The Fetishism of Commodities

A social relationship of man to man embodied by commodities assumes, in a commodity and market economy based upon private property, the form of natural objects with peculiar social properties, and manifests itself, as in an optical illusion, as the form of a relation of things, and a supra-natural mystical character that dominates the fate of man, i.e., the fetish-like character of the commodity economy worshipped by a commodity economy society. Marx called it “fetishism of commodities” and its forms of development “fetishism of money” and “fetishism of capital”.

The fetishism of commodities is a product of the development of natural economy or product economy to the stage of commodity economy. The private labor character of commodity production makes it impossible for either individual producers or the totality of producers to consciously maintain that production takes place in accordance with the required ratio of socially necessary labor. Social production presents an anarchic state, and a large number of apparent and accidental factors govern the movement of commodity prices. The blind and spontaneous powers of the market become a mystical force that dominates commodity producers. In particular, the leap from commodity to money often brews a crisis of overproduction. The fate of commodity producers depends on whether the commodities can be transformed into money. Money has the mystical power to dominate people’s fate, and the mystery of commodity thus develops into the mystery of money, which makes the fetishism of money a form of development of the fetishism of commodities. The fetishism of capital emerges in the process of transformation of money into capital. The fetishism of capital is a misconception that the valorization of capital is regarded as a “universal light” possessed by things themselves, and that the capitalist society becomes an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world.

In short, what was originally a connection of production between producers formed due to the social division of labor now manifests itself as a connection between different commodities, between things. As such, commodities are things produced by the commodity producers themselves with their own hands, but instead it is the fate of commodities that dominates the fate of commodity producers, which creates a sense of mystery among commodity producers about the categories of commodities, value, money, and capital, placing them in a supreme position in people’s notion. The mystery of the fetishism of commodities and its forms of development is that “the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor”, i.e., “there it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Revealing the fetish-like character of commodities, money and capital and the mystery of their emergence is a great discovery of Marxist economics. Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people, and predicted: “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labor as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.” Only the Marxist political economy, which is based upon Marx’s labor theory of value and theory of surplus-value and historical materialism, can really do away with the fetishism of commodities.