BIGpedia - Commodity fetishism - Encyclopedia and Dictionary Online

Commodity fetishism is the inauthentic state of social relations , said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, where people mistake social relationships for things. The term is introduced in the opening chapter of Karl Marx's main work of political economy, Capital, (1867).

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 identifying just such primitive belief systems 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.

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Marx's argument

Persons within capitalist societies find their material life organized through the medium of commodities. They trade their labor-power for a special commodity, money, and use that commodity to claim various other commodities produced by other people.

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.

The social connections between the people involved are thereby obscured (It should be noted that the term 'social', for Marx at least, refers to the essential organization of a society, i.e., those processes by which a society allocates the tasks necessary to its survival). Social relations between people are experienced only in the form of the commodities they see extracted from them as producers, and those returned to them as consumers. Both are private experiences, of person to commodity, and of material self 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.

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, as Marxist orthodoxy might see it, 'vulgarized' the original concept. In the work of Sigmund Freud, of course, the word "fetish" is used with a different resonance, which led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually-charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object.

Georg 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' 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). In the work of the semiotician Jean Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the 'realm of circulation', ie, among consumers. Baudrillard is 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 his 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. A simple example will illustrate this version of the theory: the person who owns a Cadillac (or Lexus or Bentley) 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 (i.e., beyond the direct, material utility) to those who possess it.

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Categories: Marxist theory