Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

Honestly this is one of my favorite sections of the entire book, and it’s right at the start. Many Marxists, and even some non-Marxist, humanist types, have noted the significance of commodity fetishism and more broadly Marx’s theory of alienation. It goes beyond capital, but it is certainly interesting in regard to capital too!

Definition of commodity fetishism:

“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.”

In other words,

“the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.”

I think the name “fetish” is perfect. It refers to religious fetishes — think voodoo dolls and other idols — which humans consciously produce, yet they believe that the objects take on a supernatural character once produced.

The name is perfect for two reasons. First, it very precisely describes what is happening with commodities and the illusions they produce in the mind. Second, because it is a jab at the colonizing European societies that believed themselves to be so culturally and intellectually superior to the peoples they colonized, many of whom used fetishes in their religious practices.

“… the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.”

This line reminds me of one of Marx’s letters to his friend Ludwig Kugelmann in which he strongly defends his identification of labor as the substance of value. For Marx, the procedure for this determination is backward from the political economists. The political economists started from the commodity in order to identify the determinants of commodity prices. From this point of view, labor is just one speculative guess at one such determinant among many, such as energy, utility, etc.

Marx starts from the other direction. For him the big question is not what forms price magnitudes? but rather how does capitalist society distribute labor? And, as he says in the letter, it is clear that the way that the total social labor is distributed in capitalism is through the exchange of commodities. From this perspective it is no longer a mystery why labor is the essence of value.

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To digress a tad. Alienation occurs when a human power or ability is placed onto an object. This occurs with labor being objectified (i.e. placed into an object) as value. But it can occur in other ways, such as placing our legal-political power into liberal institutions. We are alienated from our ability to affect political decisions and only have access to that ability through electoral institutions.

The same is true for the “human essence” which I won’t spend time exploring here; but in Marx’s early, pre-communist 20s and 30s, when he was involved with the Young Hegelians, he spent a lot of time thinking about materialism and religion in works like Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology, and Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In the intro to the last one, where Marx makes his famous “opiate of the people” line (this intro is my favorite of all of Marx’s writing) he talks about “inverted consciousness” in an “inverted world”. This inversion is due to alienation, and in that way is linked to commodity fetishism.