Won't commodity fetishism also exist in libertarian-communism?

We're still relating to objects, but the objects are not mediating social relations.

Well put Khawaga.

I'm not totally sure what commodity fetishism is but in terms of our relationship to production and consumption I reckon....

With libcom, the production, distribution and consumption of the objects isn't being driven by the profit motive, it's being driven by social need.

Through improved social organisation, and more ways to bring social need to other people's attention, we would have much more access to the people and workplaces that produce the objects/ services that were available at any given time. We are all involved in the production and consumption not as alienated individuals following the whims of capital, the lure of marketing and the orders of the boss, but through networks of social organisation. If the quantity/ quality of what was available to us wasn't right we could get involved in addressing that and would have lots of ways of asking other people to get involved too.

It's a good question though and I do think that there would be scenarios where we would sometimes feel alienated from the people who produce the things we consume, because there would only be a certain amount of production processes we could get heavily involved in. But still, it would be loads better and I for one would like the opportunity to get involved in making lots of different things.

First, a lot of communists rightly refuse to put forward a fixed "vision" so I don't think you're really being fair "pinning" this "vision" on them. For example, the answer to "how will people get food" might be "well, they might just go to the distribution center and get it" but this would not be an encyclopedic statement concerning how a communist society would work.

But still, being clear that what I say isn't "the vision" either, let me offer some concrete details concerning how the qualities of a communist society might differ from those of a capitalist society.

For example, rather than a supermarket-like distribution center where nuclear families got their ration of processed food, a communist society might distribute food using large communal kitchen/eating halls which could be also be centers for socializing, where the process of volunteering to cook and serve would be quite informal but still thought-out to the extent that it would offer a grand-pallet for the portion of people who enjoy being cooks and helping create the human dining experience. One could sketch a similar "creative-participatory" process for child care, garbage removal, or any present day activity.

To move further into abstraction, the organization of capitalist society is an organization of human collective activity, it is simply an organization of human collective which appears to be separate individuals relating to "things", those "things" being prices and commodities. Note also that neither a price nor a commodity is a purely physical thing but rather a "social thing".

A communist society would have to strip away that veil and combine collective process, both formal and informal, with the particular activities of dealing with the material world.

I would personally frame the situation as being that a communist society would be, uh, communal. Personal enjoyment would come from the weaving together of material things and social processes. This would involve the fusion of "consuming things", individual-and-collective entertainment and collective decision making, obviously with some situations having more emphasis on one thing and some on another (I know folks took offense at my earlier reference to orgies so I'll keep overall framework less-defined but hey, my point is that communist society would be organized promote our mutual enjoyment in a variety of forms acting to minimize any relationship of scarcity or self-sacrifice).

And I should also put it that my opinion is by no means the universal opinion here. I'm sorry to say but I'd certainly say some portion of ostensibly communist posters here would sketch a post-capitalist whose details are almost identical to our present rather inhuman order

And you can follow a whole earlier discussion around scarcity from the link above.
I note here, especially, that all of these rationed "Luxury goods" mentioned by cantdocartwheels are pure "social relations" in the sense that "big games", "top notch restaurants" and scarce theater performances only exist given the dominance of stars and celebrities today. IE, the active, intentional organization of today's society is the main, active force that makes a few select experiences more desires than many possible others. The constant repetition of images of these more desirable activities of course is a strong reinforcer of the artificial social scarcity embedded in capitalist relations today. Note also that I wouldn't argue that a communist society would necessarily only involve a return to a natural state. Just as today's social relations reinforce the scarcity of commodity relations, a communist society would likely take active measure to maintain conditions of subjective abundance - making sure that everyone on earth had their basic biological survival needs met and that social needs were met with fairly minimal material costs, etc.

Altogether, my subjective summary would be - this society is not simply badly organized, nearly everything we do and the very organization of the present terrain is barking, screaming mad. A future society would be very different. Call that "hippy thinking" all you want.

Edit: Minor further edits after buzzy's kind words.

Great post, Red. Where were the "orgies" mentioned?

Never mind, I found it after your link above...

You would still have fetishes, objects imbued with certain 'voodoo' powers that mediate social relationships. No?

How would objects "mediate social relationships" in a communist society? I mean if you're talking about the smell of madeleines or something, fine, but in the sense Marx gives to this mediation, communism is supposed to be the abolition of such.

Whether we live under capitalism or communism or whatever, objects take on significance through the social relations they embody. Whether in the mass 'alienation' the myriad of objects that we know not where they came from that have a spirt of their own, to its opposite - objects that are created through collective processes which arrange our social relationships with each other. WE may be more aware of the fact that objects do serve this function than we presently do, but the relationship with have with objects and the arbitrary nature of their value throughout human existence will not be be diminished imho.

In a society that values the worth of all workers, past and present, where each worker is considered essential and not a disposable resource, commodities no longer exist as objects to be prized, but as usable units that indicate the worth of all individuals.

Though we may not know the production details of a particular item, whether it be a head of lettuce, a tablet computer, or a work of art does not prevent us from realizing the collective effort required to produce the particular commodity.

So, if we assume that each takes according to need for essentials, like housing, food, health care, no mediation of any kind is implied or required.

Non-essentials, which certainly include, as an example, a front-row seat at a concert, have to be handled differently by collective agreement, but without requiring any mediation.

In either situation, whether dealing with an essential or non-essential item, "no experience between ourselves and the commodity" is indicated. Needs, even non-essentials, are the products and rewards of the collective effort.

Though that means the commodity is a relation of the past, so I'm not quite sure what you're on about when you say commodities reflect the "worth of all individuals".

communism is the supersession of commodity production. goods are no longer produced for exchange and the social value of individual labour is "directly" affirmed in the planning of the associated producers.

in other words we get together collectively to decide what needs doing and do it - we don't depend on the workings of the market to do it for us.

that doesn't imply we all known each others work inside out, just that decisions are made democratically before the act of production not blindly through the interaction of products on the market

No single commodity is simply the product of an individual. Rather it is a product of workers, past and present, who have built the structure that allows the single commodity to be produced: a collective effort.

A lot of people think social relations are relations between people alone. This is a mistake. Social relations, in any form of society, are relations between people and things. That does not necessarily mean that things mediate relations between people the way they do in the specific social relations of capitalism.

We are embodied beings, we need to eat and we need space in which to exist. Even in a hypothetical hunter-gatherer society with virtually no (hu)man-made objects, human relations are also relations with a physical territory and the things, living and inert, within it.

This platonic or gnostic aversion to our materiality, is imo, one of the reasons for the prejudice that seeks to valorise a "purely humanistic" view of social relations between humans, uncorrupted by non-human objects. Certain themes within primitivism reflect this idea that, by reducing the material world to that produced by "nature" alone, and not the "evils" of human artifice, then the eden of "authentic" social relations between humans can be somehow regained.

Social relations will always involve relating to objects then. But this does not mean that objects mediate social relations in the way they do in capitalism.

Capitalism is a social mode of production - i.e. most of producers labour is spent on creating objects or services that will mostly be used by others, and most of the things that we consume will be created for us by others. The management of how we allocate labour between the social division of labour is the key here.

In capitalism, the allocation of labour is not done socially (i.e. by communication and agreement between society members) but through the market mechanisms of generalised commodity production. Which means we sell our labour power to the market, our labour power is engaged to make commodities, these are then sold on the market, and through the occluded and opaque mechanisms of the market, we are shunted from pillar to post, without ever really understanding why, who made the call (no-one), or having any control over the most important part of our lives - how we contribute to the collective production of our own world.

Only in commodity production is concrete labour transformed (through the whole effects of this particular system of social relations) into abstract labour - whose form of appearance is exchange value. Only in the system of generalised commodity production, does exchange stamp the labour embodied in individual portions of the social product as abstract labour.

In a communist society, I may not be aware of all the individual workers whose labour has gone into a particular product I avail of from my local distributor - but that does not make the labour embodied in that good "abstract". "Abstract" is not a synonym for "anonymous" here, it's a technical term that relates to the whole working of the value system in a society dominated by exchange.

Hmm,

I would say that there is just little more that need to be riddled-out in these discussions.

It seems like in the last quote, Kapitalism101 could be merely saying commodity fetishism exists if all the elements of capitalist relations as per Das Kapital exist and so the end of the capitalist society will ipso-facto put an end to commodity fetishism. That would be fully consistent but I wouldn't find it very interesting or revealing. It seems like one could argue for any kind of society as long as it eliminated as one or another of Das Kapital's categories (former Yugoslavia for example had commodity production that was officially accounted-for in terms of the working class owning the means of production while the USSR might be argued to not really have had traditional commodity production since it didn't have a real market).

Anyway, earlier, both Ocelot's use of "social" and Kapitalism101's earlier use of "directly social" more or less treated the new communist relations as something of a "black box". That's OK.

If we are going to be historical, some parts of our descriptions of how things work now involve factors "explained by local circumstances" and some portion of how things will work involve factors "yet to be explained".

But again, if you make your entire "deal", the historicity of different categories, your position can wind-up essentially meaningless - X period is or is not capitalist based whether it stays in or goes past one or another category (Whether the USSR was capitalist decided by one or another litmus test of whether it had wage labor and/or capital). So if you're meaningfully compared different historical periods and their qualities, you need at least a few "transhistorical" categories as well.

So to jump right in, what I'd say is communism does posit some inherent ability of people to organize things as a collective totality. When that is going on, one can speak of organizing society "directly" (as per Kapitalism101) even when one you can break down the dynamics involved with "acting directly" and say some apparently indirect steps happen (as per ultraviolet).

Now, the thing is not that communism would only be a pure return to "direct" or "collective unitary" relations but that it would actually have to systematically use and cultivate this "direct" way of relating. I guess I'd make the bold claim that the perfection of capitalist relations is the perfection of the previous modes of "alienation", of surplus extraction and that a society which came afterwards would thus have to involve the systematic refusal/negation of this alienation. But I think it reasonable. If you look in detail, what we'd call capitalism is both historical and trans-historical. Capitalism isn't purely the evolutes of European historical culture, domination and colonization but all the societies in which have reached the point that capital's categories self-reproduce within them.

With this, you might even argue that communism would have to systematically challenge all kinds of alienation rather than just those particular to capitalism (remembering "systematically challenge" is different from "elimenate"). But I'll leave further argument on that till later.