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stickly@lemmy.world 1 week agoMarx’s analysis doesn’t make the meme incorrect. He could be aware of the visible effect without fully understanding it’s mechanism and potential magnitude. Let’s not forget that Marx was working on Capital while the cutting edge of behavioral and cognitive science was phrenology ffs. His pool of knowledge and prognostic fidelity were fundamentally limited.
Shopping and commodity addiction are no doubt exploited by capitalism but the neurobiological causes will exist independent of any economic system. You could live in a socialist utopia and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.
In the language of the meme, Marx considered “Shopping is fun” but not “Shopping is so fun! ❤️”
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days is because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.
Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.
But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.
stickly@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s a complete distortion of Marx’s theory to support your own ideological priors. Marx calls out capitalism as an active driver of alienation, as shown in his analysis of commodity fetishism. By his reckoning, commodity fetishism can more-or-less only exist in capitalism where a nebulous value is assigned to your shopping independent of its use value. But if there’s a neurological vulnerability for fetishizing a commodity at your own expense, the alienation happens no matter what.
Modern technology enables workers to produce an unfathomable volume of goods and the logistics to efficiently distribute them to unknowable corners of the world. Who owns the means of production is irrelevant, but I’m sure those laborers will be happy to get the full value of their production. And even if they do know the harm caused to the shopper, their guilt is shared by every other laborer with a product in that store. They couldn’t rectify the alienation if they tried.
The underlying problem is not some struggle with Gattungswesen, it’s quantifiably electrical and chemical. So his prediction here is flat wrong unless you insist on twisting his theory to fit reality, à la Nostradamus.
That’s the thing that makes people fans of Marx: his work can be aspirational philosophy/commentary or hard science. Just appeal to his authority with a quote and you’re in a quantum superposition, collapsing to whatever you need it to be later in the conversation.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
No, its not a complete distortion.
A society that is abstracted away from the literal, material and human processes of production and trade… basically begins to treat commodities in a more perverse manner.
The specific underlying neurological mechanisms that underly this and explain it more mechanically, in greater detail… yeah he did not talk about those because he did not know about them.
But again, he didn’t need to know about them, in great detail, to observe and explain what I just said two sentences ago.
As far as I can tell, you have invented some kind of prediction that Marx made, relative to what we are talking about, commodity fetishism, that turned out to be wrong.
… What? What is this wrong prediction?
I genuinely do not see where you described this.
Marx objectively was wrong in his prediction that a socialist revolution would come out of urban/manufacturing cores… it actually largely came out of agrarian areas.
So yeah, there’s an example of something he got wrong.
But I’m not aware of how the second sentence of this comment has in anyway been shown to be broadly wrong.
Modern technology that hacks your brain’s dopamine pathways to make you feel more happy when you see a new thing … that could be yours! … that markets an identity or emotional state that will be conferred upon you when you buy the thing…
That’s a hypercharged form of alienation, directly furthering you and your mental framing away from the literal material and human reality of the thing.
Historical materialism was the foundation, the ‘priors’ that Marx worked from… look at the actual state of the physical reality of people and stuff and how they are related and interact, and that can tell you things about how societies will change.
That you can imagine a utopia with shopping malls or digital shopping malls, and also imagine that that could be socialist… that doesn’t make Marx wrong about how alienation produces commodity fetishism in a society.
I think that Marx would argue that…
… this is false. I don’t think he would call that a socialist utopia, because I think he would find the concept of an online marketplace, as we have them now, massive in scope, totally minimized human to human interactivity, streamlined for your convenience… I think he would call that alienation, alienation that produces commodity fetishism.
I think Marx would literally call an American shopping mall from the 80s or 90s ‘a cathedral of capitalism’.
I think Marx could imagine a way that an online market place could exist in a ‘socialist utopia’, but that would be to the extent that it would be designed in such a way that forced human to human interactions, that it was stripped of manipulative marketing and dark patterns, that directly made you fully aware of the truth of the manufacturing and shipping processes, and all of the costs that go into all elements of that.