I got really high one night and had a thought about this, but I don’t know how stupid it sounds.
Capitalism practices animism for brands and products. Doing these movies is them attempting to bestow soul onto the brands and bring them to life beyond their material use as a product. I saw the poster for Sneaks and that’s what set this off in my head. Sneakers are alive and have their own lives. They are your friends. They help you play sports. It’s part of the mysticism of material forces that capitalism must carry out in order to justify its existence from a moral and even spiritual standpoint.
Then you go back and look at all the times colonists destroyed entire cultures who deeply believed in animism of nature. That was considered uncivilized. But then they need to do it with products. So you don’t get a world of civilized capitalism, you get the animism but it’s directed toward production rather than existing outside of it.
In contrast, the commodity-form has nothing at all to do with labor products’ physical nature or the thing-to-thing relationships arising from it, and the same holds for the value relation of labor products, within which that form is expressed. Here, it is only a particular social relation among people that assumes, for these people themselves, the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things. To find an analogy, we have to travel into the misty place that is the religious world, where things produced by the human mind seem endowed with lives of their own: they seem to be autonomous figures interacting with one another and human beings. So it is in the commodity world, too, but with things produced by human hands. I call this “fetishism”; labor products become fetishes the moment they are produced as commodities, and this fetishism is thus inseparable from commodity production.
I got really high one night and had a thought about this, but I don’t know how stupid it sounds.
Capitalism practices animism for brands and products. Doing these movies is them attempting to bestow soul onto the brands and bring them to life beyond their material use as a product. I saw the poster for Sneaks and that’s what set this off in my head. Sneakers are alive and have their own lives. They are your friends. They help you play sports. It’s part of the mysticism of material forces that capitalism must carry out in order to justify its existence from a moral and even spiritual standpoint.
Then you go back and look at all the times colonists destroyed entire cultures who deeply believed in animism of nature. That was considered uncivilized. But then they need to do it with products. So you don’t get a world of civilized capitalism, you get the animism but it’s directed toward production rather than existing outside of it.
this is why i don’t need to read books i just get my theory right here in the comments
GOOD post