Commodity fetishism

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Marxist theory

In Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of

human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships
between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships
between things (commodities and money).

The concept of commodity fetishism plays a crucial role in Marx's theory of capitalism, because
it links the subjective aspects of economic value to its objective aspects, through the
transformation of a symbolization of value into a reification which attains the power of an
objective social force.[1] It plays an integral part in Marx's explanation of why economic
relationships and interactions in capitalism often appear quite differently from what they really
are. The concept is introduced at the conclusion of an analysis of the value-form of commodities
in the first chapter of Marx's main work, Das Kapital. Subsequently he clarifies in Das Kapital
that many different economic phenomena can be "fetishized" (the fetish of money, the fetish of
interest-bearing capital, etc.) to the extent that they attain an independent power vis-a-vis the
people.[2] But these further developments of commercial fetishism nevertheless have their historical
origin in commodity trade.

Contents
[hide]
 1 Textual origins
 2 Important dimensions of the concept
 o 2.1 "Fetish"
o 2.2 Example
o 2.3 Reification
o 2.4 Beliefs
 3 Marx's argument
o 3.1 The domination of things
o 3.2 The objectification of value
o 3.3 Naturalization
o 3.4 Masking
o 3.5 The opacity of economic relations
o 3.6 Conclusion
 4 After Marx
o 4.1 Cultural theorists
o 4.2 Menger and subjective wants
o 4.3 Market freedom
 5 Criticism
 6 See also
 7 Further reading
 8 Notes

 9 External links

[edit] Textual origins

The term is introduced in the opening chapter of the first volume of Das Kapital[3] (Marx
modified his discussion in the second edition of this work)[4]

"A commodity is... a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour
appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the
relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social
relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the
reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the
same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object
is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of
something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage
of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation
between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things
qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as
commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material
relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in
their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy,
we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the
productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering
into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with
the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of
labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the
production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing
analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them." -
Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1 section 4 [6]

However, Marx had already referred to the notion of fetishes and fetishism much earlier, usually
in the context of religious superstition or in criticizing the beliefs of political economists.
Originally, Marx borrowed the idea of "fetishism" from a book he had read by Charles de
Brosses[5] This work provided a materialist theory of the origin of religion, and represents one of
the first theoretical works in ethno-anthropology. Marx was also influenced in the 1840s by
Auguste Comte's discussion of fetishism [6] and Ludwig Feuerbach's interpretation of religion.

 The first mention appears in Marx's 1842 response to a newspaper article by Karl
Heinrich Hermes (a government spy, as it turned out) which defended the Prussian state
on religious grounds.[7] Hermes followed the German philosopher Hegel in regarding
fetishism as the "crudest form of religion." Marx ridiculed this argument, together with
Hermes's definition of religion as that which raises man "above sensuous appetites."
Instead, Marx argued, fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites" (die Religion der
sinnlichen Begierde), adding that "the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper
into believing that an 'inanimate object' will give up its natural character to gratify his
desires. The crude appetite of the fetish worshipper therefore smashes the fetish when the
latter ceases to be its most devoted servant"[7]

 The next mention occurs in Marx's famous 1842 articles in the Rheinische Zeitung about
Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.[8]. Showing considerable wit, Marx wrote:

"The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its
honour, sang in a circle around it and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been
present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the
Rhinelanders' fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of
animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in
order to save the human beings."

 In his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx again refers several times explicitly to fetishes,
jotting for example:

"The nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of precious metals, and are therefore
still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are not yet fully developed money-nations. Contrast of
France and England. The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the task of practice
and effected through practice, the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and
positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-
worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is different. The
abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the
human sense of nature, and therefore also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by
man’s own labour.[8]
  Marx also refers to the notion of fetishism in his ethnological notebooks.[9] Here, Marx
comments on John Lubbock's ideas about fetishism in The Origin of Civilisation and the
Primitive Condition of Man (1871).

 In the Grundrisse, the idea occurs again when Marx criticizes Frederic Bastiat:

"In real history, wage labour arises out of the dissolution of slavery and serfdom --or of the decay
of communal property, as with oriental and Slavonic peoples -- and, in its adequate, epoch-
making form, the form which takes possession of the entire social being of labour, out of the
decline and fall of the guild economy, of the system of Estates, of labour and income in kind, of
industry carried on as rural subsidiary occupation, of small-scale feudal agriculture etc. In all
these real historic transitions, wage labour appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations
in which labour was fixed on all sides, in its income, its content, its location, its scope etc. Hence
as negation of the stability of labour and of its remuneration. The direct transition from the
African's fetish to Voltaire's supreme being, or from the hunting gear of a North American savage
to the capital of the Bank of England, is not so absurdly contrary to history as is the transition
from Bastiat's fisherman to the wage labourer.[10]

 In the manuscript Results of the Immediate Process of Production (probably written in

1864), Marx comments that:

"...we find in the capitalist process of production [an] indissoluble fusion of use-values in which
capital subsists [as] means of production and objects defined as capital, when what we are really
faced with is a definite social relationship of production. In consequence the product embedded
in this mode of production is equated with the commodity by those who have to deal with it. It is
this that forms the foundation for the fetishism of the political economists"[11]

 In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx refers to John Ramsay

McCulloch's A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of
Political Economy (1825). McCulloch argued “In its natural state, matter ... is always
destitute of value” and Marx comments "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".

These references illustrate that Marx used the notion of fetishism in various contexts throughout
his economic and ethnological studies across 25 years or more, in the course of refining his
understanding of economic value.[12] According to influential French Marxist philosopher Louis
Althusser, the development of these ideas suggest a "break" (or epistemological rupture) between
a "young Marx" and an "old Marx," but Ernest Mandel has argued against the idea of a break, in
favor of an evolution and gradual refinement of ideas.[13]

[edit] Important dimensions of the concept

[edit] "Fetish"
"Fetishism" in this context refers to symbolic attribution of power to an object to the point where
people believe and act as though the fetish object really has that power, and this power is even
regarded as being intrinsic to (a natural, inherent characteristic of) the object, rather than a
human attribution. In reality, that power is not an intrinsic characteristic of the object at all.
However, in terms of social behavior, if a sufficient proportion of people act as though the object
has the power, then the object can function as if it had that power.

For thousands of years, people already knew or believed that particular objects or activities could
cause harm, and that others could have good effects, even although they did not really know why
in a "scientific" sense. Consequently these "primitive" people were apt to regard such objects as
being ruled by good and evil spirits, or endowed them with magical or supernatural powers, and
they devised rules for their appropriate use. Some objects were then treated as sacred or taboo,
meaning they could not be touched or used, or that they could be used only under specific
conditions, or by authorized people.

Marx argued that a similar sort of perception arises in market trade, where special powers are
attributed to the traded objects and their relationships, to the extent that people believe and act as
though those powers are the natural, inherent characteristic of the traded objects and theorize
about them in that way. Since social relationships are expressed as the relationships between the
things being traded, it begins to look like social characteristics, such as value and
exchangeability, are the natural, intrinsic characteristic of the things being exchanged.

[edit] Example

A claw vending machine at Saint Giles’ Fair, Oxford, demonstrating the fetish of commodities:
both in the form of cheap toys from Monsters, Inc. and in the attachment of 20-pound banknotes.

A $100 note is not really worth $100 (it cost only a few cents to produce), but if people accept it
as a currency, it can claim $100 worth of goods, in which case it really seems to be worth $100,
and the goods seem to be worth $100. The money has the power to claim $100 worth of goods,
and the goods have the power to exchange for $100. Then it seems like the value of $100 inheres
in the money and the goods themselves (people would not usually tear up a $100 note because it
is a "useless bit of paper" or throw it into the rubbish, because it has a value, namely it can claim
$100 worth of goods and services). In the exchange relationship, the buyer is worth $100 to the
seller, and the seller is a $100 expense to the buyer. In considering the trade between buyer and
seller, how the buyer and seller are socially related, or what their identity is, in principle doesn't
really matter (except perhaps for marketing purposes), all that matters is that $100 can trade for
$100 worth of goods; the seller insists the goods are worth $100 and the buyer insists that they
are not worth more. The transaction can be expressed and analyzed quite independently of the
transactors - it does not even require a personal contact in principle - but also the possession of
$100 provides the owner with the power to experience, use or consume things which he could
not create himself. Moreover, whether the buyer and the seller will be related at all, may depend
just on whether the one has $100 and the other has $100 worth of goods. Where the money, the
goods and the trading parties originated from may remain unknown to all concerned.

[edit] Reification

The reified perception in commodity trade denoted by the concept of commodity fetishism (i.e.
the belief that a symbolization of a social relationship is an independent "thing" which can act in
its own right) is reinforced by several circumstances:

 Money has the incredible power of being able to claim anything which can be traded, and
persuade others to be willing to trade; thus, not only can any traded object be considered
purely as a monetary value, but also objects which are not (yet) traded can be considered
in terms of their potential monetary value (their "business potential").
 the value of one commodity comes to depend on the value of many other commodities
being produced and traded,
 commodity values can change quite independently of any particular value or valuer, in
accordance with the "state of the market" (and behind that, the conditions of production);
 the growth of commerce increasingly separates the production and consumption of
commodities in space and time, obscuring the process by which value is formed and
affirmed.
 It is often not possible to observe or verify what rises and falls of commodity values
should be attributed to, and therefore it seems that these things happen of their own
accord.

[edit] Beliefs

Marx's use of the term fetish could be interpreted as an ironic comment on the "rational",
"scientific" mindset of industrial capitalist societies. In Marx's day, the word "fetish" was
primarily used in the study of primitive religions to describe a revered object or talisman; Marx's
"fetishism of commodities" might be seen as proposing that just such primitive belief systems
exist at the heart of modern society.

In subsequent Marxist thought, commodity fetishism is often defined as an illusion arising from
the central role that private property plays in capitalism's social processes. It is regarded as a
central component of the dominant ideology in capitalist societies. Behind the appearance of
freely-traded commodities are private property rights enforced by the state, and class interests.

[edit] Marx's argument

Marx's argument is simply that in a society where many independent, private producers trade
their products with each other on their own individual initiative, without much (or any) overall
coordination, their production volumes and activities can only be adjusted to each other through
the fluctuating values of those products when exchanged in markets. Their social co-existence,
and the meaning of it, is expressed through their trading activity and transactions in markets.
People may indeed have no other relation with each other except for the transactions between
them.

Thus, their social relations are constantly being mediated and expressed by things (commodities
and money). But not only that; relationships between many traded objects are brought into being
which exist and can change quite independently of what individuals do, and quite independently
of their social relationships. How the traded objects will be related will depend a great deal on
their costs of production, reducible to quantities of living human work. But in reality the worker
has little control over what happens to his product.

[edit] The domination of things

The effect is that the relationships between things begin to shape and even dominate the
relationships between people, to the exent that they must constantly adjust - consciously or
unconsciously - to the changing value proportions between things over which they don't have
any control anymore (because nobody really controls the markets). The trading values of things
then gain an independent, objectified power, to the point where social characteristics seems to be
the natural, inherent properties of things, the relationships between which evolve in their own
right. "The market" seems to spontaneously balance supply and demand, but people no longer
see the human cooperation behind the market which makes it all possible. In economic theories,
human cooperation plays hardly any role anymore, because self-interested market actors are
thought to be trading things and associating as individuals according to their own rational
choices, held together or brought together by the market; cooperation is focused upon only in
management theory insofar as people must be united and organized to produce the things that are
supplied to the market, and in behavioural sciences where how people do things together is
studied.

[edit] The objectification of value

Normally one would say, that values are something that people have, it is they who make
valuations. Human evaluations have their origin in the ability of sentient living organisms to
prioritize and weigh up behaviours consciously according to self-chosen options; if they value or
cherish something, that is in the first instance a subjective appreciation. But in fact, the growth of
trading relations among large masses of people creates many value relationships between traded
objects which gain an objective reality, and which escape from the individual or even the
collective control of people. If for example the housing market collapses, this is a reality that
home owners cannot get away from. It has effects on house values, the construction industry,
employment and incomes. Whatever valuations people may have in their minds, it does not
prevent the fall in the value of their assets. They value their assets, but the assets lose value
without them being able to do anything about it. At that point, a conflict develops between their
personal values, and the values of the things they own or want to own.
[edit] Naturalization

As Marx notes, market phenomena are then typically regarded as "natural" phenomena that "just
happen of their own accord", and indeed the political economists he criticized frequently referred
to "natural equilibria" and "natural" prices, the idea being, that they were merely a reflection of
human nature, a natural state of affairs, or a natural order of things. Indeed, Adam Smith
regarded the propensity to "truck, barter and exchange" as a natural feature of human beings, and
thought that market economy corresponded best to human nature, however defined; a self-
balancing market economy was thought to be constituted, which spontaneously gravitated
towards a natural equilibrium state such that price-relativities ensured that everyone could get
what they wanted. In modern times, the state of the markets is often likened to the weather, and
meteorological metaphors are used such as "the investment climate", "financial headwinds",
"financial tsunami", etc.

But, Marx argues, this "naturalization" of market relationships in economic theory, apart from its
ideological or apologetic function in making them unchangeable and eternalized "facts of life",
actually is the result of the inability to provide a serious scientific explanation of social
phenomena - primarily because trading processes are separated, in theory and in practice, from
the social processes and production activities (the labor efforts of socially related people) which
are behind them and give rise to them. His book Das Kapital aims mainly to reveal the
relationship between production activities and the circulation of products in trade, and thus to
demonstrate what is behind the fetish of commodities and what constantly reproduces it.

According to David Ricardo, for instance, the proper focus of economic science was the
distribution of resources through markets,[14] and modern economics has become largely a
mathematical "science of price movements". In this sense, the fetishization of commodity
relationships seriously distorts or even mystifies real economic relationships between people and
between people and their environment, by detaching the conditions of production from the
conditions of distribution. In the process, the social organisation of the relationships between
people, and what holds them all together, becomes rather mysterious - something about which
one could have a personal interpretation, but which ultimately cannot be known for certain.

[edit] Masking

Marx uses the theatrical concept of a character mask, to describe the functional way that people
express how they are relating or related in capitalist society - their relationships and the things
they trade frequently appear other than they really are, they are "masked" or "disguised". The
"masking" Marx mentions does not mean, that the real nature of what goes on is completely
hidden away, and indeed people may very well know that something is being masked. It is just
that some essential aspects of a reality appear other than they really are, so that the meaning at
the observable surface is actually not the whole meaning of what goes on. Things seem
transparent, self-evident and obvious, but really they are not; in truth, they are not related in the
way they seem to be related; and "part of the story" hides the "whole story". Paradoxically, the
"unknown" is actually created by the way people relate or are related, by the "barriers" they set
up in their interactions. These barriers arise ultimately from property rights and the interests they
give rise to. If people are the "guardians" of commodities, as Marx says, they will "guard" their
own interest.

It therefore takes scientific inquiry and fact-finding to understand what the whole story is. For
ordinary purposes, it may not even matter what the whole story is, and people can just carry on in
their daily business without knowing it; but it does matter, when it becomes practically necessary
to know what the whole story is, to solve a very real problem. If, for example, the market
economy starts to collapse, even although plenty resources exist for everybody's needs, people
begin to question how that was possible at all. And one of the factors involved is a systematically
distorted (reified) perception people have, powerfully promoted by commodity fetishism, the
effect of which is that people habitually mask things to others and to themselves - even without
necessarily being aware that they are doing it. People can buy and sell plenty things without
understanding the full implications of what they are doing.

[edit] The opacity of economic relations

The primary valuation which counts for practical purposes is the trading value of goods and
activities expressed in terms of money-prices. To work out what the relationships involved are,
people then only compare prices and price trends in the market. They are hardly able to see and
understand anymore all the human processes which bring goods and services to their door, they
don't know who the people are that facilitate that, and indeed this is often not much of concern to
them anymore. They depend on commodities being available to them and trust or assume they
will be there, without having any control over, or insight into, the human cooperation that can
ensure this will be the case.

The results of the collective labor efforts of people present themselves, or are expressed to
people, in the form of the values and prices of products, assets or services. But what the exact
connection is, between those things, their values and the efforts that enabled their supply, is no
longer at all clear. Thus, "what markets will do" is explained by what other markets will do, by
rising and falling prices, and analysts try to estimate probabilistically the effects of different
market trends. Markets then seem to be things that evolve in their own right, they gain an
autonomous power, and it is often no longer clear what market trends can really be attributed to;
one could dispute about causes and effects, or try to research it with different hypotheses,
without being able to verify absolutely what exactly caused changes and fluctuations in the
market.

[edit] Conclusion

In this way, Marx aims to prove that markets can function perfectly well, with people buying and
selling, without people knowing what the real nature of those markets is, what it all means, or
even what the real nature is of the social set-up they live within. If the markets seem to work
well, they think it's a good thing, and if they don't, they think it's a bad thing, but why it all
happens they may have little idea about, other than "imagining" things which they are in no
position to verify. True knowledge about markets is not required to participate in markets, and
the meanings involved could be tilted just a bit (or a whole lot) to support a favourable
perspective on them. In fact, the distorted perception of markets facilitates or is conducive to
their operation, to the extent that it legitimates and justifies the position of participants in them.

[edit] After Marx

The fetishism of commodities has proven fertile material for work by other theorists since Marx,
who have added to, adapted, or, perhaps, "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. Fetishes are often visible in advertising, where human qualities are associated with a
product in a way which the advertiser hopes will encourage people to buy them.

[edit] Cultural theorists

György Lukács based History and Class Consciousness (1923) on Marx's notion, developing his
own notion of commodity reification as the key obstacle to class consciousness. Lukács's work
was a significant influence on later philosophers such as Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard.

 Debord developed the concept of the society of the spectacle that parallels to Marx's
notion of the commodity; for Debord, the "spectacle" made relations among people seem
like relations among images (and vice versa), where people passively watch while their
own representations are active (for example, on television). The spectacle is the form
taken by society once the instruments of cultural production have become wholly
commoditized, and subject to commercial trade, so that aesthetic value becomes ruled by
commercial value, and artistic expressions are shaped by their ability to attract market
sales. In the further development of capitalism, it is argued, the whole sphere of personal
consumption is reorganized according to commercial principles. In that case, cultural
products also gain "a life of their own" completely independently of the producers.
Debord's work could be seen as a further interpretation of what Marx's critique
anticipated, insofar as in modern society even the deepest intimacies of inter-subjective
and personal self-relating become subject to commodification and are turned into
separate "experiences" which can be bought and sold as a "product" for a price. The
ultimate form of human alienation then occurs when people begin to view their whole
being as a marketable commodity, and regard every human interaction as a (potential)
transaction.

 In the work of the semiotician Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is deployed to explain

subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation", that is, among
consumers. Baudrillard was especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects
by advertising, which encourages consumers to purchase them as aids to the construction
of their personal identity. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972),
Baudrillard develops a notion of the sign that, like Debord's notion of spectacle, runs
alongside Marx's commodity.

 Other theorists (such as Thorstein Veblen and Alain de Botton) have been concerned
especially with the social status of the producers of consumer items relative to their
 consumers. In this sense, the argument is that the identity of a person becomes defined
and expressed by what he owns and buys, far beyond simply cherishing one's belongings,
since sending out the "correct signals" about one's status then begins really to depend on
the possession of commodities: if you don't have them, you don't belong, something
which can create status anxiety. For example, the person who owns a Porsche has more
prestige and worth, than the people working on the assembly-line that produced it, and
you have to own a Porsche to be a "member of the set". If you don't own a Porsche, this
impacts negatively on your social standing. This interpretation of commodity fetishism
refers to a belief that the car (or any manufactured object) is more important than people,
and that it confers special powers beyond material utility to those who possess it (see
also conspicuous consumption). Prestige goods and flaunting wealth have been human
practices for thousands of years, but in capitalist society they are very closely linked to
monetary valuations, and how those valuations will be interpreted.

 The concept of commodity fetishism is absolutely central in the literature of the neo-
Marxist Frankfurt School, especially of its leader Theodor W. Adorno, which focuses
mainly on how the forms of commerce invade the human psyche, cast people in roles not
of their own making, and affect human development. The Marxist Frankfurters tried to
show that while markets offer the promise of a richly developed, creative individuality, in
reality this development is severely restricted or even stunted, to the point where people
hardly have "time for themselves" anymore, because they are constantly acting out or
caught within roles which they have little control over. They become passive consumers
rather than active creators of their lives, and any creativity which is incompatible with
bourgeois norms is beaten down in some way.

In the most recent literature, the focus of theorists is often on the transformation of information
and knowledge into a tradeable commodity (or capital) which is bought and sold, and which
exists through an interaction between people and computers. This begins to alter human
consciousness in a very powerful and direct way. The argument is that this creates a new kind of
topsy-turvy world in which information and knowledges become objects of value in themselves,
which are no longer lodged in people's heads, but assume a life of their own and acquire
"magical" powers, even to the point where people are barred from the knowledge they
themselves helped to produce (the "privatization of knowledge"). It is also argued that
increasingly communication itself begins to function according to, or imitates, the rules of
financial transactions; giving attention becomes a kind of negotiation (or haggling) conditional
on the expectation of a return on the "investment" into it.

Several main themes can be distinguished here.

 Culturally, Marxist theorists such as Fredric Jameson link the reification of information
and knowledge to post-modernism. One of the main concerns is with the distinction
between authentically knowing and experiencing things, and "fake", "surrogate" or
superficial knowledge/experience made possible by the fact that money can buy just
about anything. Through the media, people can for example acquire all kinds of beliefs
without having any of the personal experience which gives rise to those beliefs. A kind of
"pseudo-world" is created which begins to substitute for the real one.
 In the field of economics, Marxians such as Michael Perelman have critically examined
the belief systems involved in the rise of intellectual property rights; Samuel Bowles and
Herbert Gintis critically reviewed the beliefs involved in the theory of human capital [9].
Knowledge as the means to make a better life contrasts here with knowledge as a
tradeable commodity or a type of capital, which can generate income and wealth. In the
process, knowledge and information become detached from the knowing subject and
begin to lead a "life of its own".

 Sociologists like Frank Furedi and Ulrich Beck have focused on the growth of
commodified knowledges in the context of modern "risk prevention culture" growing out
of the preoccupation with portfolio risk and the insurance of wealth or status. The Post-
World War II economic expansion created gigantic savings, and the dominant bourgeois
ideology shifted gradually towards the way of thinking of fund managers controlling the
investment of financial assets ("the talk follows the money"). The global pension funds
accumulated by 20% of the world population (mostly in OECD countries) who have
pensions nowadays alone amount to circa $17.5 trillion;[15] to this gigantic asset must be
added the even greater funds of other institutional investors such as banks, finance
companies, hedgefunds and the like. In 2008, the world's total tradeable financial assets
(stocks, debt securities and bank deposits) were estimated at $178 trillion, more than
three times the value of what the whole world produces in a year.[16] These gigantic funds
have to be invested for profit while the future is uncertain, and this creates a tremendous
preoccupation with risk calculations. Yet, while more and more funds are spent to insure
capital assets against possible loss in value, workers' lives are increasingly insecure;
workers cannot be sure that the job they hold now will still be there in future; this creates
general uncertainty and an increased preoccupation with risk allround. If one has a lot of
money, it is easier to pose as a "risk-taker"; taking a risk might forfeit considerable
money, but after the loss, there is still a lot of money left. If one has little money, one
might lose rather little money from taking a risk, but the risk can nevertheless have a
huge impact on one's life. When risk is fetishized as "a quantity of money", this may
powerfully distort the very perception of the real risks ordinary people run in everyday
life.[17] And thus the very valuation of risk is susceptible to ideological biases. The
sociologists note that fortunes are nowadays earnt from insights by "experts" into the
relationship between "knowns" and "unknowns", and in which all kinds of primitive
fears, anxieties and superstitions about what "might happen" are manipulated and
capitalized on - not infrequently in a fraudulent way. The authoritativeness of these
experts, it is argued, often begins to rely on a quasi-religious belief by people in the
experts' powers of analysis and forecasting, and in the power of their knowledge,
something which is sustained with sophisticated techniques for persuading and seducing
the public. The valuation of knowledge gets a somewhat "mystical aura".

 Inspired by various authors including Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, various artists
and art critics have explored fetishes in the world of art, and how the definition and
valuation of art is altered by commerce (the relationship between commercial value and
aesthetic value). The most obvious example of "artistic fetishes" occurs, when the trivial
personal belongings (or rather trivial artistic productions) of a famous artist are sold for
gigantic sums of money. But fetishes may also enter into the very design of art work.
  In the area of legal theory, authors ranging from Harvard professor Duncan Kennedy [10]
and scholars such as Evgeny Pashukanis, Karl Renner and Franz Leopold Neumann, to
the socialist writer China Mieville and labor lawyer Marc Linder[18] have explored
commodity fetishism in the legal system - the suggestion being that legal forms are
reified to the point of misrepresenting real social relations.

In general, these kinds of (often dystopian) interpretations suggest that the whole of human
knowledge itself is increasingly being restructured in terms of the relationships between objects
of commercial value and the property rights they involve - to the point where the true nature of
human relations is shrouded or hidden away, or indeed becomes a total mystery, because all the
relevant concepts necessary to understand them are denied, disconnected or erased. Gradually, it
is argued, all knowledges which do not serve business interests are being "wiped out".

That might not seem to wipe out so much, to that extent that many knowledges are compatible
with making money, but even if the relevant disciplines are not starved of funding, the argument
is that the structures of the knowledges themselves are being reformed and deformed, according
to a specific pattern of conceptualizations which reflects commercial interests and business
culture. As a side-effect, however, metaphysical (rather than scientifically sound) beliefs begin to
substitute more and more for a "genuine self-knowledge of society" obtained through
independent, critical and comprehensive scientific (or artistic) inquiry. Ultimately, people can
then no longer understand themselves and their own lives anymore without the use of
commodities, state authorities and specialized "expert" services (which could be religious
services offered by specialists on the spiritual condition of the human species).

[edit] Menger and subjective wants

Strongly pro-capitalist economists, such as Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School have
insisted that the attribution of value is only a matter of subjective preferences:

"The value of goods, accordingly, is a phenomenon that springs from the same source as the
economic character of goods--that is, from the relationship, explained earlier, between
requirements for and available quantities of goods. But there is a difference between the two
phenomena. On the one hand, perception of this quantitative relationship stimulates our
provident activity, thus causing goods subject to this relationship to become objects of our
economizing (i.e., economic goods). On the other hand, perception of the same relationship
makes us aware of the significance that command of each concrete unit of the available
quantities of these goods has for our lives and well-being, thus causing it to attain value for us.
Just as a penetrating investigation of mental processes makes the cognition of external things
appear to be merely our consciousness of the impressions made by the external things upon our
persons, and thus, in the final analysis, merely the cognition of states of our own persons, so too,
in the final analysis, is the importance that we attribute to things of the external world only an
outflow of the importance to us of our continued existence and development (life and well-
being). Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the
importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, that is, to our lives and well-
being, and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the exclusive causes of the
satisfaction of our needs."[19]
The difference between Marx and Menger is just that for Marx, value relationships exist and
evolve between things and activities also quite independently from the wishes or desires of any
individual or even group of individuals. The fact that this is so, is precisely what helps to sustain
the "fetish". It is not merely that people habitually regard value as intrinsic to objects, but also
that the economic value objects have, and the way they are related, gained a real power over
people. For Menger, value is only exclusively an expression of subjective preferences, but for
Marx, value also begins to assert itself as a mind-independent, objective force, quite regardless of
what people happen to prefer, with the practical effect that people must often adjust to economic
values, rather than the supply of goods and services adjusting to the needs and wishes of people.
If individuals don't have the money to buy things, they can prefer all they like, but they won't get
the goods and the prices often won't change either (unless perchance someone offers to share
them).

Obviously, in markets there is a tendency for supply and demand to adjust to each other, however
haphazardly that may occur, causing economists to extrapolate a "natural tendency of markets to
reach equilibrium" provided there is no outside interference in market activity. Therefore,
Menger's view has a certain plausibility; after all, markets are in good part driven by demand,
and therefore by the choices and preferences of myriads of individuals. This reality was already
noted in ancient Greece by the philosopher Aristotle, who therefore attributed the value of goods
simply to the intensity of demand for them.[20]

It is just that the very meaning, scope and limits of these choices and preferences themselves is
also determined by objective market forces over which individuals have no control, and with
which they are confronted every day. They do not control the results of the fact that a mass of
working hours has, or has not been worked. They have to adjust their behaviour to price-levels,
like it or not ("market discipline"). This means that, mostly, the value of goods is set by a price-
level which people normally cannot change, or change only within narrow limits, and the fact
that people individually strongly or weakly prefer a good offered for sale does not normally
change its basic supply price. The market does not change at all, simply because people have a
desire for particular goods, but because they really buy or sell them (or not). If somebody
strongly desires a candy bar that sells for $1, the $1 price for the candy does not spontaneously
by itself change because of that desire. At most the seller of candy might say, that "if you get five
bars, I will give you a discount".

[edit] Market freedom

Menger's theory leads to the result, that market effects can only be explained in terms of the
subjective preferences of individuals and nothing else. If markets expanded, that must be
because the intensity of desires increased, and if they shrank, it must be because appetites
reduced, causing changes in the free choices people made to buy or sell. But for Marx, this sort
of vulgar and naive theory (in his opinion) was itself a product of commodity fetishism, insofar
as it completely disconnected market trade from the constraints placed on that trade by the labor
efforts of people, by history and by the framework of social relations within which they co-
existed, like it or not (see law of value).
"Market freedom" might only be a sort of illusion created by the ability of people to choose
whether to buy and sell or not, and by the potential choices they could conceivably make, even if
they had only very little money. They feel unconstrained in market activity only because they
have internalized the constraints and agree to play by its rules. But people might not buy or sell
out of free choice at all, but because they were forced to do so by circumstances, like it or not, at
prices not to their liking.

The theories which economists made up about markets were, in Marx's opinion, themselves
ultimately a product of the way market trade itself functioned, and not the other way around. If
markets involved a reified consciousness, which attributed an independent power to symbols
imposed by "the many" on "the few", or by economic community on each of its members, this
would also powerfully influence the economic theories created about markets - in ways which
actually promoted the fetishization of economic phenomena. Ultimately this created the belief
that "the economy" and "the market" were independent things which could act in their own right,
even if few people could explain or define what "the economy" or "the market" means. People
might say, "the market does this" or "the market does that" but in reality people do these things,
and the market results are merely the effects of what they do. Thus, ultimately, commodity
fetishism contributed to a process of dumbing down.

[edit] Criticism
Five criticisms have often been made of the concept of commodity fetishism:

 Although maybe there is a cultural tendency to fetishize objects in human society, this
has always existed and is not unique to capitalist society. People are normally very well
able to distinguish between commercial valuations and other sorts of evaluations, and
they are not so misguided as Marx seems to think. If they attribute a normal value to
objects, that is not a bad thing. If they did not, life would become very difficult because
they wouldn't be able to agree what something is worth.

 Modern economics is very much based on the idea that economic value is subjective, a
matter of what people choose to value, which influences their choices. If economic value
is said to be objectified, this is merely an illusion; and people know very well it is an
illusion. It is wrong to think that price-levels force people around, because they always
have a free choice. They can always change their behaviour to get what they want. The
value of objects is just a matter of their practical utility for human purposes.

 Marx's idea of commodity fetishism is therefore claimed to be an exaggeration, because

in real life people simply do not fetishize objects to the extent that Marx thinks they do.
They apply all sorts of valuations which guide their behaviour, quite aware of the
differences between the characteristics of an object and the characteristics of human
subjects; thus they can learn to control their desires, and judiciously manage money as a
means to an end, rather than an end in itself. If one really believed that value relationships
were beyond anyone's control, this would get in the way of freely determining one's life.
Indeed, the use of fetishes could be regarded as a natural form of human play, a game that
is only a game in which objects are cherished or loved.
  The analogy drawn between commodity fetishism and religion is claimed to be mistaken,
because people do not truly "worship" money and commodities in a spiritual sense, or
attribute supernatural powers to them; it is argued that the development of capitalism has
led to considerable secularization, i.e. to the abandonment of organized religion and
superstitions in many areas of life, in favour of a scientifically based interpretation of the
world (although science and religion might also combine). The human beliefs about
value-relationships which are involved in commodity fetishism are, according to this
argument, not "religious" beliefs at all, and do not have the same characteristics as real
spiritual beliefs. The proof of this interpretation is said to be, that one could be a religious
believer, even though one is extremely aware of commodity fetishism, and highly critical
of its manifestations; indeed it might be an integral part of one's religion to tear down the
golden calf, i.e. to oppose idolatry in all forms.[11]

 Marxism is itself claimed (e.g. by the later Leszek Kolakowski) to be a sort of fetish,
namely the fetishization of Marx and his ideas.[21] This is sometimes also interpreted as a
spiritual substitute for "real" religion which Marxists regard as not credible.[22] Thus, it
can be argued the concept of commodity fetishism is itself fetishized, and thereby
endowed with a pervasive power and influence which it does not really have, leading to a
distorted, stunted perception of social reality, in which subjective sympathies or dislikes
are badly confused with objective realities.

How exactly Marx would have responded to such criticisms remains unclear, because he never
explicitly defended his idea of commodity fetishism after he published it, and seemed to regard it
as a rather obvious aspect of life. No doubt he would not have denied that people can be very
self-aware; they can make choices and relativize matters, and few objectively given economic
circumstances are so compelling that one cannot actively do anything about them at all. But
probably he would have referred to the enormous power that money has over people's lives, and
to the quasi-religious zeal with which the business world may pursue its aims.

Perhaps he would have pointed to what people in capitalist society actually do when the "crunch"
comes, when there is a real economic crisis (as a "test case"). What do people do in the first
instance? Do they for example try to secure their possessions, perhaps investing in gold or other
assets that hold their value? Or do they spontaneously seek to cooperate with others to resolve
the crisis?

It is evident from Marx's text that in drawing an analogy between the fetishes of a religious cult
and the fetishes involved in commerce, he did not commit himself to the idea that commodity
fetishism is a "religion of commerce", the same as a religious faith. "Having a fetish" (endowing
something with powers it does not really have) need not involve a specifically religious belief at
all. However, how people regard commercial phenomena could also be influenced by a mixture
of religious, semi-religious and non-religious beliefs.

How Marx would have regarded Marxism is not known, because Marxism emerged as a
significant political movement only after his death. Although very aware of the desire of human
beings to remake the world after their own image, and immortalize themselves, Marx stayed an
atheist and a humanist. He was rather skeptical and derisive when some French leftists began to
call themselves "Marxists" in the early 1880s.[23] According to the testimony of Friedrich Engels,
Marx quipped wrily, "what is certain is that, as for myself, I am no Marxist" (or, in another
version, "All I know is that I am no Marxist") - the suggestion being that if this was "Marxism",
he wanted no part of it.[24] Marx did seek influence for his ideas, but not for himself; he
recommended that people should "think through" matters for themselves, using their own critical
faculties, and his writings were intended only as a aid for this. Yet it could be argued that this
contradicted with the intellectual authority he and Engels definitely did seek in the labour
movement, which could after all hardly exist without followers; and it was not unreasonable that
these followers would begin to call themselves "Marxists", to distinguish themselves from other
trends. The old Engels, by then an intellectual mentor of the growing social-democratic
movement, eventually accepted the label of "Marxism" - which he did not invent himself - to
express the political tendency he and Marx represented, and for which he had written many
popular pamphlets, articles and books.[25]

[edit] See also

Marx's argument
 Character mask
 Commodity (Marxism)
 Exchange-value
 False consciousness
 Fetishism
 Labor theory of value
 Real prices and ideal prices
 Reification (Marxism)
 Relations of production
 Use-value

 Law of value  Value-form (Marxism)

After Marx
 Jean Baudrillard, a theorist whose System of Objects borrows from Marx
 Guy Debord, a situationist theorist
o Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (full text)
 Georg Lukács' theory of class consciousness and his concept of reification
 Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays of Marx's theory of value.

[edit] Further reading

 Debord, Guy (1983) The Society of the Spectacle, ????: Black and Red.
 Lukács, Georg (1972) History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press.
 Marx, Karl (1992) Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, London:
Penguin.
 Mary Douglas who wrote The world of goods with Baron Isherwood.

[edit] Notes
1. ^ In an influential commentary, Isaak Illich Rubin claims that "The theory of fetishism is,
per se, the basis of Marx's entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of
value." - I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx's theory of value. Montreal: Black Rose Books,
1990, p. 5.
2. ^ In chapter 24 of Capital, Volume III, Marx comments that "The relations of capital
assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital."
3. ^ Capital Vol I. Part I § 4 The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof p. 31 in
the Great Books (Volume 50) First Edition.
4. ^ The first edition included a special appendix on the value-form. Among other things,
Marx there considers that the "fetish-character emerges more strikingly in the equivalent-
form than in the relative value-form. The relative value-form of a commodity is mediated,
namely by its relation to another commodity. Through this value-form the value of the
commodity is expressed as something completely distinct from its own sensible
existence." - Appendix to the 1st German edition of Capital, Volume 1, 1867 [1]).
5. ^ Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la
religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760) [2]. A German translation was subsequently
published: Uber den Dienst der fetischengotter oder Vergleichung der alten religion
Eqyptians mit den heutigen Religion Nigritiens. Ubersetzt von Christain Brandanus
Hermann Pistorius. Berlin, Stralsund: Gottlieb August Lange, 1785. For an important
study of the origin of the concept 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.
6. ^ The positive philosophy of Auguste Comte 1830-1842).
7. ^ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On religion. Atlanta: Scholars, 1982, p. 22.
8. ^ Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", in Marx-Engels
Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress, 1975, p. 312 [3]).
9. ^ Lawrence Krader (ed.), The ethnological notebooks of Karl Marx: studies of Morgan,
Phear, Maine, Lubbock. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972).
10. ^ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, chapter 17 (1857)
11. ^ Karl Marx,Results of the Immediate Process of Production, appendix in Capital Volume
1. Penguin edition, 1976, p. 983).
12. ^ For more details, see: Roland Boer, "That Hideous Pagan Idol: Marx, Fetishism and
Graven Images". Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, Volume 38, Number 1, February
2010 , pp. 93-116.
13. ^ See Ernest Mandel's 1967 dissertation at the École pratique des hautes études,
published in English as The formation of the economic thought of Karl marx: 1843 to
'Capital'. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, especially pp. 163-186.
14. ^ David Ricardo, On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), Preface.
15. ^ "Paying for pensions: affording old age", BBC News, 13 September 2010
16. ^ "Global financial markets: entering a new era", McKinsey Global Institute, September
2009, p. 9.
17. ^ See further e.g. Jan Toporowski's analysis
18. ^ Marc Linder, Reification and the consciousness of the critics of political economy.
Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1975 and subsequent works.
19. ^ Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), chapter 3
20. ^ See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 5
21. ^ In his Marxist phase, Leszek Kolakowski published nine essays under the title Kultura
i fetysze [Culture and fetishism] (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwow Nakowe, 1967),
English translations in: Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism, Marxism and Beyond,
 and A Leszek Kolakowski Reader. Later he distanced himself from Marxism; he drew
many parallels between Marxism and a religious faith.
22. ^ Significantly, Louis Proyect titles his blog "The unrepentant Marxist"[4].
23. ^ See further Christophe Prochasson, Histoire des gauches en France. Paris: La
Découverte, 2005.
24. ^ See Hal Draper, Karl Marx's theory of revolution, Volume II: the politics of social
classes. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978, pp. 5-11.
25. ^ In a foreword to his essay Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy (1886), dated February 21, 1888, Frederick Engels claimed confidently,
"Inzwischen hat die Marxsche Weltanschauung Vertreter gefunden weit über
Deutschlands und Europas Grenzen hinaus und in allen gebildeten Sprachen der Welt."
This was translated as "In the meantime, the Marxist world outlook has found
representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary
languages of the world." Strictly speaking, the adjective "Marxsche" means "Marxian",
but at the time already seems often to have been considered synonymous with "Marxist".
In a note to Part 4 of this essay, Engels comments "Without [Marx] the theory would not
be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name."[5]

[edit] External links

 Capital, Chapter 1, Section 4 - The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof
 All of Chapter One - Marx's logical presentation
 (Isaac Rubin's commentary on Marx)
 "The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism"
 David Harvey, Reading Marx's Capital, Reading Marx’s Capital - Class 2, Chapters 1-2,
The Commodity (video lecture)
 Biene Baumeister,Die Marxsche Kritik des Fetischismus (outline in German)