Commodity fetishism

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Commodity fetishism: In the marketplace, producers and consumers perceive each other
by means of the money and goods that they exchange.
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In Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism, commodity fetishism is

the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships
among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities
exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective,
abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have
intrinsic value.[1]

The theory of commodity fetishism is presented in the first chapter of Capital: Critique
of Political Economy (1867), at the conclusion of the analysis of the value-form of
commodities, to explain that the social organisation of labour is mediated through market
exchange, the buying and the selling of commodities (goods and services). Hence, in a
capitalist society, social relations between people—who makes what, who works for
whom, the production-time for a commodity, et cetera—are perceived as economic
relations among objects, that is, how valuable a given commodity is when compared to
another commodity. Therefore, the market exchange of commodities masks (obscures)
the true economic character of the human relations of production, between the worker
and the capitalist.[2]

Karl Marx explained the philosophic concepts underlying commodity fetishism thus:

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour
within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the
commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite
social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form
of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight
into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as
autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with
each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the
products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of
labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the
production of commodities.

— Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1[3]

Contents
 1 The concept of fetishism
 2 The theory of commodity fetishism
o 2.1 The domination of things
o 2.2 Objectified value
 o 2.3 Naturalisation of market behaviour
o 2.4 Masking
o 2.5 The opacity of economic relations
 3 Applications
o 3.1 Cultural theory
o 3.2 Intellectual property
 4 In other economic theory
o 4.1 Subjective wants
 5 Criticism
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 Further reading

 9 External links

The concept of fetishism

Fetishism: a South African fetish figurine whose supernatural powers protect the owner
and kin in the natural world (ca. 1900)
Metal money fetishism: A political poster shows gold coin as the basis of prosperity. (ca.
1896)

The theory of commodity fetishism originated from Karl Marx's references to fetishes
and fetishism in his analyses of religious superstition, and in the criticism of the beliefs of
political economists.[4] Marx borrowed the concept of "fetishism" from The Cult of Fetish
Gods (1760) by Charles de Brosses, which proposed a materialist theory of the origin of
religion.[5] Moreover, in the 1840s, the philosophic discussion of fetishism by Auguste
Comte, and Ludwig Feuerbach's psychological interpretation of religion also influenced
Marx's development of commodity fetishism.[6][7]

The first mention of fetishism appeared in 1842, in his response to a newspaper article by
Karl Heinrich Hermes, which defended the Prussian state on religious grounds.[8] Hermes
concorded with the German philosopher Hegel in regarding fetishism as the crudest form
of religion. Marx dismissed that argument, and Hermes's definition of religion as that
which elevates man "above sensuous appetites". Instead, Marx said that fetishism is "the
religion of sensuous appetites", and that the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish
worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to
gratify the desires of the worshipper. Therefore, the crude appetite of the fetish
worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service.[9]

The next mention of fetishism was in the 1842 Rheinische Zeitung newspaper articles
about the "Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood", wherein Marx spoke of the Spanish
fetishism of gold and the German fetishism of wood as commodities: [10]

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 the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the European
fetish of precious-metal money:

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. [Note the] contrast of France and England. The extent to which the solution of
theoretical riddles is the task of practice, and is 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.[10]

In the ethnological notebooks, he commented upon the archæological reportage of The

Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social conditions
of Savages (1870), by John Lubbock.[11] In the Outlines of the Critique of Political
Economy (Grundrisse, 1859), he criticized the statist, anti-socialist arguments of the
French economist Frédéric Bastiat; and about fetishes and fetishism Marx said:

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.[12]

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx referred to A

Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy
(1825), by John Ramsay McCulloch, who said that "In its natural state, matter . . . is
always destitute of value", with which Marx concurred, saying that "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".
Furthermore, in the manuscript of "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" (ca.
1864), an appendix to Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), Marx
said 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.[13]

Hence did Karl Marx apply the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from economic
and ethnologic studies, to the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, wherein
an economic abstraction (value) is psychologically transformed (reified) into an object,
which people choose to believe has an intrinsic value, in and of itself.[14]

The theory of commodity fetishism

In the critique of political economy

Karl Marx proposed that, in a society where independent, private producers trade their
products with each other, of their own volition and initiative, and without much co-
ordination of market exchange, the volumes of production and commercial activities are
adjusted in accordance with the fluctuating values of the products (goods and services) as
they are bought and sold, and in accordance with the fluctuations of supply and demand.
Because their social co-existence, and its meaning, is expressed through market exchange
(trade and transaction), people have no other relations with each other. Therefore, social
relations are continually mediated and expressed with objects (commodities and money).
How the traded commodities relate will depend upon the costs of production, which are
reducible to quantities of human labour, although the worker has no control over what
happens to the commodities that he or she produces. (See: Entfremdung, Marx's theory of
alienation)

Commodity fetishism, the socio-economic reification of a commodity into a fetish, an

object with intrinsic value and an independent economic reality, is a five-fold
transformation —

The domination of things

The concept of the intrinsic value of commodities (goods and services) determines and
dominates the economic (business) relationships among people, to the extent that buyers
and sellers continually adjust their beliefs (financial expectations) about the value of
things — either consciously or unconsciously — to the proportionate price changes
(market-value) of the commodities over which buyers and sellers believe they have no
true control. That psychologic perception transforms the trading-value of a commodity
into an independent entity (an object), to the degree that the social value of the goods and
services appears to be a natural property of the commodity, itself. Thence objectified, the
market appears as if self-regulated (by fluctuating supply and demand) because, in
pursuit of profit, the consumers of the products ceased to perceive the human co-
operation among capitalists that is the true engine of the market where commodities are
bought and sold; such is the domination of things in the market.

Objectified value

The value of a commodity originates from the human being's intellectual and perceptual
capacity to consciously (subjectively) ascribe a relative value (importance) to a
commodity, the goods and services manufactured by the labour of a worker. Therefore, in
the course of the economic transactions (buying and selling) that constitute market
exchange, people ascribe subjective values to the commodities (goods and services),
which the buyers and the sellers then perceive as objective values, the market-exchange
prices that people will pay for the commodities.

Naturalisation of market behaviour

The "natural behaviour" of the market: During an economic bubble, speculators presume
that capital appreciation is an inherent economic property of their investments.

In a capitalist society, the human perception that "the market" is an independent, sentient
entity, is how buyers, sellers, and producers naturalise market exchange (the human
choices and decisions that constitute commerce) as a series of "natural phenomena . . .
that . . . happen of their own accord". Such were the political-economy arguments of the
economists whom Karl Marx criticized when they spoke of the "natural equilibria" of
markets, as if the price (value) of a commodity were independent of the volition and
initiative of the capitalist producers, buyers, and sellers of commodities.

In the 18th century, the Scottish social philosopher and political economist Adam Smith,
in The Wealth of Nations (1776) proposed that the "truck, barter, and exchange" activities
of the market were corresponding economic representations of human nature, that is, the
buying and selling of commodities were activities intrinsic to the market, and thus are the
"natural behaviour" of the market. Hence, Smith proposed that a market economy was a
self-regulating entity that "naturally" tended towards economic equilibrium, wherein the
relative prices (the value of) a commodity ensured that the buyers and sellers obtained
what they wanted for and from their goods and services.[15]

In the 19th century, Karl Marx contradicted the artifice of Adam Smith's "naturalisation
of the market's behaviour" as a politico-ideologic apology — by and for the capitalists —
which allowed human economic choices and decisions to be misrepresented as fixed
"facts of life", rather than as the human actions that resulted from the will of the
producers, the buyers, and the sellers of the commodities traded at market. Such
"immutable economic laws" are what Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867)
revealed about the functioning of the capitalist mode of production, how goods and
services (commodities) are circulated among a society; and thus explain the
psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent,
objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value — other than the value
given to it by the producer, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.

Masking

In a capitalist economy, a character mask (Charactermaske) is the functional role with

which a man or a woman relates and is related to in a society composed of stratified
social classes, especially in relationships and market-exchange transactions; thus, in the
course of buying and selling, the commodities (goods and services) usually appear other
than they are, because they are masked (obscured) by the role-playing of the buyer and
the seller. Moreover, because the capitalist economy of a class society is an intrinsically
contradictory system, the masking of the true socio-economic character of the transaction
is an integral feature of its function and operation as market exchange. In the course of
business competition among themselves, buyers, sellers, and producers cannot do
business (compete) without obscurity — confidentiality and secrecy — thus the necessity
of the character masks that obscure true economic motive.

Central to the Marxist critique of political economy is the obscurantism of the juridical
labour contract, between the worker and the capitalist, that masks the true, exploitive
nature of their economic relationship — that the worker does not sell his and her labour,
but that the worker sells individual labour power, the human capacity to perform work
and manufacture commodities (goods and services) that yield a profit to the producer.
The work contract is the mask that obscures the economic exploitation of the difference
between the wages paid for the labour of the worker, and the new value created by the
labour of the worker.

Karl Marx thus established that, in a capitalist society, the creation of wealth is based
upon "the paid and unpaid portions of labour [that] are inseparably mixed up with each
other, and the nature of the whole transaction is completely masked by the intervention of
a contract, and the pay received at the end of the week"; and that:[16]

Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than to interpret, to systematize and turn
into apologetics — in a doctrinaire way — the ideas of the agents who are trapped within
bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that, precisely within the
estranged form of appearance of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd
and complete contradictions occur — and all science would be superfluous if the form of
appearance of things directly coincided with their essence — that precisely here vulgar
economics feels completely at home, and that these relationships appear all the more self-
evident to it, the more their inner interconnection remains hidden to it, even though these
relationships are comprehensible to the popular mind.

— Das Kapital Volume 3.[17]

The opacity of economic relations

The primary valuation of the trading-value of goods and services (commodities) is

expressed as money-prices. The buyers and the sellers determine and establish the
economic and financial relationships; and afterwards compare the prices in and the price
trends of the market. Moreover, because of the masking of true economic motive, neither
the buyer, nor the seller, nor the producer perceive and understand every human labour-
activity required to deliver the commodities (goods and services), nor do they perceive
the workers whose labour facilitated the purchase of commodities. The economic results
of such collective human labour are expressed as the values and the prices of the
commodities; the value-relations between the amount of human labour and the value of
the supplied commodity.

Applications
Cultural theory

György Lukács developed Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism to develop

reification theory.
Thorstein Veblen proposed the conspicuous consumption of commodities as the pursuit
of social prestige.

Since the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented the theory of commodity fetishism, in
Section 4, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof", of the first chapter of
Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), the constituent concepts of the theory, and
their sociologic and economic explanations, have proved intellectually fertile
propositions that permit the application of the theory (interpretation, development,
adaptation) to the study, examination, and analysis of other cultural aspects of the
political economy of capitalism, such as:

 Sublimated sexuality

The theory of sexual fetishism, which Alfred Binet presented in the essay Le fétichisme
dans l'amour: la vie psychique des micro-organismes, l'intensité des images mentales,
etc. (Fetishism in Love: the Psychic Life of Micro-organisms, the Intensity of Mental
Images, etc., 1887), was applied to interpret commodity fetishism as types of sexually-
charged economic relationships, between a person and a commodity (goods and
services), as in the case of advertising, which is a commercial enterprise that ascribes
human qualities (values) to a commodity, to persuade the buyer to purchase the
advertised goods and services.[18]

 Reification

In History and Class Consciousness (1923), György Lukács started from the theory of
commodity fetishism for his development of reification (the psychological transformation
of an abstraction into a concrete object) as the principal obstacle to class consciousness.
About which Lukács said: "Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and
reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively
sinks more deeply, more fatefully, and more definitively into the consciousness of Man"
— hence, commodification pervaded every conscious human activity, as the growth of
capitalism commodified every sphere of human activity into a product that can be bought
and sold in the market.[19] (See: Verdinglichung, Marx's theory of reification.)
  Industrialised culture

Commodity fetishism is theoretically central to the Frankfurt School philosophy,

especially in the work of the sociologist Theodor W. Adorno, which describes how the
forms of commerce invade the human psyche; how commerce casts a person into a role
not of his or her making; and how commercial forces affect the development of the
psyche. In the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Max Horkheimer
presented the Theory of the Culture Industry to describe how the human imagination
(artistic, spiritual, intellectual activity) becomes commodified when subordinated to the
"natural commercial laws" of the market.

To the consumer, the cultural goods and services sold in the market appear to offer the
promise of a richly developed and creative individuality, yet the inherent
commodification severely restricts and stunts the human psyche, so that the man and the
woman consumer has little "time for myself", because of the continual personification of
cultural roles over which he and she exercise little control. In personifying such cultural
identities, the person is a passive consumer, not the active creator, of his or her life; the
promised life of individualistic creativity is incompatible with the collectivist,
commercial norms of bourgeois culture.

 Commodity narcissism

In the study From Commodity Fetishism to Commodity Narcissism (2012) the

investigators applied the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism to psychologically
analyse the economic behaviour (buying and selling) of the contemporary consumer.
With the concept of commodity narcissism, the psychologists Stephen Dunne and Robert
Cluley proposed that consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the
manufacturing origin of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the
exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services,
bought by the "concerned consumer"; that, within the culture of consumerism,
narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a
socially acceptable way to express aggression.[20]

 Social prestige

In the 19th and in the 21st centuries, Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class:
An Economic Study of Institutions, 1899) and Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety, 2004)
respectively developed the social status (prestige) relationship between the producer of
consumer goods and the aspirations to prestige of the consumer. To avoid the status
anxiety of not being of or belonging to "the right social class", the consumer establishes a
personal identity (social, economic, cultural) that is defined and expressed by the
commodities (goods and services) that he or she buys, owns, and uses; the domination of
things that communicate the "correct signals" of social prestige, of belonging. (See:
Conspicuous consumption.)

 Social alienation
In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Guy Debord presented the theory of "du
spectacle" — the systematic conflation of advanced capitalism, the mass communications
media, and a government amenable to exploiting those factors. The spectacle transforms
human relations into objectified relations among images, and vice versa; the exemplar
spectacle is television, the communications medium wherein people passively allow
(cultural) representations of themselves to become the active agents of their beliefs. The
spectacle is the form that society assumes when the Arts, the instruments of cultural
production, have been commodified as commercial activities that render an æsthetic
value into a commercial value (a commodity). Whereby artistic expression then is shaped
by the person's ability to sell it as a commodity, that is, as artistic goods and services.

Capitalism reorganises personal consumption to conform to the commercial principles of

market exchange; commodity fetishism transforms a cultural commodity into a product
with an economic "life of its own" that is independent of the volition and initiative of the
artist, the producer of the commodity. What Karl Marx critically anticipated in the 19th
century, with "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof", Guy Debord
interpreted and developed for the 20th century — that in modern society, the psychologic
intimacies of intersubjectivity and personal self-relation are commodified into and as
discrete "experiences" that can be bought and sold. The Society of the Spectacle is the
ultimate form of social alienation that occurs when a person views his or her being (self)
as a commodity that can be bought and sold, because he or she regards every human
relation as a (potential) business transaction. (See: Entfremdung, Marx's theory of
alienation)

 The semiotic sign

Jean Baudrillard applied commodity fetishism to explain the subjective feelings of men
and women towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation"; that is, the cultural
mystique (mystification) that advertising ascribed to the commodities (goods and
services) in order to encourage the buyer to purchase the goods and services as aids to the
construction of his and her cultural identity. In the book For a Critique of the Political
Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard developed the semiotic theory of "the Sign"
(sign value) as a development of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism and of the
exchange value vs. use value dichotomy of capitalism.

Intellectual property

In the 21st century, the political economy of capitalism reified the abstract objects that
are information and knowledge into the tangible commodities of intellectual property,
which are produced by and derived from the labours of the intellectual and the white
collar workers.

 Philosophic base

The Marxist economist Michael Perelman critically examined the belief systems from
which arose intellectual property rights, the field of law that commodified knowledge and
information. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis critically reviewed the belief systems of
the theory of human capital [11]. Knowledge, as the philosophic means to a better life, is
contrasted with capitalist knowledge (as commodity and capital), produced to generate
income and profit. Such commodification detaches knowledge and information from the
(user) person, because, as intellectual property, they are independent, economic entities.

 Knowledge: authentic and counterfeit

In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), the Marxist theorist
Fredric Jameson linked the reification of information and knowledge to the post-modern
distinction between authentic knowledge (experience) and counterfeit knowledge
(vicarious experience), which usually is acquired through the mass communications
media. That in such a pseudo-world, counterfeit experience eventually substitutes
authentic experience. In Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and
Advertising in Capitalist Society (1986), the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug presents a
"critique of commodity aesthetics" that examines how human needs and desires are
manipulated and reshaped for commercial gain.[21]

 Financial risk management

The sociologists Frank Furedi and Ulrich Beck studied the development of commodified
types of knowledge in the business culture of "risk prevention" in the management of
money. The Post–World War II economic expansion (ca. 1945–73) created very much
money (capital and savings), while the dominant bourgeois ideology of money favoured
the risk-management philosophy of the managers of investment funds and financial
assets. From such administration of investment money, manipulated to create new capital,
arose the preoccupation with risk calculations, which subsequently was followed by the
"economic science" of risk prevention management.[22][23] In light of which, the
commodification of money as "financial investment funds" allows an ordinary person to
pose as a rich person, as an economic risk-taker able to risk losing money invested to the
market. Hence, the fetishization of financial risk as "a sum of money" is a reification that
distorts the social perception of the true nature of financial risk, as experienced by
ordinary people.[24] Moreover, the valuation of financial risk is susceptible to ideological
bias; that contemporary fortunes are achieved from the insight of experts in financial
management, who study the relationship between "known" and "unknown" economic
factors, by which human fears about money can be manipulated and exploited.

 Commodified art

The cultural critics Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin examined and described the
fetishes and fetishism of Art, by means of which "artistic" commodities are produced for
sale in the market, and how commodification determines and establishes the value of the
artistic commodities (goods and services) derived from legitimate Art; for example, the
selling of an artist's personal effects as "artistic fetishes".

 Legal traducement
In the field of law, the Soviet scholar Evgeny Pashukanis (The General Theory of Law
and Marxism, 1924), the Austrian politician Karl Renner, the German political scientist
Franz Leopold Neumann, the British socialist writer China Miéville, the labour-law
attorney Marc Linder, and the American legal philosopher Duncan Kennedy (The Role of
Law in Economic Theory: Essays on the Fetishism of Commodities, 1985) have
respectively explored the applications of commodity fetishism in their contemporary
legal systems, and reported that the reification of legal forms misrepresents social
relations.[25][26]

In other economic theory

Subjective wants

Carl Menger, a founder of the Austrian School of economics, proposed that commodity
fetishism is a person's subjective preference.

In Principles of Economics (1871), the capitalist economist Carl Menger, a founder of the
Austrian School, said that the attribution of value (commodity fetishism) is a matter of
subjective preference:

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 the requirements for and the 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 [the]
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.

— Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), chapter 3[27]

Theoretically, the market tends to adjust supply to demand, for which reason, economists
extrapolate a "natural tendency of markets to reach equilibrium" if there is no outside
interference. The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), in the
Nicomachean Ethics, noted such "market behaviour", and said that the increased value of
a commodity was relative to the buyer's demand for the commodity.[28]

In the 19th century, Karl Marx's contemporary, Carl Menger (1840–1921), proposed the
"Theory of Subjective Wants", wherein the behaviour of the market is explainable only in
terms of the subjective wants of the buyer and the seller. The market expanded because
the intensity of the buyers' want increased desires; if the market contracted, it was
because of the buyers' decreased desires. That "market freedom" might be an illusion,
created by buyers and sellers in order to control of the economic choices available to
them, as determined by the supply and the demand for commodities (goods and services).
Buyers feel unconstrained by the activities of the market because they have internalized
the rules for buying and selling commodities. Although people might not buy or sell of
their free choice, but because they were forced by circumstance, as in a food crisis,
wherein scarcity over-prices the food supply, yet people buy it, because they must eat.

In the opinion of Karl Marx, the theories of natural market-behaviour proffered by

capitalist economists were products of the way the market functioned — by the volition
and initiative of the buyers and sellers of commodities — not otherwise. If the market is
the creation of a reified consciousness, which attributed an independent economic value
to symbols (objects) imposed by "the many" upon "the few"; or by the economic
community upon its members, it would influence the economic theories that explain
"natural market-behaviour" in ways that promoted the fetishization of buying and selling
commodities. Ultimately, that objectification (reification) created the belief that "the
economy" and "the market" are sentient entities who act independently of the actions
(choices and decisions) of the buyer and of the seller.[29] Hence, although people might
speak of the market acting as an entity, and the market exchange results from the volition
and initiative of the buyers and the sellers, in which case, Marxist commodity fetishism
had contributed to economic dumbing down. (See: Law of value)

Criticism
The Tribune of the Uffizi (1772–78), by Johann Zoffany, depicts the commodity-fetishism
metamorphosis of oil paintings into culture-industry products.

The Marxist theory of commodity fetishism is criticised from the perspectives of:

 Market logic

In the book In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000), the libertarian economist Tyler
Cowen said that, despite the cultural tendency to fetishes and fetishism, the human
fetishization of commodities (goods and services) is an instance of anthropomorphism
(ascribing personal characteristics to animals and objects), and not a philosophic feature
particular to the economics of capitalism or to the collective psychology of a capitalist
society. That people usually can distinguish between commercial valuations
(commodities) and cultural valuations (objets d'art), if not, quotidian life would be very
difficult, because people would be unable to agree upon the value and the valuation of an
object; thus, if the market did not exist, it would have been impossible for the popular
masses to have access to cultural objects.[30]

 Marxism as religion

The historian of ideas Leszek Kołakowski said that Marxism (the philosophy) and Karl
Marx (the man) had become fetishized and rendered into commodities; that such a form
of intellectual reductionism could be construed as a secular, materialist faith that
substituted for supernatural religion.[31][32]

 Capitalism as religion

In the essay "Capitalism as Religion" (1921), Walter Benjamin said that the idea of
whether or not people treat capitalism as a religion was a moot subject, because "One can
behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the
same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion." That the
religion of capitalism is manifest in four tenets:
 (i) "Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever
existed"
(ii) "The permanence of the cult"
(iii) "Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not
atonement"
(iv) "God must be hidden from it, and may be addressed only when guilt is at its
zenith".[33][34]
 Commodity iconoclasm

In Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun, Professor Helena Sheehan said that the analogy
between commodity fetishism and religion is mistaken, because people do not worship
money and commodities in the spiritual sense, by attributing to them supernatural
powers. That human, psychological beliefs about the value-relationships inherent to
commodity fetishism are not religious beliefs, and do not possess the characteristics of
spiritual beliefs. The proof of this interpretation lies in the possibility of a person's being
a religious believer, despite being aware of commodity fetishism, and being critical of its
manifestations; that toppling the Golden Calf might be integral to one's religiousness, that
such iconoclasm would lead to opposing all manifestations of idolatry.[35]

See also
Pre–Marxist theories
 Simple living

Marxist theories pertinent to the theory of commodity fetishism

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

 Law of value  Value-form

Post–Marxist theories derived from the theory of commodity fetishism
 The System of Objects, by Jean Baudrillard
 The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy Debord (full text)
 The theories of class consciousness and of reification, by Geörg Lukács
 The Essays of Marx's Theory of Value, by Isaak Illich Rubin

References
1. ^ Isaak Illich Rubin said that "The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis
of Marx's entire economic system, and, in particular, of his theory of value." —
Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990, p. 5.
2. ^ Fine, Ben; Saad-Filho, Alfredo (2004). Marx's Capital (4th ed.).
London: Pluto Press. pp. 25–26.
3. ^ Marx, Karl (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Classics. p. 165.
4. ^ The various references in the 'Wood Theft' articles to idols, animal
masks, workship of animals, and fetishes, reflect Marx's systematic study (1841–
42) of primitive religion. The notebooks indicate that Marx was especially
interested in the concept of fetishism — its nature, its origins, and the difference
between ancient and modern forms of fetishism. (MEGA, Vol . 1, Part 2 p. 115ff)
— Sherover, Erica (1979). "The Virtue of Poverty: Marx's Transformation of
Hegel's Concept of the Poor". Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory /
Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale 3 (1): 53–66.
5. ^ Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l'ancienne religion de
l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760) [1]. The German translation
was Uber den Dienst der fetischengotter oder Vergleichung der alten religion
Egyptians mit den heutigen Religion Nigritiens. Ubersetzt von Christain
Brandanus Hermann Pistorius. Berlin, Stralsund: Gottlieb August Lange, 1785.
For a study of the conceptual origin 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. ^ Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
8. ^ http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/07/10.htm
9. ^ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On religion. Atlanta: Scholars, 1982,
p. 22.
10. ^ Karl Marx, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", in Marx-
Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress, 1975, p. 312 [2].
11. ^ Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx:
Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972, p. 342f.
12. ^ Karl Marx, Grundrisse, chapter 17 (1857)
13. ^ Karl Marx,Results of the Immediate Process of Production, appendix in
Capital Volume 1. Penguin edition, 1976, p. 983.
14. ^ For more details, see Boer, Roland (2010). "That Hideous Pagan Idol:
Marx, Fetishism and Graven Images". Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory 38
(1): 93–116. doi:10.1080/03017600903454413.
15. ^ Adam Simth, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776), Book 1, Chapter 2 "Of the Principle which gives occasion to the
Division of Labour" [3]
16. ^ ". . . the paid and unpaid portions of labour are inseparably mixed up
with each other, and the nature of the whole transaction is completely masked by
the intervention of a contract and the pay received at the end of the week" — Karl
Marx, Value, Price and Profit, part 9.[4] "Since Lassalle's death, there has
asserted itself in our party the scientific understanding that wages are not what
they appear to be — namely, the value, or price, of labor — but only a masked
form for the value, or price, of labor power". — Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha
Programme (1875), part 2 (emphases added). [5] cf. the Resultate manuscript in
 Capital, Volume I, Penguin edition, p. 1064, where Marx uses the word
"vertuscht" (covered up).
17. ^ Marx, Capital, Volume III, Penguin edition, p. 956 (translation corrected
to the German edition).
18. ^ [6] The Fetish in Love (Le fétichisme dans l'amour: la vie psychique des
micro-organismes, l'intensité des images mentales, etc., 1887)
19. ^ "Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces
itself economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively
sinks more deeply, more fatefully, and more definitively into the consciousness of
Man." György Lukács, History and Class-Consciousness London: Merlin Press,
1971, p. 93.
20. ^ Cluley, R. and Dunne, S. (2012) From Commodity Fetishism to
Commodity Narcissism, Marketing Theory, 12(3)
21. ^ Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance,
Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Introduced by Stuart Hall.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
22. ^ "Paying for Pensions: Affording Old Age", BBC News, 13 September
2010
23. ^ "Global financial markets: entering a new era", McKinsey Global
Institute, September 2009, p. 9.
24. ^ See further e.g. Jan Toporowski's analysis
25. ^ Marc Linder, Reification and the consciousness of the critics of political
economy. Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1975 and subsequent works.
26. ^ "The Role of Law in Economic Theory: Essays on the Fetishism of
Commodities" (1985), by Duncan Kennedy, The American University Law
Review Volume 34, pp. 939–1001. [7]
27. ^ Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), chapter 3
28. ^ See Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 5
29. ^ Roosevelt, Frank (1975). "Cambridge Economics as Commodity
Fetishism". Review of Radical Political Economics 7 (4): 1–32.
doi:10.1177/048661347500700402. Reprinted in Nell, Edward J. (1980). Growth,
profits, and property: essays in the revival of political economy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521223962.
30. ^ In praise of commercial culture (2000), by Tyler Cowen. Harvard
University Press.
31. ^ When he was a Marxist, Leszek Kołakowski published nine essays in
the book Kultura i fetysze (Culture and Fetishism, Warsaw: Państwowe
Wydawnictwow Naukowe, 1967). The English translations of his works are
Toward a Marxist Humanism, Marxism and Beyond, and A Leszek Kolakowski
Reader. Afterwards, when Kołakowski quit being a Communist, he noted the
many parallels between Marxism and a religious faith.
32. ^ Louis Proyect titled his weblog "The unrepentant Marxist"[8].
33. ^ "Capitalism as Religion", by Walter Benjamin, in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Vol. 1 1913–1926. Michael W. Jennings (ed.), Cambridge,
Massachusetts Harvard University Press, 2004 p. 259.
 34. ^ [9] No Useless Leniency weblog, "Notes on Capitalism as Religion" (17
December 2008)
35. ^ Portrait of a Marxist as a Young Nun, by Helena Sheehan

Further reading
 Sandel, Michael (2012). What money can't buy : the moral limits of markets. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374203030.
 Bottomore, Tom (1991). A Dictionary of Marxist thought. Oxford, UK
Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Reference. ISBN 9780631180821.
 Debord, Guy (2009). The Society of the Spectacle. Eastbourne: Soul Bay Press.
ISBN 9780955955334.
 Fine, Ben (2010). Marx's Capital. London & New York: Pluto Press.
ISBN 0745330169.
 Harvey, David (2010). A companion to Marx's Capital. London New York:
Verso. ISBN 1844673596.
 Lukács, György (1971). History and Class Consciousness : studies in Marxist
dialectics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262620208.
 Marx, Karl (1981). Capital  :Volume 1: A critique of political economy. London
New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.
ISBN 9780140445688.
 Douglas, Mary (1996). The world of goods : towards an anthropology of
consumption : with a new introduction. London New York: Routledge.
ISBN 9780415130479.

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)
 Understanding Capitalism Part IV: Capitalism, Culture and Society

Categories:
 Marxist terminology
 Marxist theory