If there was one Marxist concept that had to be singled out for being the most misunderstood
of all, that award would have to go to Commodity Fetishism.
Much like the widespread misunderstandings of “Dictatorship” in Dictatorship of the
Proletariat and “Materialism” in Historical Materialism, the word “Fetishism” in Marx’s
Commodity Fetishism to the modern ear conjures up all kinds of weird and wonderful connotations
– well, mostly just weird.
But look, to clarify from the get-go, no, we’re not going to be discussing paraphilia
– Marx really wasn’t overly concerned with people’s sex lives, especially not
in relation to random objects.
Likewise, we aren’t going to be talking about the more common misconception of Commodity
Fetishism as people simply being obsessed with purchasing consumer goods.
Marx’s Commodity Fetishism refers neither to a sexual fetish nor an excessive preoccupation
with consumerism.
So, what does it refer to?
What is Karl Marx’s conception of Commodity Fetishism?
Let’s find out.
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Now, when Marx uses the word “Fetishism” he uses it in an older anthropological sense
of the term.
A fetish, by this understanding, is an object that appears to have some kind of magical
or mystical, supernatural powers within it.
This often occurs in religious, spiritual, and mythological contexts.
Think of a magic ring that supposedly grants superpowers to its possessor.
The object somehow contains a power or value that’s perceived to be inherent within it.
The question of where this power or value has come from is obscured, hidden behind a
veil of mysticism.
Questions regarding where the ring came from, under what conditions it was produced, what
its molecular composition is, why it has appeared at this specific moment in time, etc. are
all brushed aside.
We instead just see a static object that exists with power and value which appears to emanate
from the object itself – rather than from complex processes of production among people
which have actually given rise to it.
This is the illusion of the object: the fetishism that conceals the social reality of its production,
and instead ascribes to the object inherent power and value.
So, when Marx talks about Commodity Fetishism, he’s similarly referring to our illusory
perception as consumers that commodities contain inherent value in and of themselves, appearing
in a kind of vacuum that’s devoid of the larger social context of the production of
these commodities by real people engaged in exploitative labour relations.
When we walk into a shop and see a chair, we’re only seeing the finished product and
its price tag.
The appearance, then, to us, is that this commodity – the chair – simply inherently
contains value.
But what constitutes that value is generally not immediately clear to us.
We may be able to know its use-value: that it can be sat upon.
We may be able to see that it’s made from wood or other materials.
And, of course, we know that it can be exchanged for a certain quantity of another commodity
that we may possess – money.
We can kind of see how it relates to other things.
But we know virtually nothing about how this chair was created and those involved.
We don’t know who cut down what trees and where for the wood required to produce this.
We don’t know who assembled it.
We don’t know how the wood got to the factory for production, nor how the final product
got from that factory to the shop in which it’s now being sold.
And, importantly, we know nothing about the working conditions for all of those involved
in this complex process of production.
We know nothing about the vast amount of people involved in this process and how they relate
to one another – employees and employers.
From the capitalist who first hired workers to cut down trees to sell wood, and now all
the way to us, the consumers, at the end of this process at the point of exchange.
These social relations between real people at every step of the way are kept hidden from
us.
We know nothing about the exploited workers who produced the chair, and they know nothing
about us who purchase the product of their labour for our personal use.
Thus, these real social relations between people ourselves are hidden, and in its place
we’re confronted with what appears to us to be merely relations between things; those
things generally being the money in our pocket, and the commodity before us: our chair.
This is the fetishism of commodities.
The illusion that commodities themselves somehow contain inherent value that’s separate from
this web of exploitative capitalist social relations between actual human beings.
As a thought experiment, pick any object around you and try to trace it back to its origins.
Where did it come from?
Who assembled it?
Where did its constituent parts come from?
What were the labour conditions like for those involved in its production and distribution
from beginning to end?
It’s difficult, isn’t it?
Maybe you lucked out and chose a Fair-Trade cup of coffee that told you a little bit about
where it came from and how wonderfully ethical the entire process was.
But, in general, it’s nearly impossible for consumers to trace a commodity’s creation
back through the entirety of the complex global supply chains which have facilitated its production
and distribution, let alone ask questions about the relations between all the workers
and the capitalists involved in it.
Because this production and distribution generally occurs privately, behind closed doors.
And that’s extremely beneficial to the capitalists – most consumers would be repulsed if they
learnt about the slave-labour involved in the production process of many goods that
they’d regularly purchase, and this could potentially damage capitalists’ profit margins.
So, when we go into a shop and look at commodities, like our chair, what appears to us, as a result
of the mystifying veil of Commodity Fetishism, is, rather than relations between actual living
human beings, instead “the fantastic form of a relation between things” – our money
and this or that commodity.
As a result of the private, hidden nature of the production process, what we see is
only the surface-level relations between things, concealing the truth of exploitative social
relations between real living, breathing people.
Concealing this factor that all commodities share in common: human labour.
Today we’ve taken a look at commodity fetishism.
We began by clearing up misconceptions around the word “fetish” based on contemporary
uses of the term.
We then proceeded to examine “Fetishism” as used in the anthropological context in
order to make sense of Marx’s use of the term.
With this definition, we then looked at what Commodity Fetishism means in the context of
Marx’s critique of Political Economy – which is, to simplify, how in commodities we perceive
the real social relations between people as instead simply relations between things.
This conceals the exploitative reality of the process of capitalist production that
lies hidden, occurring privately, behind closed doors.
Thank you for watching this video, hopefully you’ve found it useful.
If you’d like to learn more about Commodity Fetishism, you’ll find extra resources linked
in the description box below.
As always, reading about these subjects will get you a lot further than solely watching
short introductory videos like this – I strongly recommend having a read of section
four of the first chapter of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, which fleshes this topic out a lot
more.
If you’re struggling with the “commodity” part of Commodity Fetishism, you can find
this explained in more detail in the previous Socialism101 video on Marx’s Law of Value.
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