The Fetishism of Commodities

The products of labour produced for exchange by private commodity producers acquire special properties, which appear supernatural to people. “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood,” Marx wrote. “Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” The cause of this is rooted in the hidden social character that labour acquires in commodity production based on private property. Material goods are not made for personal consumption but for sale on the market, i.e. to satisfy the needs of society. Private property, however, separates the producers, and the only possible form of economic link between people becomes the exchange of commodities, the movement of things.

Since this exchange happens spontaneously, the position of each producer depends on the spontaneous market situation. Commodity producers become totally dependent on the fluctuations of the market prices for commodities. On whether a commodity is sold or not, and on whether the amount received covers the expenses or not, depend both the fate of the enterprise and the prosperity of its owner.

The dependence of commodity producers on market forces is seen on the surface of society as the domination of a certain supernatural power of things (commodities, money) over people, who begin to worship the commodities they produce, just as the religious man bows down before the image of a God he has himself drawn. In the past peasants, believing that “God set prices”, sometimes had products blessed in church, and offered prayers, before taking them to market.

The property of things to dominate people, however, is not engendered by their use value or by any mysterious power with which they have been endowed by nature. It is only inherent in products of labour produced for a spontaneous market. Economic relations between separated private commodity producers cannot be manifested in any way other than through the exchange relations between the products of their labour, i.e. commodities. They take a material form, and this materialization of the production relations in a private property commodity economy, reflected in people’s minds in the form of the supernatural properties of commodities, Marx called the fetishism of commodities.

The fetishism of commodities develops and strengthens as the social character of labour develops and the dependence of producers on the market strengthens. In a developed capitalist society, man feels a slave of the things and systems that surround him and dependent on the gigantic hostile social mechanism. This finds concrete expression in the omnipotence of gold and money. The fetishism of money, the deification and worship of gold, is the extreme manifestation of the fetishism of commodities in the contemporary capitalist world.

Commodity fetishism, however, must not be understood simply as human misunderstanding. Its objective basis is a specific social existence, in particular, the conditions of spontaneous, private property commodity production, when things actually become the embodiment of elemental forces and begin to dominate people, determining their well-being, will, and consciousness. The materialization of production relations is the objective basis of the fetishism of commodities, and the phenomenon does not disappear simply because its mystery has been unveiled by Marxism-Leninism.

Bourgeois political economy not only has not disclosed the true nature of the fetishism, but on the contrary strives to strengthen it in every way possible, depicting money and its power over people as a specific natural property of gold, requiring the subordination of man to it.

The transfer of power to the working people the establishment of common ownership of the means of production, and planned organization of the economy put and end to people’s dependence on the spontaneous exchange of things and consequently, also put an end to the fetishism of commodities.