Everything about Commodity Fetishism totally explained
In
Marxist theory,
commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in capitalist market based societies, in which social relationships are transformed into apparently objective relationships between commodities or money. The term is introduced in the opening chapter of
Karl Marx's main work of
political economy,
Capital, of 1867 .
As it relates to commodities specifically, commodity fetishism is the belief that value inheres in commodities instead of being added to them through labor. This is the root of Marx's critique relating to conditions surrounding fetishism--that capitalists "fetishize" commodities, believing that they contain value, and the effects of labor are misunderstood.
Marx's use of the term
fetish can be interpreted as an ironic comment on the "rational", "scientific" mindset of
industrial capitalist societies. In Marx's day, the word was primarily used in the study of primitive
religions; Marx's "fetishism of commodities" might be seen as proposing that just such primitive belief systems exist at the heart of modern society. In most subsequent Marxist thought,
commodity fetishism is defined as an
illusion arising from the central role that
private property plays in capitalism's social processes. It is a central component of the
dominant ideology in capitalist societies.
Marx's argument
People within capitalist societies find their material life organized through the
medium of commodities. They trade their labour-power (which in Marx's view is a commodity) for a special commodity,
money, and use that commodity to claim various other commodities produced by other people.
In Classical Economic terms, the "use-value," the usefulness of a product is abstracted from the "exchange-value," the marketplace value of a product derived from its demand.
An example is that a pearl or a lump of gold is worth more than a horseshoe or a corkscrew. This abstraction is referred to as "fetishism." (The term "social" is used by Marx to refer to the essential organization of a
society, for example, to those processes by which a society allocates the tasks necessary to its survival.) Under this system
producers and
consumers have no direct human contact or conscious agreements to provide for one another. Their productions take on a property form, meet and exchange in a marketplace, and return in property form. Production and consumption are private experiences of person to commodity and material self-interest, not person to person and communal interest.
The work of social relations seems to be conducted by commodities amongst themselves, out in the marketplace. The market appears to decide who should do what for whom. Social relationships are confused with their medium, the commodity. The commodity seems to be imbued with human powers, becoming a fetish of those powers. Human agents are denied awareness of their social relations, becoming
alienated from their own social activity. As a consequence of commodity fetishism, the basic political issues involved in social relationships are obscured, from both
exploiter and
exploited. Commodity fetishism ensures that neither side is fully conscious of the political positions they occupy. Hence the commodity can be seen as the basic unit of social relations in Capitalism.
It is important to remember, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek points out that according to Marx, we can't see the commodity fetish as simply an illusion to be dispelled by critical awareness -- hence Marx's "theological niceties" -- it's instead not a secret, as everyone well knows, that it's a concrete unit of open social exchange, as for example a coin which is treated not as a physical, perishable thing -- since it's replaced automatically by the mint. Yet currencies seem to have a life of their own, going up and down unpredictably, but this is only because we treat them according to their own "real" concept. To quote Marx,
In order to exchange goods on the market we abstract from them their individuality (labor) and treat them as universals. In
Capital, this argument is presented by tracing the formal aspect of a commodity, its value, from the most abstract model possible towards more concrete, real life models. This method of analysis owes much to
Hegel, is densely written, and proves highly resistant to summarization.
After Marx
The fetishism of commodities has proven fertile material for work by other theorists since Marx, who have added to, adapted, or, perhaps, "vulgarized" the original concept. Sigmund Freud's well-known but unrelated theory of sexual fetishism led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object.
György Lukács based
History and Class Consciousness on Marx's notion, developing his own notion of commodity
reification as the key obstacle to
class consciousness. Lukács's work was a significant influence on later philosophers such as
Guy Debord and
Jean Baudrillard. Debord developed a notion of the spectacle that ran directly parallel to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the spectacle made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa). The spectacle is the form taken by society once the instruments of cultural production have become wholly commoditised and exposed to circulation. Debord's work should be seen as a confirmation of the existence of what Marx's critique would seem to predict as, within it, the intimacies of intersubjective and personal self-relating are critiqued as already being affected by commodification. In the work of the
semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation", that is, among consumers. Baudrillard was especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by
advertising, which encourages
consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal
identity. In
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard develops a notion of the sign that, like Debord's notion of spectacle, runs alongside Marx's commodity.
Other theorists have been concerned with the social status of the producers of consumer items relative to their consumers. For example, the person who owns a
Porsche has more prestige than the people working on the assembly-line that produced it. But this version of commodity fetishism refers to more—the belief that the car (or any manufactured object) is more important than people, and confers special powers beyond material utility to those who possess it
(see also Conspicuous consumption).
Further Information
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