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Welcome to the seventh entry in the Marx in Moments series. These are three-minute reads examining key Marxist concepts in a clear and accessible way. This week, we focus on commodity fetishism–not only what it is, but how Marx says it actually happens, built from the sections of Capital, Volume 1 that lead up to it.
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
– Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 163.
Pick up anything you own and you will find a price on it. The price feels like a fact about the object, the way its weight or colour is. A mug is worth four dollars in roughly the way it is white and holds a certain amount of liquid. This is the most ordinary thing in the world, and it is the thing Marx wanted to make strange.
Most accounts of commodity fetishism stop at the definition: under capitalism, relations between people appear as relations between things. True enough. But Marx called this section “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” and the secret is not the definition. The secret is the mechanism: how an arrangement between people comes to look like a property of objects. He builds it in three steps.
First, the commodity has two sides. It is useful (a mug holds coffee), and it has value. But intrinsic value never shows itself directly. You cannot point to it the way you point to the handle. It only ever appears as exchange-value when one commodity is set against another: four dollars, one coat, ten cups of rice. Value is visible only in disguise, always wearing the body of some other thing.
Second, the labour behind the commodity also has two sides. The concrete labour produces the useful thing. But strip away what makes it specific and you are left with plain human effort measured in time. Marx calls this abstract labour, and argued that this is what creates value. With one condition: it only counts once the product exchanges. Until then, your labour is private. The market is what makes it social.
Third, the form does the magic. For one commodity to express its value, it has to borrow the body of another. Because we only see the two objects trading, what is purely a social relation between producers begins to look like a natural, physical feature of the objects themselves. The concealment is built into the exchange itself.
Why does any of this happen? Because under capitalism, production is privately organized. Your work only becomes social after the fact: when your product exchanges for someone else’s. So, the social character of your labour cannot appear while you work. It can only appear afterward, stamped onto the product, as its value. The relations between people take “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”
This is not a mistake in anyone’s head. It is not an illusion a clever economist could dispel–the appearance is necessary. Given how production is organized, this is the only form value can take. The mystery, Marx says, lies not in the object’s usefulness but in the commodity form itself. Value does not announce itself, Marx writes; it turns every product into a “social hieroglyphic,” and we spend our lives trying to read a script we wrote without knowing it. We decipher the price tag, but the social relations that created it remain opaque to us.
The fetish is the reason the economy feels like weather. When we say “the market fell,” we are describing our own collective activity returning to us as an outside force. Something that happens to us rather than something we do.
So go back to the mug. Its price is not inside it the way its weight is. The price is a relation between you and everyone whose labour you will never see, folded up so small it looks like a number on a thing.