This is something I never really understood in itself or why it’s important in the first place. Modern day examples would definitely help.
Can somebody help me out?
It’s treating commodities as things, not as relations, and forgetting that humans make commodities.
For example, it’s easy to look at a book and see a block of paper with writing on each sheet, all glued together. If it’s a signed book, it might fetch a higher price than one that isn’t signed. If it’s brand new, it might fetch a higher price than a second hand copy. The commodity – here, the book – is treated as a thing. This isn’t ‘wrong’; but it’s one-sided.
At the same time, the book is all the people who put it together: the writer, the printer, the binder. And all these can only be achieved if other workers have built a building, a printer, a laptop/typewriter, roads and vehicles to transport the equipment, materials, and the final product. Every one of the workers in these processes had to eat food every day (grown by farmers, prepared, packaged, cooked, etc), had to be raised and educated, etc. In reality, then, the book is a combination of all the relations between all the people who were needed to turn an idea into a book and get that book into shops and to each reader.
When commodities like books are fetishized, they’re treated as things and all the human relations are ignored. This was hard to do before modern capitalism, because many fewer people were involved in creating goods. As you knew who was involved in making e.g. a book (a small guild of craftspersons), it was harder to forget that the only reason the book existed was because of labour.
Under capitalism, labour is divided into so many parts, that very few people in the production process know anyone else. One person chops trees with a chainsaw. Another turns trees into pulp with a machine. Another turns pulp into sheets with another machine. Another cuts sheets into pages with a guillotine. Another makes chainsaws. Another gears, oil, chains. Another machines. Another guillotines. Another turns chemicals into ink. Etc, etc.
None of these people know each other personally. They only know each other as the commodities they produce.
When we go to the shop to buy paper, a book, ink, or anything else, we ‘meet’ all the people who have produced those goods but we only see the commodity, not those people. We come to fetishize commodities, hold them up as things that appear in shop shelves as if by magic.
If we want to solve a problem, we look for commodities as the solution. Hungry? Buy a sandwich. Thirsty? Buy a drink. Fancy a story? Buy a book. Cold? Buy a coat or a house or a heater. We are working together to meet each others needs but we do it by buying commodities. So the commodities take on some magical properties.
As money is used to buy any commodity, we eventually come to fetishize (worship) money as having unique magical properties. With money, one can buy anything they want or need. It can fix every problem. Or so it seems when commodities are fetishized. But it’s human labour, human relations – society – that produces the goods (and services) that satisfy our needs and wants, that solves our problems.
Commodity fetishism turns relations into things and separates humans from one another by making it appear that we don’t need each other to survive. This has loads of distorting and disturbing effects by encouraging us to be anti-social.
It’s human labour that produces what we need to survive. When we fetishize commodities, we come to think that it’s the commodities that keep us alive, not the human labour that produced those commodities.
I don’t believe this is the correct answer. Commodity fetishism is the fetishization of the commodity form, not of individual commodities. It’s the phenomenon of commoditizing everything from sex with your partner to pictures of your cat to 5 minutes as a passenger in a car just to experience the g-forces of racing. It’s the phenomenon of putting a dollar sign on everything and inventing all new ways of putting dollar signs on things.
I’m not sure that we disagree. But how else do you ELI5 without concrete examples?
You seem to be adding further concrete examples to explain it? Could I not abstract upwards and say it’s not those commodified experiences but the commodity form? I realise I chose physical goods and you chose ‘experiences’ (services?) but I think it’s a false dichotomy to separate them.
I don’t think the commodity form is more similar to ‘intangible’ commodities than to ‘tangible’ commodities just because they share in common the feature that ‘intangible’ commodities and the commodity form cannot be touched. But maybe I’ve misunderstood your criticism.
Your examples seem to support what I said: in other words, commodification is the reification of the commodity form. That form is an abstraction of individual commodities and it is relational, as is every subject to dialectical materialists. So this fetishization is the thingifying of human relations; or, it’s when humans turn (commodity) relations into things.
I appreciate the challenge and I’m not replying in this way to shut down the conversation. I think there is something in the distinction between commodities and the commodity form. I’m going to look into it to see if I have made an error.
Thanks for engaging. It’s definitely not something I am super firm on. I think the concrete examples you gave and I gave are pointing to different things. Maybe I was not clear on the distinction I was trying to make.
The way I interpret your examples is that we see the book in its idealist form, not its material form. That is to say, we see the brand, the status, the convenience, the desire, but not the object and all its relationships.
What I was trying to convey is that we interpret all of life through the lens of commodification. So when I see a beautiful tree, I think “how can I make money on this” and suddenly something that wasn’t a commodity becomes a commodity. We do this over and over. In the 1800s, some human activities that we now think of as jobs were not yet commodities, they were just things people did. But, through commodification of labor, commodity fetishism set in and more activities that were not commodifird became commodified. So, people used to make dolls for their kids, or read them bedtime stories, and now those have been commodified by someone fetishizing the commodity form and trying to apply it to things they see in the world.
Perhaps that is what you were trying to explain as well, and I didn’t interpret your words as you intended. But my initial read of your words does not match what I was trying to convey with mine.
Neoliberal economists boast about this with supply chain abstraction through I, Pencil, a work by Leonard Read then adopted by Milton Friedman.
Search ‘Nobody knows how to make a pencil’ and you’ll get thousands more hits than searching for commodity fetishism, Friedman basically repackaged Marx and sold it as a positive of free market economics.
They basically took commodity fetishism and fetishised it.
I’m fascinated and revulsed and unsurprised.
I’ll take a look at that essay, thanks.
