The commodity mediates interpersonal struggle between producer and consumer

Evidence

For the worker is also alone with things, with his tools and machines and raw materials: yet insofar as they stand as commands to him to produce a given object for someone else, he feels them as an alien presence, as the look of the third, before which he himself becomes a kind of object along with his fellow workers. Yet the consumer who ultimately uses these manufactured objects feels himself “at one” in a profoundly depersonalized, anonymous sense with all those others who also buy and use the merchandise in question. Thus even in Being and Nothingness the commodity is the disguised bearer of interpersonal relationship, interpersonal struggle. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 504

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘commodity as disguised bearer of interpersonal relationship’ directly prefigures Jameson’s later argument in Postmodernism (‘the political unconscious’) and connects to Adorno’s account of the commodity form as social hieroglyph; also resonates with the reader’s interest in how Jameson later totalizes through it. — connects to: Economic rationality reduces individuals to obstacles in the production process; Commodities mediate social prestige despite being essentially social not economic — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 470; Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor
• DEEPTHINKING: The twist — that the consumer feels ‘at one’ with strangers precisely in their shared depersonalization — is a genuinely paradigm-shifting inversion (alienation as a kind of phantom solidarity) worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor #expands (0.80)
• Economic rationality reduces individuals to obstacles in the production process #expands (0.75)
• Commodities mediate social prestige despite being essentially social not economic #expands (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 470