by teck » Wed Jan 13, 2016 4:08 pm
its been a minute since i read up on a lot of marx but i think that isn't exactly what marx was trying to explain when he said we fetishize things (although this is related and he would probably have a heart attack at Supreme's market practices). marx was saying that we, the workers, are alienated from the labor it takes to produce goods, and thus believe that goods have an intrinsic value that's set by market forces, as if the things produced had real value outside of the labor it took to make them. for marx, labor was paramount. he wasn't so much concerned with fetishizing brands of tee shirts (no such thing existed really in a scope that we would recognize) so much as the fact that t-shirts were perceived to have a value outside of the labor time it took to produce the t-shirts.
i think he would argue that in a precapitalist world, we would value tshirts exactly at the "cost" of how much labor it is, and then use this to begin a truer process of exchange/barter. its a romantic view on preindustrial times but he had a point that.
again he would probably jump all over the supreme example, and it says something that he realized fetishism before we fetished the fetish.