Empathy with commodities is really empathy with exchange-value itself.

Evidence

Basically, however, empathy with the commodity is probably empathy with exchange-value itself. And in fact, one can hardly imagine the ‘consumption’ of exchange-value as anything else but an empathy with it.You write: ‘The consumer really worships the money which he has spent on a ticket for a Toscanini concert’. Empathy with exchange-value can turn guns into articles of consumption more attractive than butter. When in popular parlance someone is said to be ‘loaded to the tune of five million’, then the entire national community also feels itself loaded with millions more; and it empathizes with those millions. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 448

Categorization

• DEFINE: Benjamin reframes Adorno’s ‘consumption of exchange-value’ thesis into a precise definition: empathy with the commodity is empathy with exchange-value, which can turn guns into desirable consumer goods.
• XREF: connects to: Exchange creates value as genuinely as production does. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 228; Audiences worship the exchange value they themselves created by buying. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 84; Exchange itself, not utility or scarcity, creates economic value. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 261 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Audiences worship the exchange value they themselves created by buying. #corroborates (0.87) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 84
• Exchange itself, not utility or scarcity, creates economic value. #expands (0.85) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 261
• Exchange creates value as genuinely as production does. #expands (0.82) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 228
• Economic value emerges through the distance exchange creates between self and object #expands (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 250
• The image of uninhibited vitality itself recycles commodity fetishism #expands (0.78)