A commodity appears at first sight an obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very stranger thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by its activity humanity changes the form of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to it. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensible thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing that transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
The mysterious character of the commodity does not therefore arise from its use-value. Just as little does it proceed from the content of the determinators of value …
Whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, as soon as it assumes the form of a commodity? Clearly from this form itself …
The mysteriousness of the commodity-form consists … in the fact that the commodity reflects back the social characteristics of people's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as social natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the totality of labour as a social rleation between objects that exists outside of them. Through this substitution, this quid pro quo, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things things which are at the same time suprasensible or social … the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the determinate social relation between people themselves that assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of the religious world. There the products of human brains appear endowed with a life of their own, self-sufficient figures entering into relations with each other and with humans. So it is in the commodity-world with the products of human hands. I call this the fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities…
Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.
Extract from 'The Fetish Character of the Commodity and its Secret', Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, 2nd edn, 1873
Commodity fetishism is probably the best known of Marx's critical ideas about the capitalist economy. It is certainly the most immediately engaging idea in his complex and voluminous analysis of capitalism as a mode of production in his (unfinished) magnum opus, Capital – the published text of which runs to nearly 2000 pages. Most people are familiar with some notion of fetishism. However, the form of fetishism most commonly represented in capitalist cultures (in pornography, fashion magazines and advertisements) is sexual fetishism: the fixation of desire on a particular part of the body, type of object or material, such as feet, shoes, fur or rubber. A broadly Freudian, psycho-sexual conception of fetishism has thus come to prevail, in the culture of capitalism, with which Marx's notion of commodity fetishism is often confused. (This is particularly the case in certain kinds of cultural studies.) There is a tendency to assume that Marx's commodity fetishism is also about the fixing of desire, but on a different kind of object, the commodity: an investment of desire in the ownership of commodities. But this is not what Marx's account of the fetish character of the commodity is about.
The clue lies in the title of the relevant section of Capital: 'The Fetish Character of the Commodity and its Secret'. Marx's account is not about fetishism as a psychological condition of a subject, whose desire transforms the significance of particular objects. It is about the fetish character of the commodity itself, a special kind of object: specifically, the fetish character of its 'form', the commodity-form. For Marx, the commodity-form is 'the value-form of the commodity', the commodity considered not as a physical entity, but as a value (C 1, 90). What Marx is referring to with the idea of commodity fetishism is thus not the fetishization of particular commodities by individual consumers. It is a 'fetishism that attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities'. It derives from the social relations of production and is a feature of the capitalist mode of production in general. (For Marx, capitalist societies are those in which commodity production based on wage-labour prevails.) What we might call consumer fetishism, on the other hand, is part of a historically much more particular regime of circulation of consumer goods to which advertising, design and display – a whole apparatus of 'commodity aesthetics' – is central. Marx's conception is both more general and involves a more socially fundamental explanation.
To understand Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, we need to be clear about two things. First, what is involved when something is 'produced as a commodity'? Second, what was at stake for Marx in the 'analogy' of fetishism? What was the context within which the term operated in mid-nineteenth-century Europe?
Marx considers commodity fetishism at the end of the first chapter of Capital, 'The Commodity', and his discussion depends upon the analysis that precedes it. To understand commodity fetishism, we must first familiarize ourselves with Marx's account of the commodity as the 'elementary form' of wealth in capitalist societies. Simple as the commodity might seem, this is the part of Capital that Marx acknowledged presents 'the greatest difficulty' to the reader (C 1, 89). Marx's analysis of the commodity is perhaps his greatest thought. He begins by pointing out that every commodity has both a 'use-value' and an 'exchange-value'. (This is why, far from being 'obvious' and 'trivial', a commodity can become a strange, tricky or mixed-up thing.) A use-value is a property that satisfies some human need, such that someone might want to purchase the commodity. An exchange-value is a quantitative measure of the value of a commodity in relation to other commodities. It is the possession of exchange-value that makes a product a commodity. To be produced as a commodity is to be produced for exchange. Commodity production is production for exchange.
Marx's analysis goes furhter by arguing that in commodity production, labour also has a two-fold or 'double' character. Marx calls these aspects 'concrete labour' and 'abstract labour', corresponding to labour's production of the use-value and exchange-value of commodities, respectively. 'Concrete labour' designates the particular skills and practices necessary to produce a particular kind of object: the sawing, planning and hammering necessary to produce a table from wood, for example. Abstract labour, on the other hand refers to the expenditure of human labour-power in general, in the production of commodities. Marx argues that it is only when labour is reduced to this single homogenous quality that concrete labours become measurably comparable, and their products can be exchanged for money. It is as the source of abstract labour that labour-power itself is commodified. The standpoint of abstract labour is the standpoint of exchange. Chronological time is Marx's unit of measure for abstract labour. In this account, the 'socially average' time taken to produce a commodity is the measure of its relationship to other commodities. This is Marx's labour theory of value, but it is not what concerns us here.
What concerns us is the effect of abstract labour on the social being of the commodity – on what it most fundamentally is. According to Marx, when labour-power is bought as a commodity, for wages, within a process of commodity production, it is the labourer's capacity to produce exchange-value, rather than use-value, that is being purchased. Use-values are produced too, of course, since nothing without a use-value can be exchanged, but in commodity production the real goal of the process is exchange-value. Use-values are merely its material bearers. More specifically, the goal is an exchange-value greater than that of the facotrs of production as a whole: a 'surplus' value. On sale, this surplus value is realized as profit. Such, in a nutshell, is Marx's economics of the commodity.
The reason a commodity is a 'mysterious' thing, according to Marx, is that its possession of exchange-value endows it with characteristics unrelated to either its use or its sensible, material form.
[…] Moreover, Marx argues, this 'suprasensible' aspect, which is expressed through price, is the only way that the social side of the commodity appears; it is the only way 'private labour manifests itself as a member of the social total-labour' (C 1, 165). The concrete relationships of cooperation and dependency between different types of labour that are needed to produce commodities are invisible. They have no discernible social expression. Yet in practice they knit the very fabric of society. Furthermore, and this is Marx's critical point, the commodity's suprasensible property – exchange-value – appears as if it was an 'objective', 'socio-natural' property of the object itself. Value appears to be embeded in the product.
[…] Fetishism appears within [its historical] context as a category from the Enlightenment philosophy of religion.
[…] From the perspective of the Enlightenment, fetishism is a distinctly pre-modern, and therefore irrational, phenomenon. Fetishism is one of a series of terms that Marx uses to characterize states of affairs that produce illusions, all of which derive from an Enlightenment discourse that relegate such illusions to the past. […] There is a trick of the eye built into the very structure of the commodity-form, Marx is suggesting. It is an 'objective illusion' that remains even after it has been comprehended.
[…] This is the germ of the idea that Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. ADorno would later, in the 1940s, formulate as the 'dialectic of enlightenment': pushed to its limit, enlightenment (here, commodity production as a rational harnessing of natural materials) is itself revealed to be bound up with myth (the fetishism of commodities).
[…] The transparency of social relations is only one of several criteria that Marx used to make political and historical judgements about different societies. Nonetheless, its limits are worth keeping in mind when thinking about the power of commodity fetishism as a critical, rather than an analytical or interpretive category in Marx's investigation of capitalism. When he wrote of commodity fetishism Marx wrote not of a desire for commodities but of a displacement of the desire to know.
Source