A Left-Wing Commodity Fetish
The left-wing commodity fetish is the commodity form of emancipation. It refers to the transformation of emancipatory ideas into commodities. What once sought to change social conditions now appears itself as a product, a brand, and economic capital. The result is depoliticization: social change is replaced by symbolic function. Emancipation becomes an identity, an aesthetic, or a communicative value—its critical and transformative power is integrated into the logic of the market, image, and consumption.
The catch that people are currently stumbling over is
that monetary values > rob us of values. In other words, commodity fetishism at this point is therefore not merely the transformation of ideas into products. It is based on a deeper shift: Everything is increasingly viewed in terms of its measurable value, while other forms of value recede into the background. When monetary value becomes the yardstick for everything, a society loses sight of the fact that not everything that has a price also has value—and not everything that has no price is worthless.
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