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.
