Commodity Fetishism

A characteristic of capitalist economies is that goods are bought and sold. A commodity is a marketable good or material that can satisfy human needs. It can be a raw good, such as gold, grain, or diamonds, or a finished good, such as shoes, bread, or heating oil. The term fetish arose in 19th-century anthropological discourse about religious cultures that attach intense feelings and desires to specific inanimate objects they believe have great power.

German economist and philosopher Karl Marx saw a relationship between these ideas. In the classic work Capital (1867), Marx analyzed capitalist society and the connection between forms of production and corresponding sociopolitical forms to understand the underpinnings of this economic system. Marx argued that a mystical, magical quality is derived from some commodities not because of what they can do for us (use-value) but, rather, from what they mean to us (exchange-value). He called this commodity fetishism.

Two forms of value are central to understanding how the process works: use-value (its inherent capability of satisfying human wants or needs) and exchange-value (its inter-changeability with other products). In the first case, the value of a particular product is connected with what makes up the product—its physical characteristics. For example, bread is a commodity with physical properties that cannot be transferred. We cannot eat oil, for example, and we cannot heat our homes with bread. Use-value is life sustaining and has a specific concrete purpose. In traditional societies, in which agreements were often informal and social relations were intimate and close, products were often made and consumed within sight of one another. People often baked their own bread, for example, or knew the person who baked the bread they bought. But in capitalist societies, where workers are often invisible and the material production process hidden behind the veil of consumer culture and branding, people often have little sense of the effort that went into the making of a good.

Exchange-value only occurs under capitalism and is the expression of the value of one commodity as equivalent to a quantity of another commodity. So rather than the value based in the human effort and labor that creates the product, exchange-value is about what one might get by exchanging one thing for another. Thus, whereas wheat and coffee might have different values for different weights, a common value between the two is found in the process of the exchange that is unrelated to the creation of the product.

When a commodity is fetishized, people form a relationship with it—perhaps it is a car, a computer, a pair of shoes—and equate these things with qualities, such as the power to make us popular, or respected, or beautiful, and lose connection with another. Marx predicted that this relationship with things would come to define our relationships. Whereas use-value is directly related to what a product can or cannot do, exchange value is more abstract, and more about the meaning of a particular product. In commodity fetishism, [Page 56]what a product/object is originally intended for is less important than what it means to the culture. This stage goes beyond what people's needs for a product might be in a practical sense and reaches into what a product might say about the possessor of it.

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