Communism101

Thanks for engaging. It's definitely not something I am super firm on. I think the concrete examples you gave and I gave are pointing to different things. Maybe I was not clear on the distinction I was trying to make.

The way I interpret your examples is that we see the book in its idealist form, not its material form. That is to say, we see the brand, the status, the convenience, the desire, but not the object and all its relationships.

What I was trying to convey is that we interpret all of life through the lens of commodification. So when I see a beautiful tree, I think "how can I make money on this" and suddenly something that wasn't a commodity becomes a commodity. We do this over and over. In the 1800s, some human activities that we now think of as jobs were not yet commodities, they were just things people did. But, through commodification of labor, commodity fetishism set in and more activities that were not commodifird became commodified. So, people used to make dolls for their kids, or read them bedtime stories, and now those have been commodified by someone fetishizing the commodity form and trying to apply it to things they see in the world.

Perhaps that is what you were trying to explain as well, and I didn't interpret your words as you intended. But my initial read of your words does not match what I was trying to convey with mine.