So I read Jezebel fairly regularly and was psyched to see Moe (or her sister, actually) delve into a lil' bit of lit/film theory today. A drunken Marxist read of the new Sex and the City movie, actually. Which is an excellent idea. But so many people seem to think capitalism=consumerism. It is disheartening. And it makes the analysis of the movie not make much sense. Commodities aren't 'bad' because they're material! Quite the opposite actually! Marxism is into materialism, not so down with idealism. And commodity fetishism has to do with production not consumption. Or, rather, it refers to the obscuring of the labor power that produced the commodity such that value appears to inhere in the commodity itself. If you buy some cheap food or whatever, that is just as much a commodity as Carrie's shoes. The misinformed bourgeois idea that Marxism is an anti-consumerist thing, anti-materialist, anti-ownership thing--ugh, just totally wrong and harmful. Anti-materialism is a particular kind of bourgeois hippie thing itself. Not Marxist. Things that matter in Marxist thought are who owns the means of production and who gets the surplus value produced by the worker.
Though I still am most pleased this is being discussed on Jezebel. And, since I usually see boy movies and end up analyzing dude-rubrics, I am now totally going to see Sex and the City for similar kicks. I absolutely hate that shit, but I now feel dissociated enough to be curious how it functions.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment