Austin Hatch

The University of Michigan basketball recruit survived two small plane crashes nine years apart, which taken together killed the rest of his family. It’s hard to imagine. HERE.

tonight’s lecture

“Objects and the Question of Commodity Fetishism.” At the University of Melbourne, HERE.

The accusation that object-oriented philosophy is a form of commodity fetishism is itself not that interesting, since it can’t survive even the first page of Das Kapital (where Marx already speaks of the independent qualities of things). But a quick refutation of that strangely lingering charge can lead to some other interesting questions.

Commodity fetishism means reifying social relations and claiming they belong to things. Yet it simply does not follow that any claim that things have intrinsic properties is a form of reification. To think that, you would have to think that only social relations really exist.

And even if that’s your position (my condolences if so), it is certainly not Marx’s position. Not everything is a commodity for Marx, obviously. That is true not only of air, streams, virgin forests, and goods produced in communal tribes, but even of corn-rents offered up to feudal lords. None of these things are commodities for Marx. But as you can see, a good number of them pre-exist any form of society. The idea that Marx grounded all reality in social relations is such a bizarre misreading (and so counter to the spirit of his materialism) that I’m surprised that charge is still kicking around.

But as mentioned above, it can lead us to more interesting things.