FAQ U: Comment Roundup

I’ve gotten comments from people asking questions that I thought would be nicer to answer in longer form! Thank y’all so much for your interest and responses :)

Question 1: Commodity Fetishism

From “Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 For Dummies”:

I would like to add a thought/question that came to my mind a bit after commenting. You do use the term ‘social ilusion’ describing commodity fetishism and this may just be language issue but i have always had a bit of an issue with the translation of the german ‘Schein’ as ‘illusion’. In some other cases (Kant or Hegel) it gets translated as ‘semblance’. For me, neither seems coneptually accurate. Especially ‘illusion’ might lead people to think that acknowledging it would dispell it. But the fetish of the commodity seems a lot stickier. It is an illusion that only fades when the material modes of social (re)production have changed.

Thanks, warenunförmig! For context, throughout my pamphlet, I describe value (we need not qualify here—read Marx or the thing) as a “social illusion imposed on commodities as the result of labor being quantified and thus abstracted in terms of time and money.” I’m not generally a believer in misrepresenting texts to dumb them down, and I tend to prefer the rearticulation of commodity fetishism as a “real abstraction” (a social reality imposed on material relations). So, it’s a critique with which I basically agree, but I want to offer a rationale for why I described it this way regardless—which one can take or leave.

I didn’t originally include the word “fetish” in the pamphlet, since a lot of people are not familiar with the anthropological sense in which Marx used it. So, really, I’m describing a social illusion on one hand and a set of social relations which produce that illusion on the other hand. This was to get across specifically Marx’s critique that whether one believes the illusion or not, the social relations exist and continue to function materially. I decided eventually to include the word “fetish” because I felt like it would be good for readers to walk away having some idea of what Marx meant by fetishism, to connect the analysis to a specific piece of jargon for discussion (or to know what to search online).

Coincidentally, before I sat down and wrote this response, Ènziramire sent me a footnote from the article “On Some Problems in Marxian Theory” by Riccardo Bellofiore, criticizing Heinrich’s lack of carefulness with the term “fetish”:

It seems to me that Heinrich does not distinguish, as one would need to do (but almost no one does in the literature) between fetish-character and fetishism, which are quite different notions in Marx. In the case of the ‘fetish-character’, the fetish, is really endowed of social powers, but only in the given social context. In the case of fetishism, on the other hand, the social powers that the ‘thing’ possesses in capitalism are attributed to ‘the thing’ as a natural object. […] More serious is the indistinction between ‘appearance’ as phenomenal form (Erscheinung) and ‘appearance’ as the semblance (Schein). Heinrich’s discourse is almost entirely conducted in the dimension of semblance even when one should be talking of phenomenal form. One example is the social productive power of labour that ‘appears’ as the productive power of capital. This is not a semblance, as Heinrich believes. The social productive power of labor manifests itself as the productive power of capital, and there is no illusion in this. […] The Marxian discourse on ‘crazy forms’, or perhaps better ‘displaced forms’ [verrückte Formen], is directed not against reality ‘as it seems’ (from the point of view of the ‘seeming’) but at reality ‘as it is’ (from the point of view of the phenomenal form).

While talking with Ènziramire, I compared the difference to be like that between Lacan’s registers of the Imaginary (where signifiers seem to have a certain significance or meaning for the subject) and the Symbolic (the signifying system through which signifiers acquire a significance in relation to other signifiers). I don’t want to justify my rationale in hindsight, but that’s what I was trying to get across: the difference between the commodity fetish as the appearance of intrinsic value, and fetishism as the social construction of that value—both being, of course, irreducible and relatively arbitrary to the ‘Real’ being of the physical things (commodities, signifiers, etc.) themselves.

Question 2: Gay or Queer?

From “A Feminist Constellation”:

Do you think Q(ueer) might function better than G(ay) as a descriptor for having non-gender-class-normative relations (social inc. presentation, sexual) that have a similar function in terms of reducing one’s social-reproductive utility to capitalist-patriarchy? Describing, say, a polyamorous straight person, an asexual person, somebody who presents socially in a sufficiently non-normative way that others can’t place them except in what Bhatt calls the ‘faggot-subaltern’ box, as ‘Gay’ seems rather counter-intuitive. But, all of them are oppressed for roughly similar reasons AFAICT insofar as they are all unlikely to produce a nuclear family with a neat gender hierarchy instilled in all members. And all of them might already have some identity with ‘Queer’ that’d make it easier to get them to adopt it, whilst leaving the more specific ‘gay’ as a non-class term for use in self-describing attraction.

Thanks, Jago! This question is about a parenthetical I included in my post where I qualify “gay”, as a term besides “female” and “trans”, as “having sexual relationships (or other attributes) beyond the class assigned to one’s sex”. I’ll share my original answer before elaborating:

“gay” instead of “queer” is on purpose: first, to rethink the categories we received from the LGBT movement and broaden the scope of analysis from content to structure (“queer” is ultimately an old-fashioned word for what’s now called “gay”, even if not referring to homosexuality in particular); second, to assert specifically that certain relationships to patriarchy are better understood with “gayness” in terms of a difference between one’s sex class and their behavior/characteristics, rather than with transness as feinberg had attempted.

The FGT thought experiment isn’t an attempt at taxonomy, but an argument at how being female, gay, or trans relate to each other as well as to society’s patriarchal axis. I think the way I lay things out mostly makes intuitive sense, except for the parenthetical which I put right before hitting “publish”: that one might consider divergent behavior relative to one’s sex (in general) as having more structurally in common with homosexuality (as a particular expression of gender divergence) than with transness qua sex modification.

This is not a context-free parenthetical, or an objective attempt to categorize one thing as opposed to another: it’s an anti-thesis to Feinberg in Transgender Warriors that divergence from the gendered characteristics assigned to one’s sex is characteristic of transness, and that the latter is descriptive or expressive of the former. In other words, to give a concrete example, Feinberg puts transsexuals (as they were known in her time, and as she referred to them throughout her book), drag queens, and butch lesbians under a trans umbrella, in order to suppose common basis and thus common interests.

I’ve talked in my review about why that strategic wager didn’t seem to pan out, but that parenthetical is my reversal. This is partly because patriarchy attempts to reduce gender divergence to sex modification and vice versa. Consider how one might say a gay man is gay because he wants to be a woman (and that’s as close as he can get), or a trans woman is transitioning because she wants to be fucked by men (and this is how she can do that without feeling guilty): that logic is reductive, but it already implies a difference between the behaviors by casting one as an expression of the other as a deep-seated motive. Feinberg may be read as taking the identification at face-value by, given her background, taking sex modification as an expression of gender divergence.

But, okay. Why “gay” and not “queer”? First, FGT is funny and clues the reader into the critical and non-taxonomic impulse behind the argument (it’s only a taxonomy in service of cutting across the taxonomy we take for granted; a sort of rhetorical strategy). Second, gender divergence is general is understood popularly to be gay. The specific definition of “gay” as referring to one’s sexual orientation—relative to which “queer” was determined arbitrarily to be a more general term—is an artifice of rhetoric. I’m not really suggesting that one term is better than another, but that we should fully and critically reevaluate the categories we receive from past movements. Perhaps there’s something we’re missing.

Perhaps it’s not coincidental that “trans” became Feinberg’s political identity when “gay” was at that point a term invested with bourgeois political aspirations (in Feinberg’s view and, hell, mine too). If “gay” became the political identity of respectable individuals with typical gender expressions, where were drag queens and butch lesbians supposed to go? Feinberg, as I’ve said before, had an intuitive understanding of the situation being fucked, but her understanding of why was overdetermined by her own experiences.

Question 3: Absolute Sordition

From “MUG’s Fight the Constitution: An Informal Review”:

I’m late (catching up on a month’s worth of neglected blog reading) but feel compelled to comment because I’ve long been a (lonely, weird) advocate of demarchy, and I agree with like 90% of what you’ve said here. I just think, you know, what if we go a little further?

My radical amendment is: Forget about ensuring “a base level of competency and well-informedness.” Don’t weight people’s votes based on civic competency. Don’t have open sessions. Govern by pure random sortition. It’s 1) genuinely democratic and 2) tamper-proof. Nobody can send lobbyists to open sessions, nobody can groom or suborn representatives. Have the quorum be considerably larger than contemporary American legislatures, have it vote by secret ballot, and you hardly have to worry about bribery and corruption (certainly way less than we do now).

Whenever I propose this to people, they blanch, thinking about the stupidest or most malicious person they know serving in the legislature. But like…is the stupidest, most malicious person you know actually WORSE than Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Clay Higgins? And aren’t the best people you know smarter, kinder, and more thoughtful than just about any rep you can think of? Our system selects for social and financial resources and naked, sociopathic ambition way more than anything else, which means that anybody we’re likely to think of as “a good person” only gets elected by a fluke.

Let the people govern. Sure, some of them are dumbasses, but most of them aren’t so bad. It’ll balance out in the end.

Thanks, Michael! I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not a lowercase “democrat”, meaning that I don’t see democracy per se as an end in itself. You ask whether the stupidest, most malicious person I know is worse than Paul Gosar, MTG, or Clay Higgins—and both on a personal level and speaking generally of my social context, I can confidently say yes. I live in Texas which, sure, wavers between being a blue or red state, but that doesn’t count for much since blue demographics tend to be either conservative or bourgeois (whereas red demographics—or, rather, the red demographic—are both, if tending downward with respect to social mobility).

More importantly, I have seen democracy play out here according to what I’d consider the authentic and genuine desires of the Texan people: one county with which I’m familiar passed ordinances by popular vote, first in 2021 to ban abortion, and again in 2023 to punish women who traveled out of state for abortions. There’s still sundown towns throughout Texas and even the rest of the United States. Whether or not you believe the presidential election was stolen, a hefty percent of the electorate probably still voted for Trump, and a not-insignificant number of Democrat voters (at least institutionally) share core beliefs with Republicans because they share the same material interests.

Some areas are better or worse, and there’s certainly voter suppression (gerrymandering, schedule fuckery, and outright voter roll purges), but we live in Babylon. “Have you noticed where you are? Where all the big decisions are made?” Satan asks Petra in The Brimstone Gospel. “We are in the epicenter of global destruction. The blood flows here. It’s in the rivers. It’s in your glass.” The population’s livelihood depends on the extraction of commodity value from the periphery, and subsets of the population are materially vested in the exploitation or oppression of other subsets (even cutting across different axes of the social matrix, the inverse of what is usually considered by intersectionality).

Democracy is a tool of governance, and voter suppression is its corollary, because class societies consist of irreconcilable differences; democracy thus generates the semblance of a consensus, but not necessarily if ever a true consensus (which would be impossible to really determine in such a social context). A movement to create a more “democratic” government would also need to engage in anti-democratic measures to avoid losing the reins of government to a competitive faction, which is what’s occurring right now; this is the unsavory implication, I think, of the tolerance paradox, which rests in the heavenly realm of interpersonal manners rather than the down-and-dirty of social relations.

I think the greatest service a government can provide in this context is to be forthcoming about the interests it protects, non-euphemistically. The Fifth Amendment admirably translates a certain phrase from the Declaration of Independence: from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to “life, liberty, or property”; this is both because happiness cannot be objectively litigated and because, considering the historical context of the earlier document, the pursuit of happiness is a euphemism for the ownership and valorization of property. Finally, in general, the way to solve society’s antagonisms is not through consensus-building (actual or otherwise) but by restructuring society in order to get at the roots of those antagonisms. You could take social-scale antagonisms for granted, which liberalism qua ideology does, but you must face them regardless.