My girlfriend and I have developed a specifically Malaysian way to describe Marx's concept of Commodity Fetishism.

We call it "Ada Babi?" theory.

I promise I will explain. 1/9

Okay, you know every so often in Malaysia there'll be a big silly scandal about food, cosmetics, medicine, anything. A small minority of people will claim that pork or alcohol is snuck in somewhere in its production

Boba made with lard, makeup made with pig gelatin, etc. 2/9

The people who make these claims take advantage of the way that most industrialised products are made: as a combination of hundreds of individual, isolated processes from factories across the world. But normally we look at products and don't think of the process. 3/9

We used to know the people who made our clothes, butchered our meat, farmed our grain. Now these things appear as products in a market, but we know so little about the story behind them. We don't know their story, what it took to get there. It's an informational vacuum.

4/9

In that vacuum, the conspiracy crowd invent an evil Chinese mastermind tipping a bag of crispy pork lard bits into a bubbling vat of Whitening Complexion Cream or whatever, but Marx's concept of Commodity Fetishism asks "Wait, hold on, what's *real* story?"

5/9

Who harvests the tapioca to make into starch for boba, who works in the factories to process it? Are they exploited, abused?

We don't see this when we consume. We say "this makeup is affordable", "this boba place is cheap", thinking that these qualities appeared magically. 6/9

When in fact, every quality about the things we buy comes from a long web of relationships, many of them exploitative to workers and hugely profitable to capitalists, and when we buy and use those things, we enter that relationship.

7/9

Buying and selling commodities isn't a relationship between things, it's a relationship between people.

Adopt the hyper-awareness of the Ada Babi? crowd in asking "how did this get made?", but apply it to the real people involved and their conditions, not the imaginary pork

8/9

Because at the end of every commodity's production, there may not be pork but there is certainly an anak babi, and we call them capitalists.

9/9

Addendum: I'm not nearly well-read enough to actually tell you about Commodity Fetishism, so at the first criticism this post will go down, hahahaha