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Came passed along the busy aisles, much affected by the remarkable displays of trinkets, dress goods, stationery, and jewelry. Each separate counter was a show place of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally, and yet she did not stop. There was nothing there which she could not have used-nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire, and she felt keenly the fact that not any of these things were in the range of her purchase.
-Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
A family's motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family.
-Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Historically, Marxism has not been very successful in its dealings with things. Curiously for a materialism, Marxism has been more interested in the "theological capers" of commodities than in the actual historical uses to which people have put the things they desire, purchase, and enjoy. Since Lukacs and Benjamin, commodification and commodity fetishism have come to be central to the way Marxism understands capitalist culture and the meaning of consumption. It is my argument that most Marxist analysis has misunderstood the culture of consumer capitalism because it has interpreted consumer goods only as fetishized commodities and has ignored almost entirely their use-value. The whole idea of commodity fetishism has been blown up all out of proportion to its role in Marx's own discussion in Capital, to the detriment of not only Marxist theory but Marxist politics as well. By appealing to Marx's own writings, I do not mean to reassert some kind of orthodoxy, but rather to demonstrate that notions that virtually everyone assumes are central to Marx are in fact more recent embellishments. These innovations have led Marxist and leftist politics into the futile position of.opposing or seeming to oppose the desires of the working class for their fair share of consumer goods. Moreover, the misapplied theory of commodity fetishism has hindered Marxist analysis of these things themselves.
The Novelty of Consumer Capitalism
At the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. capitalism underwent a radical...