Commodity fetishism
Commodity fetishism is a category arrived at by Karl Marx at the conclusion of the difficult opening chapter of Das Kapital. It aims to capture how the norms of capitalist political economy might mislead agents immersed within capitalist society.As the end result of an already complex post-Hegelian series of deductions, the term is as resistant to summary as any of Marx's theoretical innovations. Fetishism is a simple concept taken from the study of animistic religions: it applies to rituals and beliefs which treat an inanimate object as if it possessed human or animal powers. To grasp Marx's specific sociological intentions for the term, it is probably necessary to understand, at a minimum, the following argument:
Every society must place its members under certain obligations, especially in the form of work, in order that its complex socioeconomic processes be sustained and reproduced. The distribution of these duties is a political process, a game played between human beings.
In capitalist, free market societies, all such distribution takes place in the form of a free and fair exchange of commodities between equals. The commodity must be anointed with a certain human value in order for it to perform its role as the medium of social organization. But, being determined mainly by such social values as commodities express, agents within capitalist societies come to experience the distribution of social duties as a materialistic process, ie, one in which commodities rule.
Social relationships become confused with their medium, the commodity. The commodity seems to be imbued with human powers, and becomes a fetish of those powers to us. This confusion obscures the basic political issues involved in social relationships, from both exploiter and exploited. Commodity fetishism ensures that neither side is fully conscious of the political positions they occupy.