"TEMU and commodity fetishism" by Alice Cappelle – transcript (AI generated and corrected)

When I was researching for my video on introversion—wait, wait, the introversion video is actually going to come after this one. So, you know, if you don't want to miss it, you can subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications. Just saying. But anyway, let's go back to the video.

When I was researching for my video on introversion, in which I talked about content creator Michelle Choy, I had to watch a lot of her videos to find that cool angle, that hot take, that "aha" moment. In the process, I couldn’t help but notice how satisfying her content was. Michelle Choy is a popular social media influencer known for her lifestyle vlogs, particularly on YouTube and Instagram. Based in New York City, she shares her daily routines, travel experiences, beauty tips, and personal growth journey with her followers.

With that being said, I felt like the satisfaction I experienced while watching her videos came down to the number of practical gadgets she has. In Michelle's home, every single need is met with a product. This is not just satisfying to watch; it makes you want to buy the things as well, like a bin that automatically collects dust from the floor or a machine that prints cute labels. I didn’t feel like I needed that 10 minutes ago, but now I'm scrolling on Amazon or Etsy trying to find the item.

So, I paused for a second and started to think: do I really need this? If the answer is "yes," I wait 24 hours and decide. If the answer is "no," I just leave it. But still, I wanted to understand what’s going on. Why do I feel this way? Now, I’m not necessarily interested in the psychology of buying—that won’t be the topic of this video. I’m more interested in the social conditioning that makes that psychological impulse so strong and so freeing.

Basically, in this video, I’m going to talk about a concept called commodity fetishism. They offer the romance, the adventure of choosing from foods gathered from the four corners of the world. Each can tells the customers and the cashiers at the checkout stand how much it costs. In this video, we’re going to take a look at a very important market—the commodities market.

Commodity fetishism: I’ll give a brief definition for now, but the goal of this video is to fully understand what we mean by it through the example of Michelle Choy and, probably more importantly, through the example of the platform TEMU. I’ll make the connection later, so stay with me for now.

First, commodity fetishism. It’s made of two words: commodity and fetishism. A commodity is a product with a value assigned to it that is meant to be exchanged on the market. Fetishism is a word invented by European colonizers to refer to African traditions or religious practices. It comes from the Portuguese "feitiço," which means magic or spell. So, a fetish is something supernatural, magical even. Commodity fetishism then refers to the almost mystical relationship people have with commodities and the value we give them.

A common example is the diamond ring. To make the ring, someone had to get the diamond, forge it, attach it to the ring, transport it, and then sell it. Oftentimes, that involves more than one person. As a buyer, you don’t see all those social relations that are part of the process of making the diamond ring. What you see instead is the ring with its monetary and cultural value, which have little to do with its creation process. In other words, you're willing to pay a high price for the diamond ring because of the value we culturally give it. The high price is entirely based on the collective belief that the diamond ring is valuable, it’s precious. It solely depends on you and other people believing in it. So, if tomorrow we all woke up and collectively decided that diamond rings aren’t that special after all, then the value of the ring would drop.

That is commodity fetishism. The concept was invented by Karl Marx in response to his economist contemporaries, one of them being Adam Smith. Marx did not like Smith. Marx believed that the engine of progress was class struggle, whereas Smith believed that it was human nature guided by reason in the form of laissez-faire policies. In the eyes of Smith, the price of commodities is naturally established by individuals, so markets reflect human nature. Marx disagreed. That’s why he invented the term commodity fetishism—to expose the supernatural, not natural, relationship between a commodity and the value we people give it.

As a Marxist, Marx believed that commodity fetishism prevented buyers from seeing the labor that went into the production of the commodity they want to buy. Now, to go a little bit deeper, a bit more abstract, Marx saw commodity fetishism as the answer to avoid an absence that the buyer feels when they are confronted with an object, like a table, for example. Because they understand that tables don’t grow by themselves, they can’t help but wonder: where did it come from? To Marx, those subconscious questions aren’t met with a practical answer, like a little note saying that this table was made by Giorgio, who lives in Italy, has two kids, and is struggling to make ends meet because his boss doesn’t want to raise his salary despite four years of loyal service. No, you won’t see that. The absence of a little note, the void, the lack of answers is replaced by the fetish—the magic of having a nice chair with an arbitrary price, ready to be purchased and put in your home.

“How cool is that?” I kept repeating to myself as I was watching Michelle Choy’s videos. How cool is that little label printer? Seriously, the satisfaction was compounded by the fact that everything looked so functional, and I’m obsessed with little functional things. So, I felt legitimized to imagine myself getting the same thing. It’s the same as when you go shopping with a friend and try to convince yourself that you need that specific thing. Your friend is definitely giving you the “are you sure” look, but mentally you’re already at the checkout, and you answer, “Yeah, sure, I definitely need another black top.”

Really, it’s a funny little psychological trick that we do to ourselves. Michelle Choy’s content is so triggering for that because you don’t need to think too much if the thing is useful or not—it screams useful. It’s capitalism’s best surviving strategy: create a fake need and fulfill it. Michelle is a great agent of capitalism because she strengthens that need by staging the product in her home, showing the audience how convenient it is.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that the experience of watching Michelle Choy’s content was very similar to the experience of scrolling on a platform like TEMU. For those of you who don’t know, TEMU is an online selling platform that sells a variety of home and fashion items for super cheap prices. It looks a lot like fast fashion websites like Shein or platforms like Etsy or Amazon, but the variety of products and its accessibility is insane. On TEMU, it seems like all needs can be fulfilled. It’s hard to scroll and not feel the urge to get something. Sure, the products aren’t introduced by a friendly lifestyle YouTuber like Michelle Choy, but they’re still staged in a way. Things are organized in categories, and the presentation is optimized. Experts also noticed that TEMU uses gamification, which is “the practice of implementing gaming-related elements into the e-commerce experience.” Customers are encouraged to keep shopping with the introduction of bonuses and coupons that mimic the rewards you might accumulate in a video game.

And just to make it clear, 90% of my closet is secondhand. I am not trying to promote TEMU, even though they did reach out to me for sponsorships in the past, which is kind of interesting. I’ve heard that they pay good money for sponsorships, but yeah, I promise I won’t sell out or promote TEMU. I promise.

Anyway, people were quite shocked when they saw how platforms like Shein or Etsy kept dropping prices lower and lower, but TEMU is even worse than that. That’s late-stage capitalism. You feel like it cannot get worse, but it eventually does.

The fact that I’ve mentioned capitalism twice in this video is not a coincidence. Yes, I’m a leftist, but also, as I’ve explained at the beginning of the video, I’m not too interested in the psychological element of the buying process. I’m more interested in the social conditioning that makes that psychological impulse so strong and so free.

So, we introduced the concept of commodity fetishism, connected it to Michelle Choy’s content, and we’ve just made a parallel with the platform TEMU, which often reproduces the experience of Michelle Choy’s content but replaces the friendliness with catchy content and gamification.

Commodity fetishism is enhanced on TEMU because the platform doesn’t want you to think about the making of the product. Instead, they bombard you with a ton of information—prices, deadlines, ads, colorful pictures, popups. It is cheap, it will be sent to you for free, you can return it. No need to think about it, just add to the cart. No need to worry about who made the product, in which conditions, what are their wages.

Right?

What if it was too good to be true? Let me explain. The whole idea behind commodity fetishism is that the labor relations involved in the creation of a product are replaced by the fetish—the magic inherent to the arbitrary value attribution of a product. When we see a price tag, we assume that there is an explanation for it. We don’t question it too much because these are the natural laws of the market. Adam Smith said it, it must be true.

Well, TEMU, like most companies, let’s be honest, loves your denial. They love the fact that you don’t really question where the product comes from and just choose to accept the value that was attributed. But TEMU is not like most companies. TEMU wanted to disrupt the market of fast fashion and fast homeware by offering something completely new, something extremely cheap.

To sum it up, in the process of competing in a capitalist market with other brands like Etsy, Amazon, and Shein, TEMU pushed commodity fetishism to a level never seen before. But what is the limit? Is there a limit? When does commodity fetishism stop? When do people start to demand an explanation?

You see, TEMU is the latest invention of a hyper-capitalist society, but it may also cause its death because too much magic kills magic. Magic is most powerful when we feel like it helps us make sense of certain phenomena that are otherwise hard to explain. That is true for most religions and most spiritual practices, for commodity fetishism as well. Magic has a purpose—it fills a void, something that reality cannot fully explain. The belief in magic persists because of its relation to the real. That’s why religious people like to mobilize their faith to make sense of real-life events. That’s why the best magic tricks are the ones we feel we could uncover but somehow can’t.

TEMU’s magic, on the other hand, is so far from any possible reality—it’s so cheap that we can’t help but be skeptical. The skepticism then leads us to stop believing in the magic, to stop believing in commodity fetishism, and face what TEMU is trying to hide from us.

Now, that’s a really interesting phenomenon. You see, oftentimes when we think about getting rid of something bad like commodity fetishism or, by extension, capitalism, we think about how to challenge and dismantle it from the outside. In the case of TEMU or fast fashion and fast homeware in general, climate activism has been a source of challenge in the past decades. Climate activists and journalists have raised awareness of the dangers of capitalist overconsumption. They’ve conducted campaigns and written papers that served as a basis for popular social commentaries, read and viewed by millions of people. They worked hard to counter commodity fetishism and reframe the emotions it triggers.

I particularly like this video from climate activist Michaela Lo. Let's have a quick look and discuss it. “She is clothed in strength and dignity—or is it fast fashion?” This quote from Proverbs 31 was a big part of my initial boycott of fast fashion. If the clothes you wear are our chosen skin, do you want to be clothed in something which funds and supports oppression and violence, or do you want to be clothed in strength and dignity?

I like the fact that she brought up the terms strength and dignity because it is true that the act of buying is emotionally charged. It releases dopamine; it’s exciting. So, she chose to remain in the field of emotions and replace dopamine and excitement with strength and dignity. She could have chosen guilt, but instead, she focused on positive emotions, which is rhetorically good. Expression of personality through clothing can be empowering, but this empowerment should be on both sides. Both the maker and the wearer need to be empowered; otherwise, your empowerment is just some modern-day imperialist BS.

In that second part, Michaela exposes the social relations hidden behind commodity fetishism. She mentions the people, where they live, and the nature of their working conditions. For me, this is a really good piece of climate activism, challenging the system from the outside.

But what we’ve described with TEMU is quite different. We said that TEMU goes so hard on commodity fetishism that it forces us to question it. That is coherent with Marx’s belief that capitalism has internal contradictions that, when pushed to a certain limit, could lead to its demise. So, to sum it up, Marx says that capitalism could cause its own death by wanting its cake and eating it.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like that is exactly what TEMU is doing. When scrolling through the TEMU page, despite their efforts to cover it, it is really hard not to acknowledge that the extremely cheap prices mean someone got screwed in the process of making the thing. The exploitative labor relations that commodity fetishism aims to hide suddenly reveal themselves. It’s the same experience as the spiritual person who suddenly understands that their spiritual or religious community might not be as kind and inclusive as it likes to portray itself. Once they have this revelation, they have two options: either they double down on their beliefs and accept the immorality of that choice, or they choose a more moral path.

In the case of TEMU, you could choose to continue believing in the magic, to refuse to see all the exploitation that takes place in the process of making fast fashion and fast homeware. And by that, we mean the exploitation of working-class people, oftentimes women, sometimes kids, on the other side of the world.

That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is what we call accelerationism. In that situation, accelerationists would argue that we should let TEMU and other fast fashion and fast homeware brands do their thing. They would think we should push on that internal flaw to accelerate the downfall of capitalism and move on to something else.

Now, be careful because there are different types of accelerationists. You have the left-wing accelerationists who want to replace capitalism with communism, anarchism, anarcho-communism, or other sorts of movements. Then you have the right-wing or fascist accelerationists who want to accelerate acts of violence towards minority groups in order to establish a white ethnostate. And that is not cute; that is not something we want to support.

So yeah, this is how people can respond to the TEMU situation: one, denial of truth; second, accelerationism; and third, we said it earlier, activism. I mean, yeah, there is no definite answer or proper conclusion to this problem. This is more like a philosophical debate, a conversation, speculations as to what happens in the world of fast fashion and fast homeware, fitting into a broader historical narrative. Maybe we’re witnessing the self-destruction of the fast fashion and fast homeware industry. Maybe it will continue to thrive for decades, if not centuries. Who knows?

What’s clear is that Shein and TEMU have been fighting for monopoly in the last couple of years, threatening their existence in the process. Because yeah, the accumulation of lawsuits between the two led US safety regulators to think, "Hmm, maybe there’s a problem there. Let’s investigate." We’ll see how that goes, where that leads, and how capitalism ends.

But actually, what do you think? What is your theory? Are you more of an accelerationist who thinks capitalism will kind of destroy itself, or do you rather believe in activism, that we should put pressure and challenge the system in order to dismantle it? Or do you believe in both? I would like to hear your take. Please share it in the comment section. Let’s keep the conversation going.

That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Don’t forget to like and subscribe if you haven’t already. As always, I would like to thank my patrons for their support, and a special thank you to top-tier patrons. My battery died, so I’m going to do it here. A big thank you to Wolf Gratz, Sebastian Gazi, Shik Neil Verma, Enrin Patrick, Davesh Moan, Mina, Jeff Le, Dominic D, Yan Hang Tay, Martin, Nick, Brandon, James Ell, Pablo, Patrick, Boris, Ria, Ivon, Don, Alex, Tuki Ki, Tristan, Christopher, Patricia, Manuel, and Christopher France. And thank you to the others who prefer to stay anonymous. Thank you to Perry as well. I almost forgot Perry.

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