In Marxist philosophy, commodity fetishism () is a belief that social aspects of economic goods are inherent to them, rather than being expressions of social relations in which goods and their underlying labour are exchanged. Through commodity fetishism, social phenomena such as market value, wages and rent are reified (attributed to things, i.e. goods, labour, land) while people who determine them—traders, capitalists, landlords—are made to seem passive or obscured altogether. The concept is crucial to Karl Marx's critique of economic theory, which seeks to locate the source of profit in the capitalist economy.
Concept In the first chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), commodity fetishism is used to explain how the social organization of labour manifests in the buying and selling of commodities (goods and services). In the marketplace, social relations among people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, etc.—are represented as social relations among objects.
In the process of commercial exchange, commodities appear in a depersonalized form, obscuring the social relations inherent to their production. Marx explained the sociology of commodity fetishism:
According to Marx, the operation of commodity fetishism requires the owners of capital to actively ignore or maintain an indifference to the relational whole that produces a commodity.
Development
The theory of commodity fetishism () originated from Karl Marx's references to fetishes and fetishism in his analyses of religious superstition, and in the criticism of the beliefs of political economists.The various references in the 'Wood Theft' articles to idols, animal masks, worship of animals, and fetishes, reflect Marx's systematic study (1841–42) of primitive religion. The notebooks indicate that Marx was especially interested in the concept of fetishism — its nature, its origins, and the difference between ancient and modern forms of fetishism. (MEGA, Vol . 1, Part 2 p. 115ff) — Marx borrowed the concept of "fetishism" from The Cult of Fetish Gods (1760) by Charles de Brosses, which proposed a materialist theory of the origin of religion.The German translation was Uber den Dienst der fetischengotter oder Vergleichung der alten religion Egyptians mit den heutigen Religion Nigritiens. Ubersetzt von Christian Brandanus Hermann Pistorius. Berlin, Stralsund: Gottlieb August Lange, 1785. For a study of the conceptual origin of fetishism, see: William Pietz, "The problem of the fetish, I", Res 9 (Spring 1985), pp. 5–17; "The problem of the fetish, II: The origin of the fetish", Res 13 (Spring 1987), pp. 23–45; "The problem of the fetish, III: Bosman's Guinea and the enlightenment theory of fetishism", Res 16 (Autumn 1988), pp. 105–123. Moreover, in the 1840s, the philosophic discussion of fetishism by Auguste Comte, and Ludwig Feuerbach's psychological interpretation of religion also influenced Marx's development of commodity fetishism.
Marx's first mention of fetishism appeared in 1842, in his response to a newspaper article by Karl Heinrich Hermes that proposed to censor "philosophical and religious" arguments from newspapers. Hermes agreed with the German philosopher Hegel in regarding fetishism as the crudest form of religion. Marx dismissed that argument and Hermes's definition of religion as that which elevates man "above sensuous appetites". Instead, Marx said that fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites", and that the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper. Therefore, the crude appetite of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On religion. Atlanta: Scholars, 1982, p. 22.
Marx returned to the theme later that year when commenting on Rhineland legislative debates that established complex penalties for the formerly legal gathering of wood in private forests. He attacked the laws as justifiable only if the wood itself were held sacred:
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the European fetish of precious-metal money:
In the ethnological notebooks, he commented upon the archaeological reportage of The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social conditions of Savages (1870), by John Lubbock.Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx: Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972, p. 342f. In the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse, 1859), he criticized the liberal arguments of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat; and about fetishes and fetishism Marx said:
In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx referred to A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy (1825), by John Ramsay McCulloch, who said that "In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value", with which Marx concurred, saying that "this shows how high even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German 'thinkers' who assert that 'material', and half a dozen similar irrelevancies are elements of value".
Furthermore, in the manuscript of "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" (c. 1864), an appendix to Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), Marx said that:
Hence did Karl Marx apply the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from economic and ethnologic studies, to the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, wherein an economic abstraction (value) is psychologically transformed (reified) into an object, which people choose to believe has an intrinsic value, in and of itself.For more details, see
Critique In the critique of political economy
Marx proposed that, in a society where independent, private producers trade their products with each other, of their own volition and initiative, and without much coordination of market exchange, the volumes of production and commercial activities are adjusted in accordance with the fluctuating values of the products (goods and services) as they are bought and sold, and in accordance with the fluctuations of supply and demand. Because their social coexistence, and its meaning, is expressed through market exchange (trade and transaction), people have no other relations with each other. Therefore, social relations are continually mediated and expressed with objects (commodities and money). How the traded commodities relate will depend upon the costs of production, which are reducible to quantities of human labour, although the worker has no control over what happens to the commodities that they produce. (See: Entfremdung, Marx's theory of alienation)
Domination of things
The concept of the intrinsic value of commodities (goods and services) determines and dominates the economic (business) relationships among people, to the extent that buyers and sellers continually adjust their beliefs (financial expectations) about the value of things—either consciously or unconsciously—to the proportionate price changes (market value) of the commodities over which buyers and sellers believe they have no true control. That psychologic perception transforms the trading-value of a commodity into an independent entity (an object), to the degree that the social value of the goods and services appears to be a natural property of the commodity itself. Thence objectified, the market appears as if self-regulated (by fluctuating supply and demand) because, in pursuit of profit, the consumers of the products ceased to perceive the human co-operation among capitalists that is the true engine of the market where commodities are bought and sold; such is the domination of things in the market.
Objectified value The value of a commodity originates from the human being's intellectual and perceptual capacity to consciously (subjectively) ascribe a relative value (importance) to a commodity, the goods and services manufactured by the labour of a worker. Therefore, in the course of the economic transactions (buying and selling) that constitute market exchange, people ascribe subjective values to the commodities, which the buyers and the sellers then perceive as objective values, the market-exchange prices that people will pay for the commodities.
Naturalization of market behaviour In a capitalist society, the human perception that "the market" is an independent, sentient entity, is how buyers, sellers, and producers naturalize market exchange (the human choices and decisions that constitute commerce) as a series of "natural phenomena ... that ... happen of their own accord". Such were the political-economy arguments of the economists whom Karl Marx criticized when they spoke of the "natural equilibria" of markets, as if the price (value) of a commodity were independent of the volition and initiative of the capitalist producers, buyers, and sellers of commodities.
In the 18th century, the Scottish social philosopher and political economist Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776) proposed that the "truck, barter, and exchange" activities of the market were corresponding economic representations of human nature, that is, the buying and selling of commodities were activities intrinsic to the market, and thus are the "natural behaviour" of the market. Hence, Smith proposed that a market economy was a self-regulating entity that "naturally" tended towards economic equilibrium, wherein the relative prices (the value) of a commodity ensured that the buyers and sellers obtained what they wanted for and from their goods and services.
In the 19th century, Karl Marx contradicted the artifice of Adam Smith's "naturalisation of the market's behaviour" as a politico-ideologic apology—by and for the capitalists—which allowed human economic choices and decisions to be misrepresented as fixed "facts of life", rather than as the human actions that resulted from the will of the producers, the buyers, and the sellers of the commodities traded at market. Such "immutable economic laws" are what Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) revealed about the functioning of the capitalist mode of production, how goods and services (commodities) are circulated among a society; and thus explain the psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value—other than the value given to it by the producer, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.
Masking
In a capitalist economy, a character mask () is the functional role with which a person relates and is related to in a society composed of stratified social classes, especially in relationships and market-exchange transactions; thus, in the course of buying and selling, the commodities (goods and services) usually appear other than they are, because they are masked (obscured) by the role-playing of the buyer and the seller. Moreover, because the capitalist economy of a class society is an intrinsically contradictory system, the masking of the true socio-economic character of the transaction is an integral feature of its function and operation as market exchange. In the course of business competition among themselves, buyers, sellers, and producers cannot do business (compete) without obscurity—confidentiality and secrecy—thus the necessity of the character masks that obscure true economic motive.