Help me wrap my head around Commodity Fetishism.

[Broletariat]

It has stuff to do with commodities as exchange-values and how they level all human labour to be equivalent. I think. Because value is then equal to all types of labour, specific types of labour are less important and commodities becomes fetishes?

Or something.

[UltraWright]

I looked at a couple of page and here is what I understand. I have not spent but a couple of minutes trying to understand what it means, so take the following with a pinch of salt.

First of all, the word fetishism in "commodity fetishism" refers to the anthropological concept that inanimate objects can have godly powers (e.g. idols and totems) and not to sexual fetishism :P.

Commodity fetishism refers to the way the society perceives the products and the market psychologically when the products are tied to their exchange-value rather than their use-value in a capitalist society.

Let me give you an example.
1. Use-value: you go get a T-Shirt whose value was determined according to the effort put by the worker who manufactured it. You go back home knowing that this T-Shirt was made by a worker somewhere and that it is supposed to last for a certain period of time. When the T-Shirt is unusable, you will throw it away without feeling any emotions towards it because you know it has already served its purpose.
2. Exchange-value: you go buy a T-Shirt and pay for it as much money as the market sees it is worth (based on offer and demand). You go home with a feeling that you bought the T-Shirt from "the market" and that you have invested "money" into it, money that you could have used to buy other fun stuff. You overlook the hours the workers took from his life to make the T-Shirt, and you equate the T-Shirt with the amount of pleasure the money could have brought you if you had spent it to buy other stuff. You will get attached to the T-Shirt and will feel awful when it becomes unusable.

That is, in a capitalist society people forget that commodities have been produced by workers and that they are worth as much as the labour that has been put in them because the market has alienated those products from their producers. Thus, people get the illusion that commodities have value in themselves and that they have no control over the market. The buyers do not care about the workers who manufactured their commodities because things are worth money and not labour.

[gestalt]

This is a difficult one to understand, easy to confuse with "reification," as well. My comprehension is that it is the attribution of inherent value to commodities rather than realizing that the value is being created by social processes. E.g., it obscures the input of labor, the exploitation of workers and reduces everything to market transactions. Thus, social relations are expressed through trade and money.

[RHIZOMES]

The commodity becomes alienated from it's own labour, and becomes fetishised into a thing-in-and-of-itself without reference to the labour that produced it.

[UltraWright]

Oh, I have just come across a real life example :D. The vlogger Philip Defranco had a car accident a couple of days ago where he crashed into a fire hydrant. He knocked a guy's mailbox before he crashed and the guy came out of his house calling Philip a mother ****er for breaking his mailbox. Philip comments on the man's attitude as follows.

Dude, I could have died! It's a mailbox! (...) It showed me how messed up people's priorities are. (...) This guy was more worried about his mailbox. All that guy cares about is ... those things don't matter.
That angry guy has a commodity fetish towards his mailbox: it is means more to him than what it really is, just a fucking mailbox. It is even more important to him than the life of a fellow human being!

At the end of the short (around 4:37), Philip says that the experience showed him that commodities are not worth more than their use-value.

At the end of the day, it is a fucking car. Things are things, and if there is anything that I got across is that things are fucking things
GVQJ3EUagKE

This reminds me of a couple of quotes from Fight Club.

Look, nobody takes this more seriously than me. That condo was my life, okay? I loved every stick of furniture in that place. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed, it was ME!

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis.

The things you own end up owning you

[caramelpence]

Well, a fetish itself is something that is the product of human activity but then becomes a power over human beings - like the religious idol that human beings physically produce and endow with mystical qualities and then feel the need to pray to, despite its ultimately human origins. Commodity fetishism is a condition in which human beings fetishize commodities by treating them as if their status as commodities was inherent rather than being specific to a historically conditioned mode of production. It is the condition of universalizing commodity production rather than acknowledging its historical specificity. In this way, human beings come to give commodities independent power, but the important thing here is that this is not a matter of pure illusion or a purely subjective error - under capitalism it is actually the case that commodities exert power over human beings, and it is on this basis that human beings come to universalize commodity production and accept it as given.

[#FF0000]

Nobody really knows what this is apparently.

[Hit The North]

Nobody really knows what this is apparently.

Maybe you should read caramelpence's excellent post above before you make your final judgement.

[Zanthorus]

under capitalism it is actually the case that commodities exert power over human beings, and it is on this basis that human beings come to universalize commodity production and accept it as given.

I think this right here is the key point. One error made by certain writers on Marx (For example, the error appears in Kautsky's popularisation of Capital 'The Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx'), is to assume that commodity fetishism is a psychological mistake, whereas one of Marx's underlying themes from the time of his 1844 Comments on James Mill (I'm thinking here particularly of the passages which talk about the economists replacing the 'crude superstition' of the mercantilists with 'refined superstition', while failing to recognise that the 'crude superstition' had it's roots in the nature of money and exchange-value) is that major errors in understanding social reality come not from lack of intelligence or trying but from the nature of the reality that is being studied itself. In this vein, Marx says in the section on commodity fetishism that "the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, 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." (Emphasis added) Which is to say, in a society which is divided up into private enterprises human social labour becomes mediated and regulated by the commodity-form, rather than being directly under the control of the associated producers themselves.

I would also add that this appears to me to be basically the same thing that Marx was getting at when talking about 'alienation' in the 1844 Manuscripts, the Comments on James Mill and The German Ideology. And that I think the concept is fairly central to understanding how Marx develops the concepts of money and capital, as further concrete manifestations of social labour becoming a power opposed to the individual producers due to the atomisation of the producers (In this respect Kautsky does at least get it right when he notes that many have missed the point of Capital buy ignoring the centrality of the concept of fetishism, although he doesn't seem to understand why the fetishism of commodities is so important).


Nobody really knows what this is apparently.

If that was the case, then it's very unlikely that anyone really understood what Marx was on about in Capital, although on the evidence I've seen so far it's not entirely out of the question. Also what BTB said.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

[This is from pp. 19-20 of: The Red Museum: Art, economics and the ends of capital, just out from the Orange Press. Bear in mind that this is about the role of commodity fetishization in the area of culture. Any reference to certain contributors to this list is purely fortuitous. And ufortunately I don't have the patience to include the cool graphics...



Pseudo-Marxists love to carry on about “Commodity Fetishism”—how daring. It’s a nifty way to pass the dollar: calling artworks commodities serves to obscure the specific appearance of capitalist commodities under pretense of clarifying everything about the meaning of cultural artifacts. It’s what I call

The Fetishism of Commodity Fetishism.

Can’t they just sniff their sister’s panties like everybody else? What the wannabe wevolutionawies don’t seem to wealize is that Marx doesn’t speak of the "Commodity Fetish” in the original German, but of the “Fetish-aspect of merchandise (Fetischcharakter der Ware).” Fetishism is not the essence of “the" commodity for the basic reason that Marxism, being a materialist philosophy, shies away from essences and idealisms of all kinds, those a-priori categorizations with which Plato isolates the polis from the polloi. In Marx’s Heraclitan world there are no commodities and no fetishes, only the activity of fetishizing; this activity (the manipulation of the valuation of the commodity) takes on different forms depending on, say, the interests of self-deluded art critics who think they’re being teddibly wadical by throwing around words like Commodity Fetishism. Just as Karl’s evil uncle Hegel saw various primitive religions hiding a kernel of truth under different shapes, so too, Karl thought various societies might hide different economic exchanges under various forms: the subjective appearance of the commodity is always mediated by social relationships. The commodity might even appear and reappear under the various forms of art, or even as Art, the kind of art that gets the critics' snickers in a knot because , “It’s a commodity!”

[I]It is strange that the fellow does not sense [among the] fundamentally new elements of the book [Capital]...that...the commodity has a double character — use-value and exchange-value... [Marx]

And again:

If the commodity has a double character — use-value and exchange-value — then the labor represented by the commodity must also have a twofold character. [Marx]You can find out about the rest at....


http://theorangepress.com/publications/theredmuseum.html

[Broletariat]

Can’t they just sniff their sister’s panties like everybody else?


I stopped here.

[ZeroNowhere]

I stopped here.It gets worse.

Anyhow, I'll probably contribute to this thread soon, but currently I'm busy studying for things.

[Rooster]

D4MbUx-il6c

Transcript plus more info:


There are a lot of people that are really powerful in the world: Presidents, CEO’s, bankers, leaders of movements… But there is an object, a thing, that is more powerful than any of them. This object is money.
Money is really powerful. It makes people, societies, and countries do all sorts of things. The pursuit of money, as and end in itself, occupies many people’s lives and is the driving force of economic growth. And all over society money acts as a symbol of status, prestige and social power.
The funny thing about money is that it is just an object. Nowadays its not even a valuable object like gold. It’s just pieces of paper, or digits on a computer screen. It has all of this power and influence yet it needs no will, weapons, or words.
Why?
This phenomenon where objects have social power, in which things act as if they have a will of their own, is what Marx sought to unravel with his notion of “the fetishism of commodities.” When Marx talked about fetishism he wasn’t talking about whips and chains and leather outfits. He was talking about the way the relations between producers in a capitalist society take the form of relations between things.
The word “fetishism” originally was used to describe the practices of religions that attributed magical powers to objects like idols, or charms. If the Israelites of the Old Testament won a battle with the Philistines they attributed it to the powers of the ark of the covenant that they carried around. If they lost it was because they had pissed off the ark. Of course in reality it was their own actions that caused them to win or lose. Attributing their own powers to an object is fetishism. For Marx, money and commodities are much like this. We think that they have mystical powers, yet their powers really come from us, from our own creative labor.
Let’s take a look inside a workplace. It could be any workplace- a capitalist factory, a peasant commune, a family farm, whatever. Here the relations between different workers are direct. I make a widget and I hand it to the next person. If something needs to change about the labor process a manager brings the workers together and says, “Now we will organize things differently.” Whether it is a democratic or hierarchical form of organization it is an organization that happens directly between people.
Now let’s look outside the workplace at the market. In the market things are different. The organization of work, the division of labor, doesn’t happen through direct social relations between people. In the market the products of labor confront each other as commodities with values. These interactions between things act back upon production. They are what send signals to producers to change their labor, to produce more, produce less, go out of business, expand business, etc.
Coal miners, bakers, carpenters and chefs don’t directly relate to each other as workers. Instead the products of their labor, coal, bread, cabinets and pasta, meet in the market and are exchanged with one another. The material relations between people become social relations between things. When we look at coal, bread, cabinets and pasta we don’t see the work that created them. We just see commodities standing in relation of value to each other. A pile of coal’s value is worth so many loaves of bread. A cabinet’s value is worth so much pasta. The value, the social power of the object, appears to be a property of the object itself, not a result of the relation between workers.
[Money is the god of commodities. Through money all other commodities express their value. The amount of social labor that goes into a pencil becomes 20 cents. The portion of the social labor that goes into making a grand piano becomes 20 grand. As the god of commodities money becomes the ultimate expression of social power. It can be anything, buy anything, do anything. Yet money is just a scrap of paper, a pile of shiny rocks, a digit in a computer... It only has this power because it is an expression of social relations.]
We are atomized individuals wandering through a world of objects that we consume. When we buy a commodity we are just having an experience between ourselves and the commodity. We are blind to the social relations behind these interactions. Even if we consciously know that there is a network of social relations being coordinated through this world of commodities, we have no way of experiencing these relations directly because… they are not direct relations. We can only have an isolated intellectual knowledge of these social relations, not a direct relation. Every economic relation is mediated by an object called a commodity.
This process whereby the social relations between people take the form of relations between things Marx calls “reification”. Reification helps explain why it is that in a capitalist society things appear to take on the characteristics of people. Inanimate objects spring to life endowed with a “value” that seems to come from the object itself. We say a book is worth 20 dollars, a sweater worth 25 dollars. But this value doesn’t come from the sweater itself. You can’t cut open the sweater and find $25 inside. This $25 is an expression of the relation between this sweater and all of the other commodities in the market. And these commodities are just the material forms of a social labor process coordinated through market exchange. It is because people organize their labor through the market that value exists.
The illusion that value comes from the commodity itself and not from the social relations behind it is a “fetish”. A capitalist society is full of such illusions. Money appears to have god-like qualities, yet this is only so because it is an object which is used to express the value of all other commodities. Profit appears to spring out of exchange itself, yet Marx worked hard to explain how profit actually originates in production through the unequal relations between capital and labor in the workplace. Rent appears to grow out of the soil, yet Marx was adamant that rent actually comes from the appropriation of value created by labor. We see these fetishistic ideas in modern day mainstream economic theory in the idea that value comes from the subjective experience between a consumer and a commodity, and that capital creates value by itself.
Yet the theory of commodity fetishism isn’t just a theory of illusion. It’s not that the entire world is an illusion, reality existing somewhere far below the surface, always out of sight. The illusion is real. Commodities really do have value. Money really does have social power. Individual people really are powerless and material structures really do have social power. There is not a real world of production existing below the surface in which the relations between producers are direct. Relations between producers are only indirect, only coordinated through the mystifying world of commodities.
Conclusion:
The theory of commodity fetishism is central to Marx’s theory of value and it’s one of the things that sharply distinguishes him from his predecessors. Adam Smith and David Ricardo both held that prices were explained by labor time. But Marx’s value theory is much more than a theory of price. It is a theory of the way the social relations between people take on material forms that then act back upon and shape these social relations. Labor takes the form of value embodied in commodities. Money price becomes the universal expression of this value. The pursuit of money as an end itself dominates society. Means of production become capital. Money, commodities and capital, as representatives of social value, become independent forces in their own right out of the control of society. The law of value is the law of these forces. Attempts to exert some control over these forces through monopoly or the state always become enmeshed in the social antagonisms of value.
Suggested Reading:
Das Capital vol 1 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/). by Karl Marx: The theory of commodity fetishism is laid out in the end of chapter one.
Essays in Marx’s Theory of Value (http://marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/index.htm) by Issac Rubin. This is a great book about many aspects in Marx’s value theory. In many ways this video series is intended to be a modern take his book. The opening chapters are about commodity fetishism.
Also see the beginning of this article from Endnotes (http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/4) about value-form theory.

[Zanthorus]

I second the above, which on a quick skim seems quite good (And fairly clear as well). As a side note I saw that Endnotes was reccomended at the end of the quoted transcript, so it would appear that everyone's favourite online Marx interpreter is a sympathiser of the ultra-left, which is fairly interesting.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

I stopped here.
If the shoe fits...

[Broletariat]

Alright, lets see if I get this.

So basically, we do not control the market, the market controls us. Capitalism has a way of organising itself that is outside of our control. So when free-marketeers preach against "corporatism," they basically fail to understand that Capitalism is outside of our control?

[ar734]

From Capital, Vol I, Ch. I, Section 4:

"A commodity is therefore 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."

I think basically what that means, is that, a car, for instance, is in reality the product of thousands of workers, who combine socially to produce the car. However, we cannot see that when we look at the car, what we see is the physical reality (of not only the car, but the TVs, clothing, houses, tennis shoes, computers, which we as workers produce.) The two things are completely different. This is one reason so much money goes into advertising: If you buy the car you become personified in the car-you are sexy, fast, cool, you are a Mustang!! You are not just sitting in a car. Not only does the advertising control demand, but it also exploits the fetishistic quality of the car.

A foot fetish, for instance, combines two completely separate qualities: a physical foot and a sexual object. A rabbit's foot combines a physical thing with the magical quality of luck. A Catholic's rosary combines the physical reality of beads with the religious (reality) quality of a direct appeal to the mother of Jesus.

We are defined by our possessions. I am poor, therefore I drive a beat up 10 yr old Buick. My wife is a respectable teacher, she drives a fairly new Honda Accord. My daughter is a cool college kid, she drives a hand-me-down Honda Civic, to be traded in, she tells me, for a BMW convertible. And I have raised her NOT to be a material girl, but I never said she had to live like a refugee.

[ar734]

Alright, lets see if I get this.

So basically, we do not control the market, the market controls us. Capitalism has a way of organising itself that is outside of our control. So when free-marketeers preach against "corporatism," they basically fail to understand that Capitalism is outside of our control?

1. at this stage in monopolistic capitalist development, the giant corporations control the market: they control the supply of what they sell, and the prices (demand) customers pay. The free marketeers, who are mostly reactionary, want to turn history back to the mom and pop grocery store who will magically destroy WalMart.

2. on the contrary, capitalism is entirely within our control; we can take it over and destroy it. as to when and how that will happen is still open to question.

[Gorilla]

Alright, lets see if I get this.

So basically, we do not control the market, the market controls us. Capitalism has a way of organising itself that is outside of our control. So when free-marketeers preach against "corporatism," they basically fail to understand that Capitalism is outside of our control?

Capitalism functions in such a way that it appears to be outside our control.

Under commodity exchange, relationships between people are understood as relationships between things.

When I go and buy a bag of apples at the store, the price I pay for them is a monetary summary of my relation with the store, the store's with the farmer, both their relations with their respective employees and suppliers, etc. The whole world of once-living labor that is concealed in those apples, and the institutions that constrained it, are expressed in the price.

But under commodity exchange, no one thinks about the totality of it. No one thinks about the living labor going into the apples, the conditions it that labor is extracted under, the justice of those conditions, etc. They think "$3.99." A relationship of a thing (a bag of apples) to another thing (a quantity of money).

Just like a religious fetishist swaps a block of wood for his god, or a sexual fetishist swaps a pair of shoes for normal sexual outlets, a commodity fetishist swaps relations of price between commodities for relations of labor between people.

So because it involves a false substitution, and also because it is superstitious and perverse, Marx calls the ideology of commodity exchange 'fetishism'.

In socialism, of course, such mystification does not take place. Relations of production will be understood consciously and structured by conscious will of the associated workers.

[Broletariat]

1. at this stage in monopolistic capitalist development, the giant corporations control the market: they control the supply of what they sell, and the prices (demand) customers pay. The free marketeers, who are mostly reactionary, want to turn history back to the mom and pop grocery store who will magically destroy WalMart.

2. on the contrary, capitalism is entirely within our control; we can take it over and destroy it. as to when and how that will happen is still open to question.

1. I wouldn't say they control the market, they still must abide by market rules. They participate in the market, much like everyone else. They have a huge advantage of course, but the laws of capitalism still apply to them.

2. I meant control over Capitalism in more a way of, we can control the tendencies/laws of capitalism like the falling rate of profit or some such. We simply can't. Sure we can destroy Capitalism, but that's external. Internally, we have no control over Capitalism. This also appears to be an argument against reformism.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

We simply can't. Sure we can destroy Capitalism, but that's external. Internally, we have no control over Capitalism.

Maybe you should join Capitalists Anonymous: "I....I can't help it if I'm a capitalist! OOOOOOh, how I hate myself!" etc., etc. :lol:

[Broletariat]

Maybe you should join Capitalists Anonymous: "I....I can't help it if I'm a capitalist! OOOOOOh, how I hate myself!" etc., etc. :lol:

I'm not implying Socialism is impossible to achieve. Only that it must be achieved outside of the market. That really doesn't seem that controversial.

This is just what I'm getting about Commodity Fetishism, that there are unavoidable tendencies in Capitalism that we cannot control inside of Capitalism, only from without.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

It's kind of like sniffing your sister's panties: most people do it once or twice, then move on. Others can't stop, either sniffing their sister's panties or being a capitalist. So they have to rationalize the behavior they, themselves, hate. So instead of saying, "I sniff my sister's panties/come in her Manolos/suck up to my boss, and then move on to more important things," members of Capitalist Anonymous make up some mysterious power. For capitalists, it's "The Commodity made me do it." For reformists it's the "Iron Law of Wages." For Marxist-Leninists it's Diamat. :thumbup1:

[Obs]

It's kind of like sniffing your sister's panties: most people do it once or twice
dude, no, something is seriously wrong with you

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

dude, no, something is seriously wrong with you

You prefer to get off on Diamat...

[Obs]

You prefer to get off on Diamat...
As opposed to incest? Yeah, somehow I feel pretty okay about that.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

on this issue; bibs here (http://theorangepress.com/publications/theredmuseumnotes.html).

p. 20: "Can't they just sniff...." The fetishization of women's bodies - that is, dealing with women's bodies as commodities - would take another form (if it took a form at all) in a culture that did not ask of women that their own bodies perform as commodities and producers of commodities. The asymmetry between the forms that fetishization takes on the part of women vs. men in the theories of Freud and his followers is discussed in [Roudinesco 1997, 319].

p. 20: "Just as Karl's evil uncle Hegel..." Marx's definition of "fetishism" originates with the Enlightenment writer Charles de Brosses [de Brosses, 1760], whose Du Culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie [1760] was among the first to offer a materialist view of religions and first to suggest the term "fetishism"in the sense intended by Marx: a belief system in which powers are given to inanimate objects in order to displace onto them an agency - in the case of Marx, an agency that the believer is loathe to take upon him- or herself. (The concept comes to Marx by way of Hegel's Philosophy of History.) Marx's theory parallels the Freudian theory of fetishism in interesting ways: roughly with Freud , it splits into two concepts, Fetishism and Compulsion. [Roudinesco 1997, 316-320, 913-916]: after all, the practical problem for a Marxist is to explain why people keep acting capitalistically in a capitalist society: "The Commodity made me do it!" "There's this Invisible Hand!" This is done by fetishizing various concepts as historical or social agents: The Economy for a capitalist, The Iron Law of Wages for a certain type of Marxist, Dialectical Materialism for another, perhaps one's children as well. When Jacques Lacan famously said that for the young rebels of 1968 "cobblestones and teargas 'fulfilled the role of object a'” [Werner 1998, 241] he suggested the possibility of a fetishization of historical forces, with the caveat that teargas, Economic theory, or jerking off on your sister's Manolos might also have a heuristic value: that is, these would be processes that are not frozen as inalterable essences (philosophical and ethical neuroses, if you will), but as tools that may be used and discarded when their time comes, pretty much as Hegel saw the heuristic value of fetishism in History, and exactly as Marx intended the First Book of Capital to make sense once the principles of bourgeois economics had been truly understood and, being understood, transcended.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

As opposed to incest? Yeah, somehow I feel pretty okay about that.
Only a fetishist could fantasize that coming inside a pair of panties is the same as coming inside his sister. Buddy, you need help.

[Broletariat]

Could I get some serious feedback to my understanding of Commodity Fetishism here?

[Gorilla]

Could I get some serious feedback to my understanding of Commodity Fetishism here?

Did my post help at all?

[ar734]

1. I wouldn't say they control the market, they still must abide by market rules. They participate in the market, much like everyone else. They have a huge advantage of course, but the laws of capitalism still apply to them.


About 80% of the U.S. retail market is controlled by Walmart, Target, JC Penny, and, I think, Sears. U.S. banking is controlled by 5-6 banks: Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman, Sachs, Bank America, etc. One corp., Microsoft, controls the computer operating systems for the entire world market.

I just don't think it is reasonable to say that these behemoths abide by market rules or that they participate in the market like everybody else. It's been well established that modern capitalism is monopolistic: Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order , Sweezy, The New Industrial State, Galbraith, Cornered, The New Monopoly Capitalism..., Barry Lynn.

[Broletariat]

Did my post help at all?

Ehh not really, from what I'm hearing, commodity fetishism seems to be more about the control commodities have in our lives and less about our lack of being able to easily understand the relations in capitalism.


About 80% of the U.S. retail market is controlled by Walmart, Target, JC Penny, and, I think, Sears. U.S. banking is controlled by 5-6 banks: Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman, Sachs, Bank America, etc. One corp., Microsoft, controls the computer operating systems for the entire world market.

I just don't think it is reasonable to say that these behemoths abide by market rules or that they participate in the market like everybody else. It's been well established that modern capitalism is monopolistic: Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order , Sweezy, The New Industrial State, Galbraith, Cornered, The New Monopoly Capitalism..., Barry Lynn.

I meant more of, things like the falling rate of profit will always apply to them, they cannot escape the antagonisms inherent in Capitalism. We cannot control those aspects of Capitalism, merely move them around.

[Gorilla]

Ehh not really, from what I'm hearing, commodity fetishism seems to be more about the control commodities have in our lives and less about our lack of being able to easily understand the relations in capitalism.

You're hearing wrong then. Commodity fetishism refers specifically to the mystification of social relations under commodity exchange:


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

Of course, this ideological effect of commodity exchange that is called commodity fetishism is only one aspect of it. There are in addition laws that operate under commodity exchange that no actor - even a Target or Walmart, can break for long. When you talk about...


unavoidable tendencies in Capitalism that we cannot control inside of Capitalism, only from without.

...you're talking about a different aspect of the problem than commodity fetishism, but a related and very real one. In my example of a bag of apples, if you as a farmer decide to offer your laborers better wages and healthcare, and therefore charge $5.99 for a bag of apples when everyone else is charging $3.99 - you'll go out of business, and your laborers will be out on the street. That will be true as long as we're operating under capitalism.

But the specifically fetishist aspect is this: Everyone takes "bag of apples = $3.99" as the essential relationship in the situation and thinks the relation of farm laborers to their employers "naturally" flows from that. Of course it does flow from that under commodity exchange, but it becomes fetishism when that's perceived as natural rather than an inhuman monstrosity.

[Broletariat]

You're hearing wrong then. Commodity fetishism refers specifically to the mystification of social relations under commodity exchange:

That quote seems to support my case. Marx says that objects of human labour become "living" so to speak, they gain their own social power. With religious fetishism, this is not real power, but imagined power. Commodities really do have power.

[Gorilla]

That quote seems to support my case. Marx says that objects of human labour become "living" so to speak, they gain their own social power. With religious fetishism, this is not real power, but imagined power. Commodities really do have power.

I don't know, if you're living amongst the South Seas cannibals and King Talking Tiki God demands the sacrifice of two or perhaps more virgins or else terrible consequences will follow, the power of social expectations may be such that you will indeed suffer terrible consequences if you don't throw a couple of poor girls into the volcano. In that way King Talking Tiki, a religious fetish, would become "living" so to speak and gain his own social power.

I think Marx's point is that the system of commodity exchange is our very own version of angry tiki gods. Its power, like their power, is real to those experiencing it, but from the perspective of universal history it is no less stupid and every bit as savage.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Commodities really do have power. And that box of cornflakes really does sing and dance, just like in the commercial.

[Broletariat]

I don't know, if you're living amongst the South Seas cannibals and King Talking Tiki God demands the sacrifice of two or perhaps more virgins or else terrible consequences will follow, the power of social expectations may be such that you will indeed suffer terrible consequences if you don't throw a couple of poor girls into the volcano. In that way King Talking Tiki, a religious fetish, would become "living" so to speak and gain his own social power.

I think Marx's point is that the system of commodity exchange is our very own version of angry tiki gods. Its power, like their power, is real to those experiencing it, but from the perspective of universal history it is no less stupid and every bit as savage.

I think you're conflating the power of the social construct of religious fetishes, with the actual religious fetish. The Ark of the Covenant has no power, fact. Money, has lots of power, it IS social power as far as I'm aware.

[Gorilla]

I think you're conflating the power of the social construct of religious fetishes, with the actual religious fetish. The Ark of the Covenant has no power, fact. Money, has lots of power, it IS social power as far as I'm aware.

How is the ark of the covenant any different, if you're in first-temple Judaea? There, the ark of the covenant WAS social power. A stack of Benjamins would be useless. Even gold wouldn't do you any good if you had no recognized social claim on the state for protection against banditry, etc. And any sort of social claim would have to be rooted at one remove or another in the ark of the covenant.

The only difference is, the social power of money is more abstract and universalized than the ark of the covenant's, because the capitalist mode of production is more abstract and universalized than the mode of production of a Near Eastern temple state. But other than that, the cases are identical. The social construct of the ark of the covenant, the social construct of money.

[Broletariat]

How is the ark of the covenant any different, if you're in first-temple Judaea? There, the ark of the covenant WAS social power. A stack of Benjamins would be useless. Even gold wouldn't do you any good if you had no recognized social claim on the state for protection against banditry, etc. And any sort of social claim would have to be rooted at one remove or another in the ark of the covenant.


The benjamins and gold would not be money in this example though.

[ar734]

And that box of cornflakes really does sing and dance, just like in the commercial.

The purpose of the commercial is to convince you that if you eat the cornflakes you, too, will sing and dance and be happy. The social power may be subconscious, but it still is a social power.

[Gorilla]

The benjamins and gold would not be money in this example though.

Look, just read Capital vol. 1 chapt. 1 sec. 4. It's quite clear there that fetishism refers specifically to the ideological mystifications that spontaneously arise under commodity exchange.

[Hit The North]

The benjamins and gold would not be money in this example though.

Which only proves the point Gorilla is making. It is the social relations, which are symbolised by the fetish, that carry the material power, rather than the fetish itself. In other words, the benjamins and the gold have no power, any more than the arc, except in terms of how they embody and facilitate the reproduction of the existing social relations of power which are always historically specific. Abstracted from those relations, they become emptied of their representational power.

[Broletariat]

Look, just read Capital vol. 1 chapt. 1 sec. 4. It's quite clear there that fetishism refers specifically to the ideological mystifications that spontaneously arise under commodity exchange.

I did read it, and that's sort of what I'm getting from it, but this conversation has greatly helped.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

The purpose of the commercial is to convince you that if you eat the cornflakes you, too, will sing and dance and be happy. The social power may be subconscious, but it still is a social power.
Most every twelve-year old will tell you he/she is insulted by the suggestion he or she is stupid enough to fall for this. Try again.

[ar734]

Most every twelve-year old will tell you he/she is insulted by the suggestion he or she is stupid enough to fall for this. Try again.

You're the perfect consumer. Commercials are just entertainment, just information for you to make your rational judgment on what cereal to eat.

On the issue of fetishism, since you picked the cereal box, what is it that you see when you eat your breakfast. You see a cardboard box, a physical object, an independent, isolated thing. That is the fetish. The reality is that the cereal box is a complicated social relation.

This objectivism or reification of the commodity, the cereal box, is the fertish. I think it leads ultimately to the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, and the power of the "commodities" market, the "stock" market, "futures" market over people.

[ZeroNowhere]

It may be best to begin from the general concept of a commodity. In the first place, commodities exchange for other things upon a market. For example, one may sell a door for a certain price, and then buy two windows with this price, in which case one has effectively exchanged one door for two windows, or, what is the same, given up one door to gain two windows. As the market is not a charity, giving up the door is not incidental, nor an act of gifting, but rather a necessary prerequisite if one is to obtain the window upon the market. As such, the door, other than simply being a physical object which is useful by merit of its physical properties, also gains a use as an exchangeable object. This is not, of course, a natural or material property; it need not be elaborated why it is not a natural property of an object that humans exchange it in a certain proportion with others.

Here, the door's use in exchange was expressed in terms of another commodity, windows. However, the door will also exchange with all other commodities in some proportion. For example, one door may also exchange with three cars, which may exchange with one pencil (it is, you see, a very good pencil); in that case, two windows would also exchange with three cars and one pencil, three cars with two windows, and so on. The result of this is that one pencil, three cars and one door will all exchange for two windows, and as such if one wants two windows, it does not matter which of these one has, because they are equal upon the market. While as physical bodies they may be widely different, as commodities they are essentially equal.

In that case, the way that things appear is essentially that one goes to the market, one sells one's commodities according to their properties in exchange, and then one buys commodities according to the same. In selling one's commodities, of course, one must sell them for something, and hence one must bring one's commodity into relation with another. This is carried out according to the commodity's inherent properties as a commodity, rather than as a physical object as such. Now, a physical object gains its utility as such from its physical body. However, as 'commodity-bodies', one door and three cars in the above example are essentially equal. The commodity as commodity appears as essentially a non-physical body of a certain quantitative magnitude, equal qualitatively with all other commodities (and hence interchangeable with them all in a specific quantity).

One could also look at the matter in this manner: when an object transforms into another object, it does so according to its own properties. If one drops an egg, this will have a different effect to that of dropping an atomic bomb. On the market, the door is transformed for the seller into two windows. It does this too according to its properties, but it is clear that this cannot be a result of its physical properties, but rather it takes on the quality of having objective properties as a commodity rather than simply a physical thing. These properties, however, consist entirely of its ability to relate to other commodities upon the market in certain proportions. As such, the seller must bring the commodity to the market, and then must bring it into relation with other commodities in accordance with its own properties as a commodity, hence serving simply to facilitate the relation.

This is the essence of commodity fetishism, by which essentially commodities come to have lives of their own, and come into relations with each other as commodities. Once one puts commodities on the market, one is then subject to the laws of the marketplace, and to the relations of the commodities between themselves. Only through this may one realize one's commodity as a commodity. One may hold a commodity as a physical object at one point, but as soon as one puts it upon the market, it comes into relation with other commodities essentially by its own accord and in accordance with its own properties and laws. The object is transmogrified into a commodity-body, which is no longer a specific physical object, but rather simply a relation to other commodities.

Now, let us look at the form taken by production in this wider context. In the first place, let us return to our example, where one door, three cars and one pencil are all equally capable of exchanging for two windows. The result of this is that, insofar as one is producing simply for exchange, one may produce any of these to the same effect. The same applies, of course, to all other commodities on the market as well. Insofar as the products of labour are commodities, they are qualitatively equal on the market; that is, they feature as simply exchangeable goods for the seller, and in this they are undistinguished. All commodities are exchangeable goods, and only quantitatively different in this matter. The result of this is that labour carried out towards the aim of producing commodities for exchange is itself indifferent to the various specific physical objects which are produced by it, and hence to the physical form of labour itself (after all, what you get depends upon what you do. Production of cars requires different actions to the production of pencils). Insofar as the product is a commodity, it does not matter what form it takes, merely what it will bring on the market; the physical commodity is merely an inessential body which houses the commodity as its soul. As such, the same applies to labour insofar as it is production for exchange. Now, if one produces for one's own consumption, then one must indeed be very precise about what one produces; if one wants two windows, one must produce two windows, and hence perform the actions necessary to produce two windows. Conversely, if one wishes to buy two windows upon the market, then one may produce cars, doors, beds, umbrellas, shoddy romance novels and so on.

The result of this is that we have abstract labour. All forms of labour, that is, are made qualitatively equal, as production of market wealth, or exchangeable goods. Their products are made qualitatively equal, and so are they also. A product of abstract labour is a value (this is a definition). One may view this from another angle: a producer, in producing commodities, does not perform labour simply to give it away gratis (nor does a capitalist pay wages in such a manner). The market, as we said, is not a charity. Rather, they labour for private gain (not necessarily their own). Conversely, they do not produce any physical object for themselves, but rather for the consumption of others. So then how are they to make their labour worthwhile for themselves (or the capitalist make the wages so)? Well, it must be private labour, labour carried out for private gain of the labourer or owner of their labour-power. Labour would not be private if one did not retain the product, but rather simply surrendered it to society. The result of this is precisely that their product cannot appear as simply a physical body, which they do in fact surrender to society; rather, it appears as a commodity-body, as a non-physical entity which is retained and realized by the producer or capitalist. The producer or capitalist do not abandon the product at all upon the market, but rather in fact redeem it, and hence realize their labour as private labour rather than forfeiting it as charitable social labour. Their labour, thus, insofar as it is private labour, does not produce as its product a specific physical object, but rather a non-physical commodity body.

The result of this is that the sale of the commodity comes to represent the realization of the producer's own labour, and hence the product as a physical body becomes essentially simply a means by which this labour becomes such for the labourer. It is, as a physical body, unimportant; its function is rather to redeem the labour expended, and hence to be replaced with another commodity. It is simply a means by which the labour gains a purpose for the private producer, and in this a commodity. In itself, it is worthless to the producer or capitalist, or at the least forfeited, so that the labour expended on it as a use-value is not presented as private labour, but rather its labour must seek elsewhere for this character. As a result of this, it becomes essentially a vessel of labour, by which the producer's labour (or hired labour) is deposited upon the market in some form or other (it does not matter, so long as it is labour as such, abstract labour), and as such conveyed into the territory where it may be actually realized through exchange. If it had not been produced, the producer or capitalist could not actually purchase anything with nonexistent commodities (market, charity, etc.); conversely, only through production for the market may this production be realized, and hence the commodity as a physical object serves only as a necessary means for the labour's realization. This character of a vessel of labour is how value here appears, and a commodity as a commodity is a vessel of labour.

An object has a 'natural' physical form, namely its own physical body. This is natural insofar as it is transhistorical, and does not depend upon any form of society. However, value is not realized through this, as if the object were to be consumed by itself rather than sold, it would not be a commodity as such. On the other hand, value, if it is to be realized, must take on a physical form, else it is simply an empty conjecture and has no real, material existence. This is what we may call a commodity's value-form. Now, as a value, it finds substance only through being converted into the physical body, the 'natural form' of another commodity. As such, its physical value-form is that of another commodity, for which it exchanges; this is what Marx calls its 'exchange-value'. This is the basis of Marx's discussion of the various forms of value in his explanation of money, which I think should be fairly clear.

In any case, once all of this has been seen, we may now finally examine the relevance of the laws of the market to which the seller bravely exposes his wares. Now, we have seen that abstract labour, while qualitatively equal in principle, may differ quantitatively. This is the basis of the law of supply and demand. In the first place, we may as well briefly examine the category of demand. On the market, demand is effective demand, that is, one must have something to exchange if one wishes to exchange for something. This is not the same as psychological demand, and indeed on the market most starving people have no demand for food. Effective demand is not any sort of psychological 'wanting', but is expressed in terms of commodities. One's supply is, then, one's demand to some extent (this does not hold absolutely due to the separation of sale and purchase which Marx notes in the chapter on money, as well as the chapter on crises in 'Theories of Surplus-Value'); that is, one's commodity expresses not only one's supply to others, but also one's demand for oneself. This is the same thing as saying that one does not produce for the market simply to give stuff to others, but also as private labour, and hence as an expression of demand for other people's stuff.

Now, a product has a value, but it also has a concrete price, for which it is sold. This is determined, of course, by market forces; putting in a certain amount of labour needn't mean that you get the same amount back. That would imply that the commodity producer had complete control over the price of their commodities, whereas, as we have seen, the commodities inhabit a world of their own, uninhibited by any such arbitrary stipulations. As Engels comments, "continual deviations of the prices of commodities from their values are the necessary condition in and through which the value of the commodities as such can come into existence." (that is, only insofar as these are possible can values exist) Of course, if one product is exchanged for another product which represents less labour (has a smaller quantitative magnitude of value), then that other product is exchanged for one with more labour, and hence the discrepancies necessarily cancel each other out on the total social scale, so that total price, expressed in labour-time, is equal to total value expressed in labour-time; every product, in order to act as a value, must also be sold, and hence bought by somebody, therefore serving for the buyer not as a value but as the price earned for their own commodity's sale, which conversely featured as a value for them and so on.

Now, the price-commodity, the commodity for which the commodity is exchanged away, is itself a value of a specific magnitude. As such, the commodity is itself 'valued' in terms of this commodity, which may have a value greater or lesser than its own. What this means is simply that more or less labour was expended upon buying it than making it, or, what is the same, that the effective demand in labour terms is greater or lesser than the supply in labour terms. However, undervaluation implies overvaluation elsewhere, which can only mean that more labour was performed in order to purchase the product than upon the product itself. As producers perform only abstract labour, they will therefore tend to migrate to production of overvalued commodities, where the same amount of labour-time (or labourers hired) will grant them a greater price. This tendency would only rest if prices were equal to values, and hence there were no overvaluation, and hence no supply-demand discrepancies. This is the context in which it is said that price equals value when supply and demand are equal.

In actual fact, however, we must take into account not only living labour (represented by variable capital, wages), but also dead labour (spent labour already incarnated in a product; labour carried out in producing means of production, in this context), as if prices were equal to values here, a capitalist who hired more dead labour and less living labour would have to gain less profit than one who hired less dead and more living labour (given equal wages for both capitalists, so that an equal amount of labour-time will be necessary in both cases to reproduce these wages for each labourer, and the rest spent on profit), even if their products represented an equal amount of the total labour of society (as, after all, the production of means of production of car-production in fact forms a part of the production process of the car). The result is, ultimately, that the former would tend towards increasing profits, and the latter towards lower profits than according to prices = values (although they would still do so on a social level, of course.) Whether or not prices do equal values is irrelevant to the theory of value; they may or they may not. The theory of value is not an empirical description of price-levels, it is a description of what price is.

However, that aside, we end up with the result that, "Only through the undervaluation or overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to the individual commodity producers what society requires or does not require and in what amounts." This in fact explains the nature of the market forces which appear as essentially independent and sovereign to commodity sellers. The operation of supply and demand upon price is simply an expression of the amount of the total social labour expended upon the product in question. In other words, in the market, the seemingly accidental and chaotic fluctuations in price are simply the means by which producers interact with each other. Capitalist production is not performed according to conscious social planning, but rather by private individuals, which, as we saw, was the basis of value. These private individuals may come into relation to each other only through their commodities coming into relation, and their commodities themselves serve as products of abstract labour. As such, the activity of the rest of society is materialized for the individual commodity seller as simply alterations in the relations of commodities.

In that case, the fact that commodities come to follow autonomous laws, which the sellers must simply respect and follow, is merely a result of the fact that the rest of society becomes something autonomous from them, and they may interact only through the mediation of commodity relations, so that likewise the activity and needs of the rest of society are only expressed thus. Marx points out that in every society, if it is to survive at all, labour must be not only performed, but divided between various forms in specific ways (if one spends all of one's time creating swords, then one may end up starving). In capitalist society, this takes the form of autonomous laws impinging upon the private producers; as production is private, so society may only be asserted in the form of a law imposed upon this private production, and these laws may only take place through the mediation between society and the private producer, social labour and private labour, namely the commodities themselves qua values. The fact that the product of the producers comes to be autonomous of them, and form relations independent of them, simply expresses the fact that society is alien to them (not in the sense that such statements are used by various annoying blokes whining and moralising about the internet, how people are engaging in too little social interaction, and such. We are not moralising here, and one may engage in as much social interaction as one wants while still being alienated), as are their relations to society. This is simply the early formulation of Marx, namely that alienation of man from his product necessarily involves the alienation of man from man.

Really, there's a lot which one could expand upon with that last theme, especially as regards capitalists and their role in production, but quite frankly I think I've expanded this post far enough at this point. So yes, hopefully that helps.


It's kind of like sniffing your sister's panties: most people do it once or twice, then move on. Others can't stop, either sniffing their sister's panties or being a capitalist. So they have to rationalize the behavior they, themselves, hate. So instead of saying, "I sniff my sister's panties/come in her Manolos/suck up to my boss, and then move on to more important things," members of Capitalist Anonymous make up some mysterious power. For capitalists, it's "The Commodity made me do it." For reformists it's the "Iron Law of Wages." For Marxist-Leninists it's Diamat. :thumbup1:
You, on the other hand, have no such excuse.


That angry guy has a commodity fetish towards his mailbox: it is means more to him than what it really is, just a fucking mailbox.We don't even know that the mailbox was ever a commodity. In any case, it wasn't functioning as one while he was using it as a mailbox. Despite your cautions to the contrary, you seem to be confusing commodity fetishism with the concept of sexual fetishism.


At the end of the short (around 4:37), Philip says that the experience showed him that commodities are not worth more than their use-value.Strange that capitalists keep producing them, then, given that they simply give away the use-values. Of course commodities are 'worth more than their use-value', that's why they're commodities.


I think basically what that means, is that, a car, for instance, is in reality the product of thousands of workers, who combine socially to produce the car. However, we cannot see that when we look at the car, what we see is the physical reality (of not only the car, but the TVs, clothing, houses, tennis shoes, computers, which we as workers produce.) The two things are completely different.
On the issue of fetishism, since you picked the cereal box, what is it that you see when you eat your breakfast. You see a cardboard box, a physical object, an independent, isolated thing. That is the fetish. The reality is that the cereal box is a complicated social relation.No, that is objectification, and is a property of human labour in general. The fact that our product is an object separate from us is just as much a feature of socialism as capitalism, and does not make it an alienated product. Lucio Colletti makes a fairly comprehensive distinction between appropriation (objectification) and alienation in 'Marxism and Hegel'. In any case, a cardboard box is not a social relation, and a social relation is not a cardboard box.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

You, on the other hand, have no such excuse.

I wasn't looking for one; there lies the difference.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

Fetishism refers specifically to the ideological mystifications that spontaneously arise under commodity exchange.

I'll have a scoop of frozen dialectic, please, with sprinkles on top...

[Broletariat]

*text*


This was incredibly helpful, thank you.

[ar734]

In any case, a cardboard box is not a social relation, and a social relation is not a cardboard box.

I'm not sure of that. A cardboard box, if produced socially, and the value of which is based solely on social labor, then would be a social relation. However, we don't see this relation when we look at the box; what we see is a relationship between the box, the milk carton, the kitchen table, the spoon, which we see as a relation between things. Which is the fetish nature of commodities.

Capital, as we know, is a social relation, although it looks like money, stock quotes, or gigantic piles of commodities.

Otherwise, what is the fetish? If the wooden idol is the reality, and the god is the mystical fetish, then what is the reality of the commodity and what is the fetish of the commodity?

Wooden idol is to god as box is to ? Or wooden idol is to god as social relation is to the box (the magic of individualism/objectivism.)

[Gorilla]

I'll have a scoop of frozen dialectic, please, with sprinkles on top...

I'll have your sister's panties.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

I'll have your sister's panties.
Ask your daddy, he wears them to work.

[Broletariat]

Ask your daddy, he wears them to work.

This genuinely made me lol.

Not because of the comment, but the immaturity.

[ar734]

How about this? An idol represents the magical value of primitive religion.
A commodity has value because it represents the magic of the market, the "invisible hand." The true value is the socially nec labor contained in the commodity, but we can't see that.

When the idol fetish stops working the primitive destroys it. After a commodity stays on the shelf too long it decreases in value because, on average, it is increasingly cheaper to produce it.

[Yazman]

Ask your daddy, he wears them to work.


I'll have your sister's panties.

These kinds of posts are blatant off-topic posting and really contribute nothing to the discussion. You shouldn't be posting like this in Learning - if you want to just post crap all day without having to worry if you're contributing anything or not, go to Chit Chat.

But this kind of shit isn't allowed, especially not in Learning. Don't let me see it again.

This post constitutes a warning to Hoipolloi Cassidy and Gorilla.