Commodity Fetishism, the Gold Standard and Critique

Fall Crocus or Winter Daffodil 

Marx was like a big, grumpy, woolly dog who had been expelled from his own country of Germany, who had a Wittgensteinian sense of his own genius and wealthy patron with a kind face called Friedrich Engels. Engels was raised in Calvinist family which ran cotton mills in both Germany and England. And well worth wondering whether Nietzsche himself enjoyed that same sense of Wittgensteinian self worth when weeks before his final collapse into madness he flaunted his own accomplishments by finishing his Ecce Homo, his account of how a man becomes who he is, that's been described as his final testament, a good read if you like hearing someone put a tongue in his cheek and tell you how super fantastic and wonderfully superior he is compared to everyone else. Marx's Commodity Fetishism began back in the 1840's with his understanding of money as Gold. Gold was a commodity that had a clearly measurable value that could be used as a medium of circulation for the exchange of commodities, such as sausages, pork pies, Morris Minors, such things weren't gold but could be measured and valued in terms of their weight in gold. Metal coins, copper, silver, florins, Groats, Doubloons, served the same purpose, but as mediums of exchange a person had to trust the coins value and over time, the actual coin itself lost value to wear and tear. As a commodity, the value of the original genuine Gold or genuine silver was of course subject to supply and demand, but nonetheless there was an inclination to store a non-perishable, reliable exchange of value in vaults, under the bed and what have you, where it might be available for a rainy day. Paper Money, no matter how dressed up and fancy it was, kind of took the shine off metal as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Marx chose to describe paper money - and other mediums of exchange not supported by the market value of the commodity it was made of - as a "functional substitute" or a "symbolic representation" of a metal money. This whole symbol thing rather got Marx's goat, because he wanted us to live in a materialist dialectic, he wanted us to have a materialist understanding of our world, not made up of fluff, false images, wishy-washy and other libtard shrugs from people like Kant, the appalling errors that snowflake Hegel had produced and all of German Idealism represented. And of course being a product of German Idealism, Marx was big on the value of "Critique." You point out flaws, if a man's naked and tries to persuade you he's not, the right thing to do was kick him in the shin and call him a dumbass. Marx believed in the gold standard. Yes, he was a Golden Calf man, he didn't trust the random ideas on tablets from some weirdo on a mountaintop. Then, soon after the Russian Revolution, Lenin with his Bannon-esque dreams of empire and extremist convictions dismissing Trotsky's Romney-esque objections, who for the sake of the Lord and a New Golden Age, proceeded to bankrupt farmers by squatting on the Kulaks in an attempt to forcibly collectivize agriculture with an increasingly vigorous enforcement of the food tax of 1919 which was part of a political and civil eradication of un-collectivized working farmers, which promulgated a famine lasting from 1921 to 1923 that killed 200,000 Ukrainians. Meanwhile the materialists of The Frankfurt School, safe for a while in Frankfurt, in the Wiemar Republic of Germany, looked on aghast and troubled by Bolshevik-Marxist-Leninist basic understanding of us people, their fanatical trust in the mechanics of a theory that supported the bubble of their circle jerk of mutual admiration, but at least they were bold enough to realize their failure to grasp what power did to us, to realize how we people operated as wild creatures in the world of our own making, and yes indeed we had a lot to learn from watching Chimpanzees. It must have been rough for the Frankfurt School. But they didn't give up, they returned to traditional habits of critique, kicking their own shins and calling themselves dumbass, they widened the reach of their circle to include the work of neurologist and psychiatrist such as Freud and Jung. Under this influence one of the areas they explored was how the "Culture Industry" - the monetizing of propaganda - could manipulate individuals and as a result maintain power for the chosen by putting an end to any notion of a concrete, real and material social freedom. Instead the "Culture Industry" perverted the real, including the idea of freedom, and replaced the real with basically unsupported and meaningless symbolic understandings that not even a Chimpanzee would fall for. In 1883, when Marx died at the age of 64 he had 250 pounds sterling in his probate account. (Translates to 26000 UK sterling as of October 2025. Or 35,000 US dollars as of October 2025)

The Idiot

The Podosphere

The Idiot was one of those struggling rich kid stories, of which there are far too many. Dostoevsky himself was an intermingling between merchant and priest, who like Saint Teresa of Avila, another child of the wealthy, endured an occasional epileptic episode. The heart of Dostoevsky's Idiot story, a title dripping with irony, runs this way: A young, Christian and Innocent Prince returns to polite society from a period of isolation where his personal narrative of sweetness and wet-eyed innocence is confronted by, shall we call them, fallen, corrupt and wicked narratives as well as a couple of very dangerous hot chicks with serious intentions. "So what?" I hear the call!! Well the answer to that question is PPPGPSNFM. Or the Political Pundit Podosphere Greedily Peddling Saintly Narratives For Money. Here, podosphere is defined as"podcasters and their audience." Those of us who still have a DVD from Blockbuster of David Lean's Laurence of Arabia, in full Technicolor, starring Omar Sharif and Peter O'Toole be wary of going anywhere near the Podosphere, and I'll tell you why: If you do such a thing, Dostoevsky predicted your fate, but unlike The Idiot Prince Myshkin, who didn't need health insurance you'll not be able to afford a comfortable rapture. Remember how The Idiot, an account of a Christ-like figure navigating the folds of an unfettered ruling class ended. I'm sure we all do, but, just in case you think I don't know, the hero of the tale does the right thing, he enters a catatonic state and is returned to a sanatorium - otherwise known as a posh nut house - in idyllic Switzerland where unblemished men and women represented the heavenly host. Well that won't be for you or me, our fate will be a wooded slope somewhere being stared at by chipmunks, while Baxter recites the Beatitudes. (Mathew 5:3 12)

Why the Rabbit of Usk

Carolina Elephants-Foot Gone to Seed

The dilemma, what is an authentic lived experience, resolves itself when the meaning of being is meaning. Be patient! The issue of neurosis generally and the troubling neurotic behaviors that present themselves as an unhappiness searching for quiet in particular, could well be a rewarding manifestation of Will. There again, if Arthur Schopenhauer is correct, Will is a "blind, restless, metaphysical force that is the inner essence, or the thing-in-itself." This blind, aimless, sub-rational force that throws seamstresses down stairs is very different from Martin Heidegger's Dasein, his specific Human form of Being, existential and reflective which asks the questions of being. Here the meaning of being is meaning, means no more than a blind and unattached individual Dasein finding itself thrust into the world asking and answering those questions of being as it gains both the use of language and experience of the world and as a result makes meaning. For Heidegger, Authentic would be an untroubled lived experience, and neurosis would be an expression of a troubled lived experience that's in the process of making new meaning. So when you ask: "What is an authentic lived experience?"  One answer is: "It depends on whether you interpret the World as a Representation of an overarching metaphysical Will, whether that Will has been troubled by reason and design, or whether it remains an undifferentiated blind and irrational source of suffering, and as a result of either one or other of these interpretations you begin to see yourself as a part of the universe? Or, whether you cleave to the notion of Dasein, and see yourself as an individual, a unique and very special living being equipped with a capacity to negotiate a path through a wider process." The next question, which is probably one of those questions Kant suggested our species will never be able to accurately answer is: "which of the above three basic narratives suits our species best?" A lot can be learned from a philosopher and traveller who went by the name John 'Walking' Stewart who was born in the February of 1747 and died in the February of 1822 at the age of 75. He's a big subject and both Baxter and I are much daunted by his mysterious genius, his difficult writing style, his bamboozling use of the double "f" as in the philoffopher mufft bow down to the microffcope, we nonetheless both refuse to call him an eccentric, instead we think of him as a giant, an untrammeled by any formal education independent spirit with a face to match, who met William Wordsworth - of Daffodils while wandering lonely as a Cloud fame - when both men were in Paris during the French Revolution. Worth noting that Walking Steward is a hero in a somewhat rambling, possibly turgid and disjointed, but never schlocky book called the Rabbit of Usk,

Spectacle Commodity Fetishism

Gotta Love Fleabane

I think it safe to assume that some of us with access to keyboards, internets, television, telephones and teenagers have come to know what Foot Fetishists and Furries are. Of the two, I suspect the following understanding of Furries better elucidates the subject at hand: "An interest that can lead to participating in the furry fandom, a subculture where individuals express themselves through artistic creations like "fursonas" (personal animal characters) and elaborate costumes called fursuits. The fandom is also known for its conventions, online communities, and focus on artistic expression, acceptance, and community." So with Furries it's not just a macabre Halloween, with tricks and treats, it's a whole life style, not exclusively centered on inappropriate or weird commingling of the furred and the un-furred. Commodity Fetishism predates the telephone, as early as 1840 Marx was waxing on the fetish of metal money which everyone loved and needed, paper money just didn't count. In the late 1860's he had a detailed understanding, of how, in our minds a product lost touch with the material world, what the product, let's call it a tooth brush, was, where it came from, the labor involved in making it, who owned the labor involved in making it and on it went for approximately 400,000 words. This social relationship had magically become a relationship with a toothbrush, not a social relationship between two people, but a relationship between a person and a thing. And Lo in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell for the first time ever telephoned his assistant and rather seductively said "Mr Watson, come here. I want you," a new world of fetishism was born. It was a form of progress that used electric signals traveling along wires, and which soon enough would be overtaken by electric signals traveling through electromagnetic waves. This was the beginning of a condition a Frenchman called Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist International and cigarette smoker who died at the age of 62 in 1994, chose  to call, Spectacle Commodity Fetishism. (Le fétichisme de la marchandise spectacle.) You could turn a love of stuff, into a love of Spectacle, defined as a social relationship mediated by images. We don't interact directly with each other, we interact with images of what what we are persuaded is what our lives should look like  It's not the person, he could be a dim-witted jackass, it's what the person looks like and the image he presents. It's not the toothbrush, it's what the toothbrush looks like, how its presented in images, that may include handsome men driving motorcycles and hot chicks brushing their pearly white teeth. It's not the staged sea battle with multiple casualties in somewhere like Portland Oregon, it's what the staged sea battle does for the image of the Emperor.