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hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoIn capitalism, the consumer need only care about two things: the product, and the price. This makes it easy for consumers to compare products and prices, and pick the best “bang for the buck”. Which in turn, incentivizes production efficiency.
Sometimes externalities are factored in. For example carbon taxes. But these are simply factored into the price, so the consumer can still compare products and prices like before.
This “commodity fetishism” that Marx complains about, is exactly what makes capitalist economies so effective and efficient.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
Not true, not since at least the 1950s, or at least incomplete and misleading.
The consumer also cares about what the object implies about them, how them having that object will make them feel about themselves and others feel about them.
Commodity Fetishism.
This is why almost nobody does the extremely literally grounded-to-the-product marketing of the 1800’s anymore, they all switched to selling emotions, identities, concepts… attached to the object, conveyed by the object.
Its why capitalist economists have for over a hundred years been plauged by things like ‘animal spirits’.
This, and other things like this, contibute to actors in capitalism being not actually rational, neither at a micro or macro level.
A vast chain or network of irrational decisions, compounded over time, is not what I would call flatly ‘efficient’.
JIT logistics are efficient in the short and medium term.
They’re catastrophic in the long term.
You can say thats because the externalities of all the fuel consumption are not properly factored in, I can say the predictable future rises in many forms of insurance that will be created by climate change are being irrationally ignored… because the logic of capitalism incentivizes that delusion.
Hopefully I do not need to explain that it is extremely obvious that capital markets are also not rational, that ‘efficient markets’ are … not.
"Guys lets spend $5 bazillion dollars on AI! Oh whats that? 90% of companies saw no to negative productivity gains from the largest reallocation of capital in human history?’
Capitalism may be efficient in the short to medium term, and but its extremely inefficient in the long term.
Capitalism also has within it many forces and effects that redistribute and concentrate real wealth upward as it generates new real wealth.
Eventually, broadly predictably, the credit supercycle peaks and then crashes… and you get a mass immiseration, as the sum of years or decades of delusion must now be reckoned with.
Short to medium term efficiency and stability.
Long term, predictably inefficient and chaotic.
So basically, yes, commodity fetishism is part of what makes capitalism efficient, but that efficiency is short to medium termed, and it reliably produces delusion and long term instability… which I would struggle to describe as ‘efficient’.