Commodity fetishism - 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. 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. Georg Lukács based History and Class Consciousness on Marx's notion, developing his own notion of commodity reification as the ...

See also:

Commodity fetishism, Commodity fetishism - Marx's argument, Commodity fetishism - After Marx, Commodity fetishism - External link

Read more here: » Commodity fetishism: Encyclopedia II - Commodity fetishism - After Marx

In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is an inauthentic state of social relations, said to arise in complex capitalist market systems, where social relationships are confused with their medium, the commodity. 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 p ...

Including:

• Commodity fetishism - Marx's argument
• Commodity fetishism - After Marx
• Commodity fetishism - External link

Read more here: » Commodity fetishism: Encyclopedia - Commodity fetishism

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 pe ...

See also:

Commodity fetishism, Commodity fetishism - Marx's argument, Commodity fetishism - After Marx, Commodity fetishism - External link

Read more here: » Commodity fetishism: Encyclopedia II - Commodity fetishism - Marx's argument