Commodity fetishism
Encyclopedia
In Marx's critique of political economy
, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things (commodities and money).
The concept of commodity fetishism plays a crucial role in Marx's theory of capitalism, because it links the subjective aspects of economic value to its objective aspects, through the transformation of a symbolization of value into a reification
which attains the power of an objective social force. It plays an integral part in Marx's explanation of why economic relationships and interactions in capitalism often appear quite different from what they really are. The concept is introduced at the conclusion of an analysis of the value-form
of commodities in the first chapter of Marx's main work, Das Kapital
. Subsequently he clarifies in Das Kapital
that many different economic phenomena can be "fetishized" (the fetish of money the fetish of interest-bearing capital, etc.) to the extent that they attain an independent power vis-a-vis the people. But these further developments of commercial fetishism nevertheless have their historical origin in commodity trade.
(Marx modified his discussion in the second edition of this work)
Marx had referred to fetishes and fetishism in his early work, usually in the context of religious superstition or in criticizing the beliefs of political economists. Marx borrowed the idea of "fetishism" from a book he had read by Charles de Brosses
This work provided a materialist theory of the origin of religion, and represents one of the first theoretical works in ethno-anthropology. Marx was also influenced in the 1840s by Auguste Comte
's discussion of fetishism and Ludwig Feuerbach's interpretation of religion
.
The first mention appears in Marx's 1842 response to a newspaper article by Karl Heinrich Hermes (a government spy, as it turned out) which defended the Prussian state on religious grounds.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/07/10.htm Hermes followed the German philosopher Hegel in regarding fetishism as the "crudest form of religion." Marx ridiculed this argument, together with Hermes's definition of religion as that which raises man "above sensuous appetites." Instead, Marx argued, fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites" (die Religion der sinnlichen Begierde), adding that "the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an 'inanimate object' will give up its natural character to gratify his desires. The crude appetite of the fetish worshipper therefore smashes the fetish when the latter ceases to be its most devoted servant"
The next mention occurs in Marx's famous 1842 articles in the Rheinische Zeitung about Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm. Marx wrote:
In 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx refers several times to fetishes. For example:
Marx also referred to the notion of fetishism in his ethnological notebooks. Here, Marx comments on John Lubbock
's ideas about fetishism in The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1871).
In the Grundrisse
, the idea occurs again when Marx criticizes Frederic Bastiat
:
In the manuscript Results of the Immediate Process of Production (probably written in 1864), Marx comments that:
In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
, Marx refers to John Ramsay McCulloch
's A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy (1825). McCulloch argued “In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value” and Marx comments "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".
Marx used the notion of fetishism in various contexts throughout his economic and ethnological studies.
For Louis Althusser
, the development of these ideas suggested a "break" (or epistemological rupture
) between a "young Marx" and an "old Marx". Others such as Istvan Meszaros
and Ernest Mandel
argued against the idea of a break, in favor of an evolution and gradual refinement of ideas.
Thus, their social relations are constantly being mediated and expressed by things (commodities and money). But not only that; relationships between many traded objects are brought into being which exist and can change quite independently of what individuals do, and quite independently of their social relationships. How the traded objects will be related will depend a great deal on their costs of production, reducible to quantities of living human work. But in reality the worker has little control over what happens to his product.
plays hardly any role anymore, because self-interested market actors are thought to be trading things and associating as individuals according to their own rational choices, held together or brought together by the market; cooperation is focused upon only in management
theory insofar as people must be united and organized to produce the things that are supplied to the market, and in behavioural sciences
where how people do things together is studied.
regarded the propensity to "truck, barter and exchange" as a natural feature of human beings, and thought that market economy corresponded best to human nature, however defined; a self-balancing market economy was thought to be constituted, which spontaneously gravitated towards a natural equilibrium
state such that price-relativities ensured that everyone could get what they wanted. In modern times, the state of the markets is often likened to the weather
, and meteorological metaphors are used such as "the investment climate", "financial headwinds", "financial tsunami", etc.
But, Marx argues, this "naturalization" of market relationships in economic theory, apart from its ideological or apologetic function in making them unchangeable and eternalized "facts of life", actually is the result of the inability to provide a serious scientific explanation of social phenomena - primarily because trading processes are separated, in theory and in practice, from the social processes and production activities (the labor efforts of socially related people) which are behind them and give rise to them. His book Das Kapital
aims mainly to reveal the relationship between production activities and the circulation of products in trade, and thus to demonstrate what is behind the fetish of commodities and what constantly reproduces it.
According to David Ricardo
, for instance, the proper focus of economic science was the distribution of resources through markets, and modern economics has become largely a mathematical "science of price movements". In this sense, the fetishization of commodity relationships seriously distorts or even mystifies real economic relationships between people and between people and their environment, by detaching the conditions of production from the conditions of distribution. In the process, the social organisation of the relationships between people, and what holds them all together, becomes rather mysterious - something about which one could have a personal interpretation, but which ultimately cannot be known for certain.
, to describe the functional way that people express how they are relating or related in capitalist society - their relationships and the things they trade frequently appear other than they really are, they are "masked" or "disguised". The "masking" Marx mentions does not mean that the real nature of what goes on is completely hidden away, and indeed people may very well know that something is being masked. It is just that some essential aspects of a reality appear other than they really are, so that the meaning at the observable surface is actually not the whole meaning of what goes on. Things seem transparent, self-evident and obvious, but really they are not; in truth, they are not related in the way they seem to be related; and "part of the story" hides the "whole story". Paradoxically, the "unknown" is actually created by the way people relate or are related, by the "barriers" they set up in their interactions. These barriers arise ultimately from property rights and the interests they give rise to. If people are the "guardians" of commodities, as Marx says, they will "guard" their own interest.
It therefore takes scientific inquiry and fact-finding to understand what the whole story is. For ordinary purposes, it may not even matter what the whole story is, and people can just carry on in their daily business without knowing it; but it does matter, when it becomes practically necessary to know what the whole story is, to solve a very real problem. If, for example, the market economy starts to collapse, even though plenty of resources exist for everybody's needs, people begin to question how that was possible at all. And one of the factors involved is a systematically distorted (reified) perception people have, powerfully promoted by commodity fetishism, the effect of which is that people habitually mask things to others and to themselves - without necessarily being aware that they are doing it. People can buy and sell plenty of things without understanding the full implications of what they are doing.
The results of the collective labor efforts of people present themselves, or are expressed to people, in the form of the values and prices of products, assets or services. But what the exact connection is, between those things, their values and the efforts that enabled their supply, is no longer at all clear. Thus, "what markets will do" is explained by what other markets will do, by rising and falling prices, and analysts try to estimate probabilistically the effects of different market trends. Markets then seem to be things that evolve in their own right, they gain an autonomous power, and it is often no longer clear what market trends can really be attributed to; one could dispute about causes and effects, or try to research it with different hypotheses, without being able to verify absolutely what exactly caused changes and fluctuations in the market.
led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object. Fetishes are often visible in advertising
, where human qualities are associated with a product in a way which the advertiser hopes will encourage people to buy them.
In the most recent literature, the focus of theorists is often on the transformation of information
and knowledge
into a tradeable commodity (or capital) which is bought and sold, and which exists through an interaction between people and computers. This begins to alter human consciousness in a very powerful and direct way. The argument is that this creates a new kind of topsy-turvy world in which information and knowledges become objects of value in themselves, which are no longer lodged in people's heads, but assume a life of their own and acquire "magical" powers, even to the point where people are barred from the knowledge they themselves helped to produce (the "privatization of knowledge"). It is also argued that increasingly communication
itself begins to function according to, or imitates, the rules of financial transactions; giving attention becomes a kind of negotiation (or haggling) conditional on the expectation of a return on the "investment" into it.
Several main themes can be distinguished here.
In general, these kinds of (often dystopian) interpretations suggest that the whole of human knowledge itself is increasingly being restructured in terms of the relationships between objects of commercial value and the property rights they involve - to the point where the true nature of human relations is shrouded or hidden away, or indeed becomes a total mystery, because all the relevant concepts necessary to understand them are denied, disconnected or erased. Gradually, it is argued, all knowledges which do not serve business interests are being "wiped out".
That might not seem to wipe out so much, to that extent that many knowledges are compatible with making money, but even if the relevant disciplines are not starved of funding, the argument is that the structures of the knowledges themselves are being reformed and deformed, according to a specific pattern of conceptualizations which reflects commercial interests and business culture. As a side-effect, however, metaphysical (rather than scientifically sound) beliefs begin to substitute more and more for a "genuine self-knowledge of society" obtained through independent, critical and comprehensive scientific (or artistic) inquiry. Ultimately, people can then no longer understand themselves and their own lives anymore without the use of commodities, state authorities and specialized "expert" services (which could be religious services offered by specialists on the spiritual condition of the human species).
, founder of the Austrian School
have insisted that the attribution of value is only a matter of subjective preferences:
The difference between Marx and Menger is just that for Marx, value relationships exist and evolve between things and activities also quite independently from the wishes or desires of any individual or even group of individuals. The fact that this is so, is precisely what helps to sustain the "fetish". It is not merely that people habitually regard value as intrinsic to objects, but also that the economic value objects have, and the way they are related, gained a real power over people. For Menger, value is only exclusively an expression of subjective preferences, but for Marx, value also begins to assert itself as a mind-independent, objective force, quite regardless of what people happen to prefer, with the practical effect that people must often adjust to economic values, rather than the supply of goods and services adjusting to the needs and wishes of people. If individuals don't have the money to buy things, they can prefer all they like, but they won't get the goods and the prices often won't change either (unless perchance someone offers to share them).
Obviously, in markets there is a tendency for supply and demand to adjust to each other, however haphazardly that may occur, causing economists to extrapolate a "natural tendency of markets to reach equilibrium
" provided there is no outside interference in market activity. Therefore, Menger's view has a certain plausibility; after all, markets are in good part driven by demand, and therefore by the choices and preferences of myriads of individuals. This reality was already noted in ancient Greece by the philosopher Aristotle
, who therefore attributed the value of goods simply to the intensity of demand for them.
It is just that the very meaning, scope and limits of these choices and preferences themselves is also determined by objective market forces over which individuals have no control, and with which they are confronted every day. They do not control the results of the fact that a mass of working hours has, or has not been worked. They have to adjust their behaviour to price-levels, like it or not ("market discipline"). This means that, mostly, the value of goods is set by a price-level which people normally cannot change, or change only within narrow limits, and the fact that people individually strongly or weakly prefer a good offered for sale does not normally change its basic supply price. The market does not change at all, simply because people have a desire for particular goods, but because they really buy or sell them (or not). If somebody strongly desires a candy bar that sells for $1, the $1 price for the candy does not spontaneously by itself change because of that desire. At most the seller of candy might say, that "if you get five bars, I will give you a discount".
).
"Market freedom" might only be a sort of illusion
created by the ability of people to choose whether to buy and sell or not, and by the potential choices they could conceivably make, even if they had only very little money. They feel unconstrained in market activity only because they have internalized the constraints and agree to play by its rules. But people might not buy or sell out of free choice at all, but because they were forced to do so by circumstances, like it or not, at prices not to their liking. For example, in a food crisis food becomes scarce and expensive, but people still have to eat.
The theories which economists made up about markets were, in Marx's opinion, themselves ultimately a product of the way market trade itself functioned, and not the other way around. If markets involved a reified consciousness, which attributed an independent power to symbols imposed by "the many" on "the few", or by economic community on each of its members, this would also powerfully influence the economic theories created about markets - in ways which actually promoted the fetishization of economic phenomena. Ultimately this created the belief that "the economy" and "the market" were independent things which could act in their own right, even if few people could explain or define what "the economy" or "the market" means. People might say, "the market does this" or "the market does that" but in reality people do these things, and the market results are merely the effects of what they do. Thus, ultimately, commodity fetishism contributed to a process of dumbing down
.
How exactly Marx would have responded to such criticisms remains unclear, because he never explicitly defended his idea of commodity fetishism after he published it, and seemed to regard it as a rather obvious aspect of life. No doubt he would not have denied that people can be very self-aware; they can make choices and relativize matters, and few objectively given economic circumstances are so compelling that one cannot actively do anything about them at all. But probably he would have referred to the enormous power that money
has over people's lives, and to the quasi-religious zeal with which the business world may pursue its aims.
Perhaps he would have pointed to what people in capitalist society actually do when the "crunch" comes, when there is a real economic crisis (as a "test case"). What do people do in the first instance? Do they for example try to secure their possessions, perhaps investing in gold
or other assets that hold their value? Or do they spontaneously seek to cooperate with others to resolve the crisis?
It is evident from Marx's text that in drawing an analogy between the fetishes of a religious cult and the fetishes involved in commerce, he did not commit himself to the idea that commodity fetishism is a "religion of commerce", the same as a religious faith. "Having a fetish" (endowing something with powers it does not really have) need not involve a specifically religious belief at all. However, how people regard commercial phenomena could also be influenced by a mixture of religious, semi-religious and non-religious beliefs.
How Marx would have regarded Marxism is not known, because Marxism emerged as a significant political movement only after his death. Although very aware of the desire of human beings to remake the world after their own image, and immortalize themselves, Marx stayed an atheist and a humanist
. He was rather skeptical and derisive when some French leftists began to call themselves "Marxists" in the early 1880s. According to the testimony of Friedrich Engels
, Marx quipped wrily, "what is certain is that, as for myself, I am no Marxist" (or, in another version, "All I know is that I am no Marxist") - the suggestion being that if this was "Marxism", he wanted no part of it. Marx did seek influence for his ideas, but not for himself; he recommended that people should "think through" matters for themselves, using their own critical faculties, and his writings were intended only as an aid for this. Yet it could be argued that this contradicted with the intellectual authority he and Engels definitely did seek in the labour movement, which could after all hardly exist without followers; and it was not unreasonable that these followers would begin to call themselves "Marxists", to distinguish themselves from other trends. The old Engels, by then an intellectual mentor of the growing social-democratic movement, eventually accepted the label of "Marxism" - which he did not invent himself - to express the political tendency he and Marx represented, and for which he had written many popular pamphlets, articles and books.
Marx's argument
After Marx
Political economy
Political economy originally was the term for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth, including through the budget process. Political economy originated in moral philosophy...
, commodity fetishism denotes the mystification of human relations said to arise out of the growth of market trade, when social relationships between people are expressed as, mediated by and transformed into, objectified relationships between things (commodities and money).
The concept of commodity fetishism plays a crucial role in Marx's theory of capitalism, because it links the subjective aspects of economic value to its objective aspects, through the transformation of a symbolization of value into a reification
Reification (Marxism)
Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not...
which attains the power of an objective social force. It plays an integral part in Marx's explanation of why economic relationships and interactions in capitalism often appear quite different from what they really are. The concept is introduced at the conclusion of an analysis of the value-form
Value-form
The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy. It refers to a socially attributed characteristic of a commodity which contrasts with its tangible use-value or utility .The concept is introduced in the first chapter of Das Kapital where Marx argues...
of commodities in the first chapter of Marx's main work, Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
. Subsequently he clarifies in Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
that many different economic phenomena can be "fetishized" (the fetish of money the fetish of interest-bearing capital, etc.) to the extent that they attain an independent power vis-a-vis the people. But these further developments of commercial fetishism nevertheless have their historical origin in commodity trade.
Textual origins
The term is introduced in the opening chapter of the first volume of Das KapitalDas Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
(Marx modified his discussion in the second edition of this work)
Marx had referred to fetishes and fetishism in his early work, usually in the context of religious superstition or in criticizing the beliefs of political economists. Marx borrowed the idea of "fetishism" from a book he had read by Charles de Brosses
Charles de Brosses
Charles de Brosses, comte de Tournay, baron de Montfalcon, seigneur de Vezins et de Prevessin was a French writer of the 18th century.-Life:...
This work provided a materialist theory of the origin of religion, and represents one of the first theoretical works in ethno-anthropology. Marx was also influenced in the 1840s by Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte , better known as Auguste Comte , was a French philosopher, a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism...
's discussion of fetishism and Ludwig Feuerbach's interpretation of religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
.
The first mention appears in Marx's 1842 response to a newspaper article by Karl Heinrich Hermes (a government spy, as it turned out) which defended the Prussian state on religious grounds.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/07/10.htm Hermes followed the German philosopher Hegel in regarding fetishism as the "crudest form of religion." Marx ridiculed this argument, together with Hermes's definition of religion as that which raises man "above sensuous appetites." Instead, Marx argued, fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites" (die Religion der sinnlichen Begierde), adding that "the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an 'inanimate object' will give up its natural character to gratify his desires. The crude appetite of the fetish worshipper therefore smashes the fetish when the latter ceases to be its most devoted servant"
The next mention occurs in Marx's famous 1842 articles in the Rheinische Zeitung about Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood.http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1842/10/25.htm. Marx wrote:
In 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx refers several times to fetishes. For example:
Marx also referred to the notion of fetishism in his ethnological notebooks. Here, Marx comments on John Lubbock
John Lubbock
John Lubbock is the name of:*Sir John Lubbock, 1st Baronet *Sir John Lubbock, 2nd Baronet , English banker*Sir John Lubbock, 3rd Baronet , English banker, barrister, mathematician and astronomer...
's ideas about fetishism in The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1871).
In the Grundrisse
Grundrisse
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie is a lengthy manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx, completed in 1858. However, as it existed primarily as a collection of unedited notes, the work remained unpublished until 1939...
, the idea occurs again when Marx criticizes Frederic Bastiat
Frédéric Bastiat
Claude Frédéric Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He was notable for developing the important economic concept of opportunity cost.-Biography:...
:
In the manuscript Results of the Immediate Process of Production (probably written in 1864), Marx comments that:
In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is a book by Karl Marx, first published in 1859. The book is mainly an analysis of capitalism, achieved by critiquing the writings of the leading theoretical exponents of capitalism at that time: these were the political economists, nowadays often...
, Marx refers to John Ramsay McCulloch
John Ramsay McCulloch
John Ramsey McCulloch , a Scottish economist, author and editor, is widely regarded as the leader of the Ricardian school of economists after the death of David Ricardo in 1823. He was appointed the first professor of political economy at University College London in 1828...
's A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy (1825). McCulloch argued “In its natural state, matter ... is always destitute of value” and Marx comments "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".
Marx used the notion of fetishism in various contexts throughout his economic and ethnological studies.
For Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy....
, the development of these ideas suggested a "break" (or epistemological rupture
Epistemological rupture
The notion of epistemological rupture was introduced by Gaston Bachelard. He proposed that the history of science is replete with "epistemological obstacles"--or unthought/unconscious structures that were immanent within the realm of the sciences, such as principles of division...
) between a "young Marx" and an "old Marx". Others such as Istvan Meszaros
István Mészáros
István Mészáros is a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Sussex. He held the Chair of Philosophy at Sussex for fifteen years and was earlier Professor of Philosophy and Social Science for four years at York University.He can be linked to the so-called...
and Ernest Mandel
Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter , was a revolutionary Marxist theorist.-Life:...
argued against the idea of a break, in favor of an evolution and gradual refinement of ideas.
Marx's argument
Marx's argument is simply that in a society where many independent, private producers trade their products with each other on their own individual initiative, without much (or any) overall coordination, their production volumes and activities can only be adjusted to each other through the fluctuating values of those products when exchanged in markets. Their social co-existence, and the meaning of it, is expressed through their trading activity and transactions in markets. People may indeed have no other relation with each other except for the transactions between them.Thus, their social relations are constantly being mediated and expressed by things (commodities and money). But not only that; relationships between many traded objects are brought into being which exist and can change quite independently of what individuals do, and quite independently of their social relationships. How the traded objects will be related will depend a great deal on their costs of production, reducible to quantities of living human work. But in reality the worker has little control over what happens to his product.
The domination of things
The effect is that the relationships between things begin to shape and even dominate the relationships between people, to the extent that they must constantly adjust - consciously or unconsciously - to the changing value proportions between things over which they don't have any control anymore (because nobody really controls the markets). The trading values of things then gain an independent, objectified power, to the point where social characteristics seems to be the natural, inherent properties of things, the relationships between which evolve in their own right. "The market" seems to spontaneously balance supply and demand, but people no longer see the human cooperation behind the market which makes it all possible. In economic theories, human cooperationCooperation
Cooperation or co-operation is the process of working or acting together. In its simplest form it involves things working in harmony, side by side, while in its more complicated forms, it can involve something as complex as the inner workings of a human being or even the social patterns of a...
plays hardly any role anymore, because self-interested market actors are thought to be trading things and associating as individuals according to their own rational choices, held together or brought together by the market; cooperation is focused upon only in management
Management
Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...
theory insofar as people must be united and organized to produce the things that are supplied to the market, and in behavioural sciences
Behavioural sciences
The term behavioural sciences encompasses all the disciplines that explore the activities of and interactions among organisms in the natural world. It involves the systematic analysis and investigation of human and animal behaviour through controlled and naturalistic observation, and disciplined...
where how people do things together is studied.
The objectification of value
Normally one would say, that values are something that people have, it is they who make valuations. Human evaluations have their origin in the ability of sentient living organisms to prioritize and weigh up behaviours consciously according to self-chosen options; if they value or cherish something, that is in the first instance a subjective appreciation. But in fact, the growth of trading relations among large masses of people creates many value relationships between traded objects which gain an objective reality, and which escape from the individual or even the collective control of people. If for example the housing market collapses, this is a reality that home owners cannot get away from. It has effects on house values, the construction industry, employment and incomes. Whatever valuations people may have in their minds, it does not prevent the fall in the value of their assets. They value their assets, but the assets lose value without them being able to do anything about it. At that point, a conflict develops between their personal values, and the values of the things they own or want to own.Naturalization
As Marx notes, market phenomena are then typically regarded as "natural" phenomena that "just happen of their own accord", and indeed the political economists he criticized frequently referred to "natural equilibria" and "natural" prices, the idea being, that they were merely a reflection of human nature, a natural state of affairs, or a natural order of things. Indeed, Adam SmithAdam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
regarded the propensity to "truck, barter and exchange" as a natural feature of human beings, and thought that market economy corresponded best to human nature, however defined; a self-balancing market economy was thought to be constituted, which spontaneously gravitated towards a natural equilibrium
Economic equilibrium
In economics, economic equilibrium is a state of the world where economic forces are balanced and in the absence of external influences the values of economic variables will not change. It is the point at which quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal...
state such that price-relativities ensured that everyone could get what they wanted. In modern times, the state of the markets is often likened to the weather
Weather
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, to the degree that it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. Most weather phenomena occur in the troposphere, just below the stratosphere. Weather refers, generally, to day-to-day temperature and precipitation activity, whereas climate...
, and meteorological metaphors are used such as "the investment climate", "financial headwinds", "financial tsunami", etc.
But, Marx argues, this "naturalization" of market relationships in economic theory, apart from its ideological or apologetic function in making them unchangeable and eternalized "facts of life", actually is the result of the inability to provide a serious scientific explanation of social phenomena - primarily because trading processes are separated, in theory and in practice, from the social processes and production activities (the labor efforts of socially related people) which are behind them and give rise to them. His book Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
aims mainly to reveal the relationship between production activities and the circulation of products in trade, and thus to demonstrate what is behind the fetish of commodities and what constantly reproduces it.
According to David Ricardo
David Ricardo
David Ricardo was an English political economist, often credited with systematising economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator,...
, for instance, the proper focus of economic science was the distribution of resources through markets, and modern economics has become largely a mathematical "science of price movements". In this sense, the fetishization of commodity relationships seriously distorts or even mystifies real economic relationships between people and between people and their environment, by detaching the conditions of production from the conditions of distribution. In the process, the social organisation of the relationships between people, and what holds them all together, becomes rather mysterious - something about which one could have a personal interpretation, but which ultimately cannot be known for certain.
Masking
Marx uses the theatrical concept of a character maskCharacter mask
A character mask in the Marxian sense is a character masked or disguised with a different character. The term was used by Karl Marx in various published writings from the 1840s to the 1860s, and also by Friedrich Engels...
, to describe the functional way that people express how they are relating or related in capitalist society - their relationships and the things they trade frequently appear other than they really are, they are "masked" or "disguised". The "masking" Marx mentions does not mean that the real nature of what goes on is completely hidden away, and indeed people may very well know that something is being masked. It is just that some essential aspects of a reality appear other than they really are, so that the meaning at the observable surface is actually not the whole meaning of what goes on. Things seem transparent, self-evident and obvious, but really they are not; in truth, they are not related in the way they seem to be related; and "part of the story" hides the "whole story". Paradoxically, the "unknown" is actually created by the way people relate or are related, by the "barriers" they set up in their interactions. These barriers arise ultimately from property rights and the interests they give rise to. If people are the "guardians" of commodities, as Marx says, they will "guard" their own interest.
It therefore takes scientific inquiry and fact-finding to understand what the whole story is. For ordinary purposes, it may not even matter what the whole story is, and people can just carry on in their daily business without knowing it; but it does matter, when it becomes practically necessary to know what the whole story is, to solve a very real problem. If, for example, the market economy starts to collapse, even though plenty of resources exist for everybody's needs, people begin to question how that was possible at all. And one of the factors involved is a systematically distorted (reified) perception people have, powerfully promoted by commodity fetishism, the effect of which is that people habitually mask things to others and to themselves - without necessarily being aware that they are doing it. People can buy and sell plenty of things without understanding the full implications of what they are doing.
The opacity of economic relations
The primary valuation which counts for practical purposes is the trading value of goods and activities expressed in terms of money-prices. To work out what the relationships involved are, people then only compare prices and price trends in the market. They are hardly able to see and understand anymore all the human processes which bring goods and services to their door, they don't know who the people are that facilitate that, and indeed this is often not much of concern to them anymore. They depend on commodities being available to them and trust or assume they will be there, without having any control over, or insight into, the human cooperation that can ensure this will be the case.The results of the collective labor efforts of people present themselves, or are expressed to people, in the form of the values and prices of products, assets or services. But what the exact connection is, between those things, their values and the efforts that enabled their supply, is no longer at all clear. Thus, "what markets will do" is explained by what other markets will do, by rising and falling prices, and analysts try to estimate probabilistically the effects of different market trends. Markets then seem to be things that evolve in their own right, they gain an autonomous power, and it is often no longer clear what market trends can really be attributed to; one could dispute about causes and effects, or try to research it with different hypotheses, without being able to verify absolutely what exactly caused changes and fluctuations in the market.
Conclusion
In this way, Marx aims to prove that markets can function perfectly well, with people buying and selling, without people knowing what the real nature of those markets is, what it all means, or even what the real nature is of the social set-up they live within. If the markets seem to work well, they think it's a good thing, and if they don't, they think it's a bad thing, but why it all happens they may have little idea about, other than "imagining" things which they are in no position to verify. True knowledge about markets is not required to participate in markets, and the meanings involved could be tilted just a bit (or a whole lot) to support a favourable perspective on them. In fact, the distorted perception of markets facilitates or is conducive to their operation, to the extent that it legitimates and justifies the position of participants in them.After Marx
The fetishism of commodities has proven fertile material for work by other theorists since Marx, who have added to, adapted, or, perhaps, "vulgarized" the original concept. Sigmund Freud's well-known but unrelated theory of sexual fetishismSexual fetishism
Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual arousal a person receives from a physical object, or from a specific situation. The object or situation of interest is called the fetish, the person a fetishist who has a fetish for that object/situation. Sexual fetishism may be regarded, e.g...
led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object. Fetishes are often visible in advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
, where human qualities are associated with a product in a way which the advertiser hopes will encourage people to buy them.
Cultural theorists
- György Lukács based History and Class ConsciousnessHistory and Class ConsciousnessHistory and Class Consciousness is a book by Georg Lukács, written in 1923. Class consciousness, as described by Lukács, is opposed to any psychological conception of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or mass psychology . According to Lukács, each social class has a determined...
(1923) on Marx's idea, but developed his own notion of reificationReificationReification generally refers to bringing into being or turning concrete.Specifically, reification may refer to:*Reification , making a data model for a previously abstract concept...
as the key obstacle to class consciousnessClass consciousnessClass consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
. Lukács observed that the growth of capitalism converted all spheres of human life more and more into marketable "products" to be bought and sold; thus, the commodity form increasingly invaded every kind of conscious human activity. The corollary of this was, that the fetish of commodities, money and capital also began to manifest itself everywhere as well. Lukács's writings were a major influence on later radical philosophers such as Guy DebordGuy DebordGuy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
and Jean BaudrillardJean BaudrillardJean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
.
- Debord developed the concept of the society of the spectacle that parallels to Marx's notion of the commodity; for Debord, the "spectacle" made relations among people seem like relations among images (and vice versa), where people passively watch while their own representations are active (for example, on televisionTelevisionTelevision is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
). The spectacle is the form taken by society once the instruments of cultural production have become wholly commoditized, and subject to commercial trade, so that aesthetic value becomes ruled by commercial value, and artistic expressions are shaped by their ability to attract market sales. In the further development of capitalism, it is argued, the whole sphere of personal consumption is reorganized according to commercial principles. In that case, cultural products also gain "a life of their own" completely independently of the producers. Debord's work could be seen as a further interpretation of what Marx's critique anticipated, insofar as in modern society even the deepest intimacies of inter-subjectiveIntersubjectivityIntersubjectivity is a term used in philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology to describe a condition somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity, one in which a phenomenon is personally experienced but by more than one subject....
and personal self-relating become subject to commodificationCommodificationCommodification is the transformation of goods, ideas, or other entities that may not normally be regarded as goods into a commodity....
and are turned into separate "experiences" which can be bought and sold as a "product" for a price. The ultimate form of human alienationSocial alienationThe term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
then occurs when people begin to view their whole being as a marketable commodity, and regard every human interaction as a (potential) transaction.
- In the work of the semioticianSemioticsSemiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
Baudrillard, commodity fetishism is used to explain subjective feelings towards consumer goods in the "realm of circulation", that is, among consumers. Baudrillard was especially interested in the cultural mystique added to objects by advertisingAdvertisingAdvertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
, which encourages consumerConsumerConsumer is a broad label for any individuals or households that use goods generated within the economy. The concept of a consumer occurs in different contexts, so that the usage and significance of the term may vary.-Economics and marketing:...
s to purchase them as aids to the construction of their personal identityCultural identityCultural identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. Cultural identity is similar to and has overlaps with, but is not synonymous with, identity politics....
. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972), Baudrillard develops his notion of the sign that, like Debord's notion of spectacle, aims to elaborate on Marx's theory.
- Other theorists (such as Thorstein VeblenThorstein VeblenThorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, and a leader of the so-called institutional economics movement...
and Alain de BottonAlain de BottonAlain de Botton is a Swiss writer, television presenter, and entrepreneur, resident in the UK.His books and television programs discuss various contemporary subjects and themes in a philosophical style, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. In August 2008, he was a founding member...
) have been concerned especially with the social status of the producers of consumer items relative to their consumers. In this sense, the argument is that the identity of a person becomes defined and expressed by what he owns and buys, far beyond simply cherishing one's belongings, since sending out the "correct signals" about one's status then begins really to depend on the possession of commodities: if you don't have them, you don't belong, something which can create status anxietyStatus AnxietyStatus Anxiety is a nonfiction book by Alain de Botton. It was first published in 2004 by Hamish Hamilton; subsequent publications have been by Penguin Books.-Central thesis:...
. For example, the person who owns a PorschePorschePorsche Automobil Holding SE, usually shortened to Porsche SE a Societas Europaea or European Public Company, is a German based holding company with investments in the automotive industry....
has more prestige and worth, than the people working on the assembly-line that produced it, and you have to own a Porsche to be a "member of the set". If you don't own a Porsche, this impacts negatively on your social standing. This interpretation of commodity fetishism refers to a belief that the car (or any manufactured object) is more important than people, and that it confers special powers beyond material utility to those who possess it (see also conspicuous consumptionConspicuous consumptionConspicuous consumption is spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. In the mind of a conspicuous consumer, such display serves as a means of attaining or maintaining social status....
). Prestige goods and flaunting wealth have been human practices for thousands of years, but in capitalist society they are very closely linked to monetary valuations, and how those valuations will be interpreted.
- The concept of commodity fetishism is absolutely central in the literature of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt SchoolFrankfurt SchoolThe Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
, especially of its leader Theodor W. AdornoTheodor W. AdornoTheodor W. Adorno was a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society....
, which focuses mainly on how the forms of commerce invade the human psyche, cast people in roles not of their own making, and affect human developmentDevelopmental psychologyDevelopmental psychology, also known as human development, is the scientific study of systematic psychological changes, emotional changes, and perception changes that occur in human beings over the course of their life span. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to...
. Adorno invented the concept of the culture industryCulture industryCulture industry is a term coined by critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer , who argued in the chapter of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' ; that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods...
to describe how the human imagination and all artistic, spiritual or intellectual activity becomes subordinated to the laws of commerce. The Marxist Frankfurters tried to show that while markets offer the promise of a richly developed, creative individuality, in reality this development is severely restricted or even stunted, to the point where people hardly have "time for themselves" anymore, because they are constantly acting out or caught within roles which they have little control over. They become passive consumers rather than active creators of their lives, and any creativity which is incompatible with bourgeois norms is beaten down in some way.
In the most recent literature, the focus of theorists is often on the transformation of information
Information
Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
and knowledge
Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
into a tradeable commodity (or capital) which is bought and sold, and which exists through an interaction between people and computers. This begins to alter human consciousness in a very powerful and direct way. The argument is that this creates a new kind of topsy-turvy world in which information and knowledges become objects of value in themselves, which are no longer lodged in people's heads, but assume a life of their own and acquire "magical" powers, even to the point where people are barred from the knowledge they themselves helped to produce (the "privatization of knowledge"). It is also argued that increasingly communication
Communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
itself begins to function according to, or imitates, the rules of financial transactions; giving attention becomes a kind of negotiation (or haggling) conditional on the expectation of a return on the "investment" into it.
Several main themes can be distinguished here.
- Culturally, Marxist theorists such as Fredric JamesonFredric JamesonFredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
link the reification of information and knowledge to post-modernism. One of the main concerns is with the distinction between authentically knowing and experiencing things, and "fake", "surrogate" or superficial knowledge/experience made possible by the fact that money can buy just about anything. Through the mediaMass mediaMass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
, people can for example acquire all kinds of beliefs without having any of the personal experience which gives rise to those beliefs. A kind of "pseudo-world" is created which begins to substitute for the real one. Wolfgang Fritz HaugWolfgang Fritz HaugWolfgang Fritz Haug was from 1979 till his retirement in 2001 professor of philosophy at the Free University Berlin, where he had also studied romance languages and religious studies and taken his PhD .Haug coined the term commodity aestheticism...
offers a "critique of commodity aesthetics" which examines how human needs and desires are manipulated or reshaped for the purpose of commercial gain.
- In the field of economics, Marxians such as Michael PerelmanMichael PerelmanMichael Perelman is an American economist and economic historian, currently professor of economics at California State University, Chico. Perelman has written 19 books, including Railroading Economics, Manufacturing Discontent, The Perverse Economy, and The Invention of Capitalism.-Biography:A...
have critically examined the belief systems involved in the rise of intellectual property rights; Samuel BowlesSamuel BowlesSamuel Bowles may refer to:*Samuel Bowles *Samuel Bowles...
and Herbert GintisHerbert GintisHerbert Gintis is an American behavioral scientist, educator, and author. He is notable for his foundational views on Altruism, Cooperation, Epistemic Game Theory, Gene-culture coevolution, Efficiency wages, Strong reciprocity, and Human capital theory. Gintis has also written extensively on...
critically reviewed the beliefs involved in the theory of human capitalHuman capitalHuman capitalis the stock of competencies, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. It is the attributes gained by a worker through education and experience...
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/. Knowledge as the means to make a better life contrasts here with knowledge as a tradeable commodity or a type of capital, which can generate income and wealth. In the process, knowledge and information become detached from the knowing subject and begin to lead a "life of its own".
- Sociologists like Frank FurediFrank FurediFrank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, therapy culture, paranoid parenting and sociology of knowledge....
and Ulrich BeckUlrich BeckUlrich Beck is a German sociologist who holds a professorship at Munich University and at the London School of Economics.-Life:...
have focused on the growth of commodified knowledges in the context of modern "risk prevention culture" growing out of the preoccupation with portfolio risk and the insurance of wealth or status. The Post-World War II economic expansionPost-World War II economic expansionThe post–World War II economic expansion, also known as the postwar economic boom, the long boom, and the Golden Age of Capitalism, was a period of economic prosperity in the mid 20th century, which occurred mainly in western countries, followed the end of World War II in 1945, and lasted until the...
created gigantic savings, and the dominant bourgeois ideology shifted gradually towards the way of thinking of fund managers controlling the investment of financial assets ("the talk follows the money"). The global pension funds accumulated by 20% of the world population (mostly in OECD countries) who have pensions nowadays alone amount to circa $17.5 trillion; to this gigantic asset must be added the even greater funds of other institutional investors such as banks, finance companies, hedgefunds and the like. In 2008, the world's total tradeable financial assets (stocks, debt securities and bank deposits) were estimated at $178 trillion, more than three times the value of what the whole world produces in a year. These gigantic funds have to be invested for profit while the future is uncertain, and this creates a tremendous preoccupation with risk calculations. Yet, while more and more funds are spent to insure capital assets against possible loss in value, workers' lives are increasingly insecure; workers cannot be sure that the job they hold now will still be there in future; this creates general uncertainty and an increased preoccupation with risk allround. If one has a lot of money, it is easier to pose as a "risk-taker"; taking a risk might forfeit considerable money, but after the loss, there is still a lot of money left. If one has little money, one might lose rather little money from taking a risk, but the risk can nevertheless have a huge impact on one's life. When risk is fetishized as "a quantity of money", this may powerfully distort the very perception of the real risks ordinary people run in everyday life. And thus the very valuation of risk is susceptible to ideological biases. The sociologists note that fortunes are nowadays earnt from insights by "experts" into the relationship between "knowns" and "unknowns", and in which all kinds of primitive fears, anxieties and superstitions about what "might happen" are manipulated and capitalized on - not infrequently in a fraudulent way. The authoritativeness of these experts, it is argued, often begins to rely on a quasi-religious belief by people in the experts' powers of analysis and forecasting, and in the power of their knowledge, something which is sustained with sophisticated techniques for persuading and seducing the public. The valuation of knowledge gets a somewhat "mystical auraAura (paranormal)In parapsychology and many forms of spiritual practice, an aura is a field of subtle, luminous radiation surrounding a person or object . The depiction of such an aura often connotes a person of particular power or holiness. Sometimes, however, it is said that all living things and all objects...
".
- Inspired by various authors including Georg SimmelGeorg SimmelGeorg Simmel was a major German sociologist, philosopher, and critic.Simmel was one of the first generation of German sociologists: his neo-Kantian approach laid the foundations for sociological antipositivism, asking 'What is society?' in a direct allusion to Kant's question 'What is nature?',...
and Walter BenjaminWalter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
, various artists and art critics have explored fetishes in the world of art, and how the definition and valuation of art is altered by commerce (the relationship between commercial value and aesthetic value). The most obvious example of "artistic fetishes" occurs, when the trivial personal belongings (or rather trivial artistic productions) of a famous artist are sold for gigantic sums of money. But fetishes may also enter into the very design of art work.
- In the area of legal theory, authors ranging from Harvard professor Duncan KennedyDuncan KennedyDuncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School and a founder of critical legal studies as movement and school of thought. Kennedy has been a member of the ACLU since 1967. According to his own testimony, he has never forgotten to pay his dues.-Education and...
http://duncankennedy.net/documents/The%20Role%20of%20Law%20in%20Econ%20Thought_Essays%20on%20the%20Fetishism%20of%20Commodities.pdf and scholars such as Evgeny PashukanisEvgeny PashukanisEvgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis was a Soviet legal scholar, best known for his work The General Theory of Law and Marxism.-Early life and October Revolution:...
, Karl RennerKarl RennerKarl Renner was an Austrian politician. He was born in Untertannowitz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and died in Vienna...
and Franz Leopold NeumannFranz Leopold NeumannFranz Leopold Neumann was a German-Jewish left-wing political activist, Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of National Socialism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of...
, to the socialist writer China MievilleChina MiévilleChina Tom Miéville is an award-winning English fantasy fiction writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" , and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party...
and labor lawyer Marc Linder have explored commodity fetishism in the legal system - the suggestion being that legal forms are reified to the point of misrepresenting real social relations.
In general, these kinds of (often dystopian) interpretations suggest that the whole of human knowledge itself is increasingly being restructured in terms of the relationships between objects of commercial value and the property rights they involve - to the point where the true nature of human relations is shrouded or hidden away, or indeed becomes a total mystery, because all the relevant concepts necessary to understand them are denied, disconnected or erased. Gradually, it is argued, all knowledges which do not serve business interests are being "wiped out".
That might not seem to wipe out so much, to that extent that many knowledges are compatible with making money, but even if the relevant disciplines are not starved of funding, the argument is that the structures of the knowledges themselves are being reformed and deformed, according to a specific pattern of conceptualizations which reflects commercial interests and business culture. As a side-effect, however, metaphysical (rather than scientifically sound) beliefs begin to substitute more and more for a "genuine self-knowledge of society" obtained through independent, critical and comprehensive scientific (or artistic) inquiry. Ultimately, people can then no longer understand themselves and their own lives anymore without the use of commodities, state authorities and specialized "expert" services (which could be religious services offered by specialists on the spiritual condition of the human species).
Menger and subjective wants
Strongly pro-capitalist economists, such as Carl MengerCarl Menger
Carl Menger was the founder of the Austrian School of economics, famous for contributing to the development of the theory of marginal utility, which contested the cost-of-production theories of value, developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.- Biography :Menger...
, founder of the Austrian School
Austrian School
The Austrian School of economics is a heterodox school of economic thought. It advocates methodological individualism in interpreting economic developments , the theory that money is non-neutral, the theory that the capital structure of economies consists of heterogeneous goods that have...
have insisted that the attribution of value is only a matter of subjective preferences:
The difference between Marx and Menger is just that for Marx, value relationships exist and evolve between things and activities also quite independently from the wishes or desires of any individual or even group of individuals. The fact that this is so, is precisely what helps to sustain the "fetish". It is not merely that people habitually regard value as intrinsic to objects, but also that the economic value objects have, and the way they are related, gained a real power over people. For Menger, value is only exclusively an expression of subjective preferences, but for Marx, value also begins to assert itself as a mind-independent, objective force, quite regardless of what people happen to prefer, with the practical effect that people must often adjust to economic values, rather than the supply of goods and services adjusting to the needs and wishes of people. If individuals don't have the money to buy things, they can prefer all they like, but they won't get the goods and the prices often won't change either (unless perchance someone offers to share them).
Obviously, in markets there is a tendency for supply and demand to adjust to each other, however haphazardly that may occur, causing economists to extrapolate a "natural tendency of markets to reach equilibrium
Economic equilibrium
In economics, economic equilibrium is a state of the world where economic forces are balanced and in the absence of external influences the values of economic variables will not change. It is the point at which quantity demanded and quantity supplied are equal...
" provided there is no outside interference in market activity. Therefore, Menger's view has a certain plausibility; after all, markets are in good part driven by demand, and therefore by the choices and preferences of myriads of individuals. This reality was already noted in ancient Greece by the philosopher Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, who therefore attributed the value of goods simply to the intensity of demand for them.
It is just that the very meaning, scope and limits of these choices and preferences themselves is also determined by objective market forces over which individuals have no control, and with which they are confronted every day. They do not control the results of the fact that a mass of working hours has, or has not been worked. They have to adjust their behaviour to price-levels, like it or not ("market discipline"). This means that, mostly, the value of goods is set by a price-level which people normally cannot change, or change only within narrow limits, and the fact that people individually strongly or weakly prefer a good offered for sale does not normally change its basic supply price. The market does not change at all, simply because people have a desire for particular goods, but because they really buy or sell them (or not). If somebody strongly desires a candy bar that sells for $1, the $1 price for the candy does not spontaneously by itself change because of that desire. At most the seller of candy might say, that "if you get five bars, I will give you a discount".
Market freedom
Menger's theory leads to the result, that market effects can only be explained in terms of the subjective preferences of individuals and nothing else. If markets expanded, that must be because the intensity of desires increased, and if they shrank, it must be because appetites reduced, causing changes in the free choices people made to buy or sell. But for Marx, this sort of vulgar and naive theory (in his opinion) was itself a product of commodity fetishism, insofar as it completely disconnected market trade from the constraints placed on that trade by the labor efforts of people, by history and by the framework of social relations within which they co-existed, like it or not (see law of valueLaw of value
-General:The law of value is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo's economics...
).
"Market freedom" might only be a sort of illusion
Illusion
An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation. While illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most people....
created by the ability of people to choose whether to buy and sell or not, and by the potential choices they could conceivably make, even if they had only very little money. They feel unconstrained in market activity only because they have internalized the constraints and agree to play by its rules. But people might not buy or sell out of free choice at all, but because they were forced to do so by circumstances, like it or not, at prices not to their liking. For example, in a food crisis food becomes scarce and expensive, but people still have to eat.
The theories which economists made up about markets were, in Marx's opinion, themselves ultimately a product of the way market trade itself functioned, and not the other way around. If markets involved a reified consciousness, which attributed an independent power to symbols imposed by "the many" on "the few", or by economic community on each of its members, this would also powerfully influence the economic theories created about markets - in ways which actually promoted the fetishization of economic phenomena. Ultimately this created the belief that "the economy" and "the market" were independent things which could act in their own right, even if few people could explain or define what "the economy" or "the market" means. People might say, "the market does this" or "the market does that" but in reality people do these things, and the market results are merely the effects of what they do. Thus, ultimately, commodity fetishism contributed to a process of dumbing down
Dumbing down
Dumbing down is a pejorative term for a perceived trend to lower the intellectual content of literature, education, news, and other aspects of culture...
.
Criticism
Five criticisms have often been made of the concept of commodity fetishism:- Although there may be a cultural tendency to fetishize objects in human society, this has always existed and is not unique to capitalist society. People are normally very able to distinguish between commercial valuations and other sorts of evaluations, and they are not so misguided as Marx seems to think. If they attribute a normal value to objects, that is not a bad thing. If they did not, life would become very difficult because they would not be able to agree on what something is worth.
- Modern economics is very much based on the idea that economic value is subjective, a matter of what people choose to value, which influences their choices. If economic value is said to be objectified, this is merely an illusion, and people know very well it is an illusion. It is wrong to think that price-levels force people around, because they always have a free choice. They can always change their behaviour to get what they want. The value of objects is just a matter of their practical utilityUtilityIn economics, utility is a measure of customer satisfaction, referring to the total satisfaction received by a consumer from consuming a good or service....
for human purposes.
- Marx's idea of commodity fetishism is therefore claimed to be an exaggeration, because in real life people simply do not fetishize objects to the extent that Marx thinks they do. They apply all sorts of valuations which guide their behaviour, quite aware of the differences between the characteristics of an object and the characteristics of human subjects; thus they can learn to control their desires, and judiciously manage money as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. If one really believed that value relationships were beyond anyone's control, this would get in the way of freely determining one's life. Indeed, the use of fetishes could be regarded as a natural form of human play, a game that is only a game in which objects are cherished or loved.
- The analogy drawn between commodity fetishism and religionReligionReligion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
is claimed to be mistaken, because people do not truly "worship" money and commodities in a spiritual sense, or attribute supernaturalSupernaturalThe supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
powers to them; it is argued that the development of capitalism has led to considerable secularizationSecularizationSecularization is the transformation of a society from close identification with religious values and institutions toward non-religious values and secular institutions...
, i.e. to the abandonment of organized religion and superstitions in many areas of life, in favour of a scientifically based interpretation of the world (although science and religion might also combine). The human beliefs about value-relationships which are involved in commodity fetishism are, according to this argument, not "religious" beliefs at all, and do not have the same characteristics as real spiritual beliefs. The proof of this interpretation is said to be, that one could be a religious believer, even though one is extremely aware of commodity fetishism, and highly critical of its manifestations; indeed it might be an integral part of one's religion to tear down the golden calfGolden calfAccording to the Hebrew Bible, the golden calf was an idol made by Aaron to satisfy the Israelites during Moses' absence, when he went up to Mount Sinai...
, i.e. to oppose idolatryIdolatryIdolatry is a pejorative term for the worship of an idol, a physical object such as a cult image, as a god, or practices believed to verge on worship, such as giving undue honour and regard to created forms other than God. In all the Abrahamic religions idolatry is strongly forbidden, although...
in all forms.
- MarxismMarxismMarxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
is itself claimed (e.g. by the later Leszek KolakowskiLeszek KolakowskiLeszek Kołakowski was a Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analyses of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism, which is "considered by some to be one of the most important books on political theory of the...
) to be a sort of fetish, namely the fetishization of Marx and his ideas. This is sometimes also interpreted as a spiritual substitute for "real" religion which Marxists regard as not credible. Thus, it can be argued the concept of commodity fetishism is itself fetishized, and thereby endowed with a pervasive power and influence which it does not really have, leading to a distorted, stunted perception of social reality, in which subjective sympathies or dislikes are badly confused with objective realities.
How exactly Marx would have responded to such criticisms remains unclear, because he never explicitly defended his idea of commodity fetishism after he published it, and seemed to regard it as a rather obvious aspect of life. No doubt he would not have denied that people can be very self-aware; they can make choices and relativize matters, and few objectively given economic circumstances are so compelling that one cannot actively do anything about them at all. But probably he would have referred to the enormous power that money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
has over people's lives, and to the quasi-religious zeal with which the business world may pursue its aims.
Perhaps he would have pointed to what people in capitalist society actually do when the "crunch" comes, when there is a real economic crisis (as a "test case"). What do people do in the first instance? Do they for example try to secure their possessions, perhaps investing in gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
or other assets that hold their value? Or do they spontaneously seek to cooperate with others to resolve the crisis?
It is evident from Marx's text that in drawing an analogy between the fetishes of a religious cult and the fetishes involved in commerce, he did not commit himself to the idea that commodity fetishism is a "religion of commerce", the same as a religious faith. "Having a fetish" (endowing something with powers it does not really have) need not involve a specifically religious belief at all. However, how people regard commercial phenomena could also be influenced by a mixture of religious, semi-religious and non-religious beliefs.
How Marx would have regarded Marxism is not known, because Marxism emerged as a significant political movement only after his death. Although very aware of the desire of human beings to remake the world after their own image, and immortalize themselves, Marx stayed an atheist and a humanist
Humanism
Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....
. He was rather skeptical and derisive when some French leftists began to call themselves "Marxists" in the early 1880s. According to the testimony of Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
, Marx quipped wrily, "what is certain is that, as for myself, I am no Marxist" (or, in another version, "All I know is that I am no Marxist") - the suggestion being that if this was "Marxism", he wanted no part of it. Marx did seek influence for his ideas, but not for himself; he recommended that people should "think through" matters for themselves, using their own critical faculties, and his writings were intended only as an aid for this. Yet it could be argued that this contradicted with the intellectual authority he and Engels definitely did seek in the labour movement, which could after all hardly exist without followers; and it was not unreasonable that these followers would begin to call themselves "Marxists", to distinguish themselves from other trends. The old Engels, by then an intellectual mentor of the growing social-democratic movement, eventually accepted the label of "Marxism" - which he did not invent himself - to express the political tendency he and Marx represented, and for which he had written many popular pamphlets, articles and books.
See also
Before Marx- Simple livingSimple livingSimple living encompasses a number of different voluntary practices to simplify one's lifestyle. These may include reducing one's possessions or increasing self-sufficiency, for example. Simple living may be characterized by individuals being satisfied with what they need rather than want...
Marx's argument
|
Labor theory of value The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics... Real prices and ideal prices Real prices and ideal prices refers to a distinction between actual prices paid for products, services, assets and labour , and computed prices which are not actually charged or paid in market trade, although they may facilitate trade... Reification (Marxism) Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not... Relations of production Relations of production is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism, and in Das Kapital... |
After Marx
- Jean BaudrillardJean BaudrillardJean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism.-Life:...
, a theorist whose System of Objects borrows from Marx - Guy DebordGuy DebordGuy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
, a situationist theorist- Debord's The Society of the SpectacleThe Society of the SpectacleThe Society of the Spectacle is a work of philosophy and critical theory by Guy Debord. It was first published in 1967 in France.-Book structure:...
(full text)
- Debord's The Society of the Spectacle
- Georg LukácsGeorg LukácsGyörgy Lukács was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic. He is a founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He contributed the concept of reification to Marxist philosophy and theory and expanded Karl Marx's theory of class consciousness. Lukács' was also an influential literary...
' theory of class consciousnessClass consciousnessClass consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
and his concept of reificationReificationReification generally refers to bringing into being or turning concrete.Specifically, reification may refer to:*Reification , making a data model for a previously abstract concept... - Isaak Illich RubinIsaak Illich RubinIsaak Illich Rubin was a Russian economist and is considered to be the most important theorist of his time on the field of Marx's theory of value. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. During the course of the Great Purge he was executed in 1937.-Main Works:* Rubin,...
, Essays of Marx's theory of value.
Further reading
- Debord, Guy (1983) The Society of the Spectacle, ????: Black and Red.
- Lukács, Georg (1972) History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Marx, Karl (1992) Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, London: Penguin.
- Mary DouglasMary DouglasDame Mary Douglas, DBE, FBA was a British anthropologist, known for her writings on human culture and symbolism....
who wrote The world of goods with Baron Isherwood.
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 HarveyDavid Harvey (geographer)David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . A leading social theorist of international standing, he received his PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited...
, 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)