I was thinking about how to talk about the except from Capital that we’ll be discussing tomorrow, the famous riff on the “fetishism of commodities.”  And I thought about commercials, naturally, especially the amazing Apple ads in the first decade of the 2000s, that push Marx’s notion of the commodity as “fetish” to an extent that he scarcely could have imagined:

Apple COMPLETE iPod “Silhouette” ad campaign compilation (2004-2008)

Uploaded by Tech World Newss on 2014-04-23.

And I really wanted to show the one with disembodied hands playing “Heart and Soul” on a virtual keyboard on an iPad, but all I can find are hundreds of people offering to teach us how to do it ourselves.  I’ll leave it to you to figure out what Marx would say about YouTube:

Apple iPad Mini Commercial Song – Heart and Soul

After watching the iPad Mini ad, I decided to try to play that myself. I got my iPad 2, learned the song from watching the ad repeatedly, and videotaped me playing it.

Finally, here’s a spoof of the original commerical that performs a bit of “ideology critique” by way of satire:

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And of course no discussion of Marx and Apple would be complete without a discussion, at least glancingly, of the way Apple’s products embody both the “fetishization” process and the grim face of the “alienation of labor” that Marx examines in Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844.  This report from China Labor Watch from 2012 gives some sense of how, as Marx and Engels put it in the mid-19thC, the “animal becomes human, the human becomes animal” today.