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My girlfriend and I have developed a specifically Malaysian way to describe Marx& #39;s concept of Commodity Fetishism.
We call it "Ada Babi?" theory.
I promise I will explain. 1/9
We call it "Ada Babi?" theory.
I promise I will explain. 1/9
Okay, you know every so often in Malaysia there& #39;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
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& #39;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& #39;t know their story, what it took to get there. It& #39;s an informational vacuum.
4/9
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& #39;s concept of Commodity Fetishism asks "Wait, hold on, what& #39;s *real* story?"
5/9
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& #39;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
We don& #39;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
7/9
Buying and selling commodities isn& #39;t a relationship between things, it& #39;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
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& #39;s production, there may not be pork but there is certainly an anak babi, and we call them capitalists.
9/9
9/9
Addendum: I& #39;m not nearly well-read enough to actually tell you about Commodity Fetishism, so at the first criticism this post will go down, hahahaha