I'm paralyzed by chemotherapy this morning so I've been reading the University of Purdue Web site. Finally, I understand why everyone is calling us Suppliers these days. According to the University of Purdue web site:
"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems).....borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms "commodity fetishism."
The commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value. When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness". The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things". What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes "the fantastic form of a relation between things".
This effect is caused by the fact that the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible. We only approach their products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products". We access the products of the people through the exchange of money with those institutions that glean profit from the labor. Since we only ever relate to those products through the exchange of money, we forget the "secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities"; that is labor:
"It is... precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly").... society, gold and then paper money become "the direct incarnation of all human labor", much as in primitive societies the totem becomes the direct incarnation of godhead. Through this process, "Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action". Although value ultimately accrues because of human labor, people are led to believe that they are not in control of the market forces that appear to exist independently of any individual person.
Pretty heady stuff! At Louis/Dressner, we want to cut through all this "commodity fetishism" and bring it back to the table, not the commodity exchange that bought the table. It is all about the producers, their vines and their wines and not the monetary exchanges between supplier and buyers.