> especially where the attempt is made to (shape) the desires of
> consumers so they buy more of a particular product, creating a "value"
> simply because warehouses are full of that product. But the influence
> upon truths may be another matter altogether, sorry if my response
> turns out to be off-topic;
>
> False consciousness is a Marxist hypothesis that material and
> institutional processes in capitalist society mislead the proletariat
> - and perhaps the other classes - over the nature of capitalism. This
> is essentially ideological control, which the proletariat do not know
> they are under.
>
> The concept flows from the theory of commodity fetishism - that people
> experience social relationships as value relations between things,
> e.g., between the cash in their wage packet and the shirt they want.
> The cash and the shirt appear to conduct social relations
> independently of the humans involved, determining who gets what by
> their in-built values. This leaves the person who earned the cash and
> the people who made the shirt ignorant of and alienated from their
> social relationship with each other. So through the experiences of
> alienation and oppression the individual "resolves" this through the
> false need of materialistic goods.
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
>
> In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations,
> said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, in which social
> relationships center around the values placed on commodities...
>
> ...In most subsequent Marxist thought, commodity fetishism is defined
> as an illusion arising from the central role that private property
> plays in capitalism's social processes. It is a central component of
> the dominant ideology in capitalist societies...
>
> ...People within capitalist societies find their material life
> organized through the medium of commodities. They trade their labour-
> power (which in Marx's view is a commodity) for a special commodity,
> money, and use that commodity to claim various other commodities
> produced by other people. The social nature of society is destroyed by
> the abstraction of commodities, in the sense that "use-value" (the
> usefulness of an object or action) is totally separated from "exchange-
> value" (the marketplace value of an object or action). An example is
> that a pearl or a lump of gold is worth more than a horseshoe or a
> corkscrew. This abstraction is referred to as "fetishism". (The term
> "social" is used by Marx to refer to the essential organization of a
> society, i.e., to those processes by which a society allocates the
> tasks necessary to its survival.) Under this system producers and
> consumers have no direct human contact or conscious agreements to
> provide for one another. Their productions take on a property form,
> meet and exchange in a marketplace, and return in property form.
> Production and consumption are private experiences of person to
> commodity and material self-interest, not person to person and
> communal interest...
>
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism
>
> My friends, I want you to look into the relations of Art to Commerce,
> using the latter word to express what is generally meant by it;
> namely, that system of competition in the market which is indeed the
> only form which most people now-a-days suppose that Commerce can
> take.
>
> Now whereas there have been times in the world's history when Art held
> the supremacy over Commerce; when Art was a good deal, and Commerce,
> as we understand the word, was a very little; so now on the contrary
> it will be admitted by all, I fancy, that Commerce has become of very
> great importance and Art of very little.
>
> ...Commerce has become of supreme importance and that Art has sunk
> into an unimportant matter.
>
> ...Now to speak plainly it seems to me that the supremacy of Commerce
> (as we understand the word) is an evil, and a very serious one; and I
> should call it an unmixed evil- but for the strange continuity of life
> which runs through all historical events, and by means of which the
> very evils of such and such a period tend to abolish themselves.
>
> For to my mind it means this: that the world of modern civilization in
> its haste to gain a very inequitably divided material prosperity has
> entirely suppressed popular Art: or in other words that the greater
> part of the people have no share in Art-which as things now are must
> be kept in the hands of a few rich or well-to-do people, who we may
> fairly say need it less and not more than the laborious workers.
>
> Nor is that all the evil, nor the worst of it; for the cause of this
> famine of Art is that whilst people work throughout the civilized
> world as laboriously as ever they did, they have lost-in losing an Art
> which was done by and for the people-the natural solace of that
> labour; a solace which they once had, and always should have, the
> opportunity of expressing their own thoughts to their fellows by means
> of that very labour, by means of that daily work which nature or long
> custom, a second nature, does indeed require of them, but without
> meaning that it should be an unrewarded and repulsive burden.
>
>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/as/as.htm
