TEMU and commodity fetishism

1) (i add my answer to a comment on AI here fyi) Hey! I understand your concern, i don't use AI imagery in any of my work but I felt like it would be ironical to use it here just a couple of times given the topic of the video. In case it wasn't clear, my use of AI in this video is purely ironical, it's a sort of criticism of AI since the images are super exaggerated, look really bad and don't bring anything to the story. That's why I added the '?' in the first one and overplayed the dramatic aspect in the 'Georgio' series. The goal was actually to make fun of AI imagery. Satire is the only purpose it serves in that context. I don't plan on using AI imagery in the future because of the ethical problems as you mentioned, it was the first time and again purely contextual and satirical but hey thank you for voicing that concern, it allows me to clarify and keep me in check :) i'll add that an ethical existence on the internet is simply impossible, we pretty much all use lithium powered devices, we constantly train algorithms and AI with our comments, likes and habits. It makes sense to do our best to align our values though and we can all improve!
2)my pronunciation of feitiço was so bad!! sorry about this, i was so confident it was pronounced this way that i didn't even check it, i usually play the "sorry im french" card when it comes to pronounciation but it doesn't really work this time ugh, does it? (it clearly doesn't) hope you enjoy the video :)

What kills me about Temu is how popular it is and it has advertimemts everywhere despite multiple findings of forced/slave labor. When my friend mentioned Temu, I brought up that the stuff is made by slaves and he said "yeah but it's so cheap" and suddenly, as an American, I was thrown back into my junior high American history class with my classmates asking "If everyone knew slavery was wrong, why would they buy these products?"

Very interesting

I knew there was a reason why I hated fast fashion! I love your channel and I love your explanations. Would you consider yourself a philosopher?

Hey Alice ! Déjà bravo pour cette vidéo, comme toujours intéressante et agréable tant à écouter ou à regarder. J'adore la petite musique en fond de la vidéo, pourrais-tu me donner le nom et/ou la plateforme où tu l'as trouvée ? Bisesss ❤

It was even more iconic to click at the video and see a temu ad playing first 😂.

I think a lot of people conflate commodity fetishism with just plain marketing. People thinking they look rich wearing “luxury brands” or must-have gadgets have fallen for marketing. Fetishism involves rituals like a friend that takes a half hour to make a cup of coffee because he has to grind the beans he roasts himself and follow ten other steps, or the folks who travel with a case of 25 automatic watches, or sit in the garage with a glass of wine admiring their vintage Ducati 750GT.

Comparing religion to magic is disrespectful

I really like your video overall, but it's very unfair (and inaccurate) to think that fascism's only form is white supremacy. I'm a white South African person who was literally chased away from my home and my home country by anti-white racist black groups. I had to relocate to Europe because of how often my family was harrassed and threatened.

The temu operation has been seen offering cheap ( or even for free ) fakes of classic artworks ( paintings, statues ) and antiques up to old coins, and marked minibars of gold. After that, I got sent videos of people in the streets of China everywhere who are chipping away or drilling on fake goldbars as if their life depended on it. So, thanks and appreciative credit to the charming producer of this priceless vlogline !

Nice reflections. I understand the feeling. That "magic" is a bit like the "willing suspension of disbelief". Even in that case, it breaks down if pushed too much towards unreasonable scenarios.

Damn it, even while watching a video critical of community fetishism, my brain still goes "oh, it's a neat way to organize stuff, maybe this label printer is actually quite useful"...

Amazon is full of temu resellers 😅

This is the most thought provoking thing ive watched in awhile and im only just now coming across this channel so definitely subbing and just wow

getting the fucking Temu ad while watching this is so great

To me commodity fetishism means the sexualisation of consumerism, we are so addicted to consuming, to the point where it is equivalent to turning someone on

The problem with accelerationism is that sometimes the cost is too high. In a way, to the Jewish community, the Holocaust and Hitler kind of in the end gave Jews a bit more empathy from the world, but there is another way to achieve that without killing 6 million jews

I reject acceleration because I'm a pessimist. People are very good at justifying contradiction. Heightening the contradictions only guarantees that things get much worse, much faster.

I have to disagree with accelerationism, I do not doubt the ability of capitalism to scapegoat, rebrand and survive. Also, the planet and the people being exploited cannot wait for this system to self destruct, too much damage has already been done, we need to do what we can to change the system completely.

On fetishism it almost exactly opposite. Portuguese merchants chose this word over much more fitting word idolatry specifically to highlight that "savages" believe into something that lack any supernatural force behind it.

In an attempt to radically reject any similarity between their African counterparts - Portuguese merchants captured perfectly the origin of belief the way how ordinary becomes magical and the religious. The basic move when a human can invest inanimate thing with consciousness and form relationship with it.


This is why Marx chooses to talk about commodity fetishism, because In order for a thing to satisfy your need it must have anticipated your need and only other human can do it. Therefore we project humanity into a thing and form relationship with it. It leads to people valuing thing with which they have relationship over other people with whom they don't have a relationships.

Temu will spell the end of capitalism. As soon as I saw the first commercial, I felt inredibly uneasy. Something is really off about it, like uncanny valley vibes.

Great video.

imo, lefty accelerationism is just flimsy justification for laziness, ignoring the problem and continuing to live a privileged lifestyle while pretending to be doing something. I have no patience for it.

You can't buy from Temu when your bank account is empty and use cash. Big Brain 🧠

Marx, the original Marxist 😂

I love how you say videuuurrr

I installed Temu from how cheap everything was, ofc it lured me in. I was originally just going to get some posters for my room, just to redecorate a bit. I got so distracted and bought random gadgets and clothes I don’t need. I spent hours on that damn app, and they lure you in with all these deadlines and coupons and free stuff. I think I spent almost 100 dollars there.

I wonder if you have a noticeable increase in the number of personal storage unit complexes. Here in the USA, they pop up like weeds. People feel the need for them here simply because they have too much junk. For some, accumulating cheap goods or hoarding of “vintage collectibles” has gotten so bad they need more than one unit.

Just found your channel. Quite interesting. Thank you.

The idea that Marx didn't like Smith seems bizarre. It's pretty clear he prefers Smith, who isn't a laissez-faire guy if that being in French isn't enough of a clue, to any other thinker on political economy. "In the eyes" of both Smith and Marx the price of commodities in modern society, at least given sufficiently competitive conditions, is determined by the transformation of the socially required labor to produce them. That points to a large issue with the video's portrayal of commodity fetishism. The price isn't "arbitrary," and everything else aside this is an utterly crucial misunderstanding of Smith and Marx in favor of their right-wing, marginalist opponents. The material relations between people, the labor of whatever number of people were involved in the production and transportation of the commodity, become are seen through the lens of the social relations between things, the money and nominal price of the commodity. This is not fake, it is not an illusion, nor a trick, but it is something beyond immediate appearance, and something that presumably should be sublated in the interest of some sort of higher concept, i.e., a social recognition and accounting for abstracted labor.

The core problem is you seem to be using a misunderstanding of the concept to more broadly argue that what's going on is precisely the opposite of Marx's analysis. It takes the form more of the romantic, i.e., right wing, critique of Capitalism. Ironically, it is precisely here that Marx really critiques Smith's work, in the sense that Capital is a critique of the political economy not of the capitalists but of who he called the "utopian socialists" or who we now call the "Ricardian" or "Smithian" socialists. Commodity fetishism is not to be rejected but sublated. Its rationale is to be repurposed for a higher reason than the narrow one of the producer or consumer. Relatedly Commodity Fetishism is not the conscious choice of consumers, producers, or sellers. Temu doesn't do it more than anyone else, any sort of response to it shouldn't be about one firm. We don't choose our way out of it, we construct a new series of social relations that sublate it.

Two smaller points:

Smith's "naturalism" here seems questionable to me. Smith posits the first real materialist theory of history in the stadial theory. Smith's account of exchange in general is profoundly historical. Hence his account of the "retrograde" development of Europe. Hence also his almost immediate recognition of the transformation problem after the LTV's introduction in The Wealth of Nations.


The idea that Marx rejects reason as a source of "progress," is also rather odd. What is driving class struggle if not the reason within the begriff of the class? Moreover, what exactly is there to present a universal source of improvement without some sort of ability of communicating the relation of means and ends, without reason? Marx is the culmination of the Enlightenment. The leftish desire to jettison reason seems to me to be a horrible mistake.

Your definition of fetishism is a bit off in my humble opinion

why are we targeting temu?

We collectively decide on meaning, it's not really done right independently, it's properly done collectively, even if it's just decided, and subject to change.

You bought the label printer didnt you? 🤣🤣🤣

Although Marx's idea of demise of Capitalism was ingrained in his revolutionary idea of how workers will react, but we have been seeing a different reaction from workers. Workers in countries like Bangladesh have been lifted from absolute poverty, and despite their overworked and unsafe conditions don't seem to be going towards a revolution (I could be proven wrong in the future) On the other hand, in countries like the US where the factories haven been closed due to deindustrilizarion and moving of jobs abroad has been to honker down towards nationalist rhetoric and go back to pre capitalist notions such as Mercantilism rather than socialism.

I don’t strictly think accelerationism is necessarily the answer, I just don’t think there’s another way where we fully get rid of capitalism‘s downsides like soft reforms etc. hence why I think activism is best used as a tool to make alternatives to capitalism more palatable to the general population so that when capitalism collapses the proletariat doesn’t cling to its chains and tries to reestablish capitalist rule. It’s like a monarchy losing its ruler without an heir, they will naturally try to find another king or emperor, not turn to democracy lest someone educated them on it. Just because something is the natural order does not mean it’s morally right, just or in any way needs to exist at all.

I don’t strictly think accelerationism is necessarily the answer, I just don’t think there’s another way where we fully get rid of capitalism‘s downsides like soft reforms etc. hence why I think activism is best used as a tool to make alternatives to capitalism more palatable to the general population so that when capitalism collapses the proletariat doesn’t cling to its chains and tries to reestablish capitalist rule. It’s like a monarchy losing its ruler without an heir, they will naturally try to find another king or emperor, not turn to democracy lest someone educated them on it. Just because something is the natural order does not mean it’s morally right, just or in any way needs to exist at all.

do temu actually ship stuff? for those prices i don't think they could even afford sending bricks instead of whatever you've bought

Live like a femoid in a feminist delusion. TRUMP 2024 MAGA 2024. NO FEMOID PRESIDENT NO FEMOID PRESIDENT NO FEMOID PRESIDENT

Hi, Alice! Greetings from Brazil. I am Korean - Brazilian and considered myself comunist. Thank you for this video.❤ Sorry for my english 😅

I find it fascinating that people where I am (Sweden) are finally kind of realizing fast fashion probably has negative consequences on people elsewhere and the environment, and then they shop cheap home trinkets from Temu, a European counterpart or Amazon without blinking. In spite of seeing the horrors of one industry they seem incapable of noticing the exact same ENORMOUS, INESCAPABLE issues with another. Sadly seems like walking through life with a self imposed blindfold is just too comfortable and convenient for most people. And as long as that’s the case hyper capitalism will keep smiling, winning and boiling the earth.

Greetings from Brazil. I do not think that this simetry between "accelerators" are up for a good use. We as leftists should know that.

I was an accelerationist, but I guess such actions would mean suffering for a lot of people. still, humans were a mistake.

Yayy, a Marx video just as I begin my Marx section of sociological theory !! <33

I'd subscribe, but I won't because of AI art

Never accelerationism.

Remember the consequence of everything that happened in the 1930s.

Hi Alice. I'm Hilary from Taiwan
I really enjoy your videos, but is it possible to include more specific sources of the philsophers or scholars that you quote or talk about? I would like to know where to find their ideas when interested in their thoughts.

How to find the line between the need and commodity fetish?

Omg I love your videos sm!!! I am buying almost only second-hand clothing and i think it's not only more ethical (which is ofc more important) but also more fun and creative, it helps with building your own, unique style

"we'll see how capitalism eeends..." <3 preach sister!

I got a Temu ad on this video 🥴😔