I should have actually foregrounded this third issue in the post above, because it would have been a slightly clearer way (perhaps…) of expressing what I was trying to say: I don’t take Marx to be engaging in what I often call an “unmasking and debunking” critique (and I don’t think the post to which I was replying takes him to be engaging in this, either). But when the concept of the fetish is deployed as though its primary object is to reveal that capitalism is based on labour, this can sometimes be where people then go (and, again, I don’t take the post to which I was responding to have been going here – which is why I positioned this comment as more of a terminological than a substantive quibble).

If the concept of the fetish is primarily intended to unveil that labour is socially central in capitalism, the question becomes: what is the potential expressed by this act of unveiling? What sort of ideals or normative principles is the critique expressing? What sort of transformation do we see as immanent within this context?

Historically, some movements would have seen the potential to be for the more open and transparent structuring of society by labour – so that labour could, in a sense, come into its own. (This of course isn’t the only option, even in an historical sense – the notion of the proletariat abolishing itself is central to many historical movements, as well.)

My impulse, though, is that some important critical resources – some important dimensions of understanding the social genesis of transformative potentials, and of opposition to transformation – might be missed if we don’t also consider the concept of the fetish to be an attempt to account for the determinate character of some pervasive forms of perception and thought – an attempt, not simply to point out that capitalism is based on labour, or that capitalism disguises this fact by making the requirement appear natural, but also an attempt to explain why we perceive “nature” the way we do – why categories like “nature”, “matter”, etc., acquire their distinctive modern qualitative form, such that we begin to find certain shapes of consciousness, forms of embodiment, and ways of being in the world intuitive and plausible. I see the concept of the fetish as opening up a great deal more than simply unveiling that labour is central, or showing that this centrality is contingent – I see it as opening onto an exploration of some quite complex and multifaceted practical “resources”, with ambivalent potentials that both reinforce and point beyond their capitalist origins in specific ways.

Apologies if this is a bit too obvious (it’s been a long day here… ;-P) – I’m not at all trying to suggest that you didn’t intend this meaning to be encompassed in what you’ve written above. In a sense, I’m basically trying to work through how to express these concepts in a way that this form of theory is a bit harder to assimilate into other, more common, approaches to social critique or readings of Marx, so I may just be being pedantic with how things are being phrased.

But basically, yes: you’re absolutely correct that I shouldn’t have implied that (1) and (2) sat in some kind of tension to one another – I had another point in mind (the point that the fetish offers much more than a simple “unmasking”) and didn’t express what I was trying to do particularly clearly… Many thanks for this – I’ll slowly trundle toward what I’m trying to say…

(To address the rest of your post: I (too?) can’t make heads or tales of those who argue that information technology invalidates the labor theory of value.)