COMMODITY FETISHISM
In Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism, commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. With the notion of commodity fetishism, illustrated in the first chapter of Book 1 of Capital, Marx took a step further in a precise direction, explicitly framing his indictment of the division of labour in terms of the specific form it assumes in capitalistic economies (Roncaglia, 2005, p. 250).
Dobra (2010, p. 3) maintains that in The Capital Marx uses the Feuerbachian model of reversal in order to develop his notion of fetishism of commodities. A commodity is defined as “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (Marx, 1992) while fetishism is defined as attributing inherent value to an object. Commodity fetishism is the appearance that the commodity has a natural and intrinsic value, apart from the labour bestowed on it. According to Dobra (2010, p. 3), for Marx, the capitalist economic world is truly of religious essence, in other words, religious ideology has been replaced by market ideology. As such “human needs are realized and appear in the form of alienated essence in religion just as economic relations do in social life according to Marx” (Hamacher, 1999). The fetishism of commodities corresponds to “a definite social where relation between men assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx, 1992).
Furthermore, under capitalism the social relations of production are established by means of the transfer of “things” from individual to individual. This transfer of things has a coercive power over men via the way production is organized. Commodity fetishism describes a situation in which alienation predominates, due to “the social power which arises through the co-operation of different individuals appears to these individuals not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control” (Marx, 1992). In capitalism the domination of the “material” is not an illusory interpretation of social relations among people, it is a real social fact, fetishism is “a phenomenon of social being”. In other words, “property, capital, money, wage labour, do not in themselves represent phantoms of the imagination, but very practical, very concrete products of self-alienated forms of two worlds” (Rubin, 1972).
Nonetheless, Dobra (2010, p. 7) argues that the fetishism of commodities designates the collective and individual logic of representation, in which social relations are replaced by material relations. The concept of fetishism of commodities is especially important in Marx’s theory because it constitutes a tool for the capitalist ideology. It contributes to institutionalize domination and to stabilize class antagonisms, via the alienation. “In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura” (Marx, 1998).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dobra, A. (2010). What does Marx mean by the ‘fetishism of commodities’?. E-LOGOS Electronic Journal For Philosophy. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/7127/1/dobra10b.pdf
Hamacher, W. (1999). A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Michael Sprinker Eds, London : Verso.
Marx, K., (1998). The German Ideology, including Theses on Feuerbach. New-York: Prometheus Books.
Roncaglia, A. (2005). The Wealth Of Ideas – A History Of Economic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Rubin, I., I. (1972). Essays on Marx Theory of Value. Detroit: Black and Red.