt condition.

A recent post based on a Hebrew Scripture from the Prophet Isaiah comes to mind:
Behold Me rousing against them the Medes, who are not accounting silver, And gold - they are not delighting in it. (Isaiah 13:17)
Then there is perhaps the more widely known Greek Scripture from the Apostle Paul (who sometimes quoted Isaiah) to Timothy :
 For a root of all of the evils is the fondness for money, which some, craving, were led astray from the faith and try themselves on all sides with much pain. (1 Tim 6:9-10)
The Greek word which is normally translated here "fondness for money" or "love of money" is philarguria, or "love of silver", or perhaps a "fetish for silver" in recent English?  Yeeccchhh!

Then there is the Lord Himself, upon commissioning His disciples to be solely going to the house of Israel with His authority:
"Gratuitously you got; gratuitously be giving.  You should not be acquiring gold, nor yet silver, nor yet copper in your girdles,..."   (Mat 10:8-9)
Here he orders His disciples to NOT take any form of payment in or possess any or all of the three naturally occurring metal commodities that oddly went on to occupy Column 11 of the Periodic Table of the Elements.  Sounds like He had their best interests in mind and wasn't taking any chances lest perhaps they would develop what Marx may have identified over 1,800 years later as a "commodity fetish", and become corrupted via the human interface with any of these metals.... but apparently only when they are used as an exogenous form of "money" or otherwise an object of delight.


4 comments:

Major_Freedom said...

What profound, deep ignorance.

Yiccchhhhh! Sicko! Sorry to say that imo, present day people who seem to have some sort of irrational attraction to gold as a "standard" by which we could base our monetary system, look like they may be suffering from this corrupt condition.

As opposed those sickos who have an irrational attraction to state monopolized fiat money as a "standard" for money?

Laugh. It's precisely you fiat bugs who want to turn a subjective concept such as money, into an objective standard of value imposed by the state.

For a root of all of the evils is the fondness for money

So the state is evil for having such a fondness for money to such an extent that they monopolize it all to themselves!

State monopoly fiat money is commodity fetishism par excellence

Detroit Dan said...

"Commodity Festishism" -- I'm going to start using that term for the cult of gold and silver.

Give me some of that good old fashioned fiat currency -- the people's currency -- any day!

Matt Franko said...

Dan, (I'm with you btw wrt fiat...)

It looks like in the Greek scriptures that form of "money" (I think what we are looking at as endogenous "money") was termed 'nomisma' via the Greek "nomos" or "law", or the coins were referred to directly by their names ie denarius, stater, drachma....

Then there are references to exogenous forms like 'argurion', perhaps 'chalkon' (going from memory).... which was based on weight of the metal whether copper, silver, or gold....

So it seems both monetary systems were in use in Judea during the time of Jesus' documented in the Greek scriptures... looks like the Romans and the Herodians were using nomisma, while the Israelites used metals.

Or you could look at it as the Romans/Herodians issued endogenous while the Israelites used exogenous based on weight measures of the 3 metals in column 11...

This dichotomy still seems operative today of sorts...

Resp,

Matt Franko said...

Major,

"State monopoly fiat money is commodity fetishism par excellence"

Read your own words here, by definition, fiat "money" is not based on any commodity, so how can it be the object of "commodity fetishism"????

btw Marx believed "money" was exogenous... just like you.

rsp,