Commodity fetishism: Encyclopedia II - Commodity fetishism - Marx's argument

Commodity fetishism - Marx's argument

People within capitalist societies find their material life organized through the medium of commodities. They trade their labor-power (which is in Marx' view a commodity) for a special commodity, money, and use that commodity to claim various other commodities produced by other people. The social nature of society is destroyed by the abstraction of commodites, in the sense that "use-value" (the usefulness of an object or action) is totally separated from "exchange-value" (the marketplace value of an object or action). An example is that a pearl or a lump of gold is worth more than a horseshoe or a corkscrew. This abstraction is refered to as "fetishism." (It should be noted that the term "social" is used by Marx to refer to the essential organization of a society, i.e., 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.

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.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Marx's argument", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki