Commodity fetishism and object liberation
On of the criticisms of object-oriented ontology which has some currency is the suggestion that it is a form of, or a philosophized alibi for, commodity fetishism. And this has a superficial plausibility; doesn’t the focus on objects enact the kind of reification that Marx criticizes. I don’t think this plausibility is more than superficial, though, because it misunderstands object-oriented ontology and, more importantly, misunderstands commodity fetishism. In fact, object-oriented philosophy might provide a useful way of analyzing commodity fetishism which we could use to provide a Marxist corrective to the banality of much leftist critique of reification (such as that of Axel Honneth). Read moreā“