Commodity fetishism names the necessary mystification produced by capitalist exchange. Social relations between people appear as objective properties of things. Value seems to inhere in commodities themselves rather than arising from the labour relations that produce them. This is not subjective delusion correctable through enlightenment. It is objective appearance following logically from how exchange actually operates.
Marx introduced the concept in Capital as critique of political economy’s failure to recognise value’s social origins. Classical economists treated value as natural property of objects. They unconsciously repeated what commodities themselves seem to say. Marx demonstrated that this mystification results structurally from the autonomy of exchange-value.
The double nature of commodities
Commodities possess dual character. Use-value concerns their qualitative properties and concrete usefulness. Exchange-value concerns their quantitative relations to other commodities in market circulation. These two dimensions remain incommensurable yet inseparable.
Use-value appears immediate and sensuous. Objects serve particular purposes through specific material properties. A coat provides warmth. Bread satisfies hunger. These qualities seem natural and self-evident.
Exchange-value operates differently. It abstracts from all concrete qualities to establish purely quantitative relations. Twenty yards of linen exchange for one coat not because of any shared material properties but because both embody equivalent amounts of abstract labour. This equivalence is social, not natural.
The fetish emerges from this split. Exchange makes qualitatively different things commensurable through abstracting from their concrete properties. Yet this abstraction appears as objective property of the things themselves. Commodities seem to possess value the way they possess weight or colour.
Autonomy of exchange-value
Exchange-value functions autonomously from conscious intention and concrete labour. Markets establish value relations independently of what producers or consumers think. Individual participants cannot determine value through will or knowledge. They must accept prices as given facts.
This autonomy parallels the autonomy of the signifier in language. Just as linguistic value derives from differential relations between signifiers, exchange-value derives from differential relations between commodities. Both operate as closed systems where elements gain meaning or value solely through their structural positions.
Saussure’s linguistics and Marx’s political economy converge on this insight. Both discovered that value (linguistic or economic) emerges from systematic relations of pure difference rather than from positive properties or natural correspondences. This makes both materialist sciences despite analyzing apparently immaterial phenomena.
Inversion of relations
Commodity fetishism inverts relations between persons into relations between things. Workers relate to each other through products of their labour rather than directly. Social cooperation appears as properties of objects rather than as conscious collective organisation.
Marx describes how commodities communicate amongst themselves through values in a language parallel to but distinct from human communication. Political economists unconsciously repeat this commodity language. They speak as if spoken through by commodities rather than as independent observers.
This inversion is not mere appearance concealing true essence beneath. The inverted form is how capitalist social relations actually exist and operate. People genuinely do relate through things under capitalism. The fetish names this reality, not a distortion of reality.
Distinction from false consciousness
Commodity fetishism differs fundamentally from false consciousness. False consciousness implies subjective error correctable through education. Commodity fetishism describes objective necessity of how value appears when exchange relations dominate.
Even those who understand Marx’s analysis must navigate markets according to commodity logic. Workers cannot simply decide their labour-power is worth more than markets pay. Capitalists cannot ignore profit imperatives without being eliminated by competition. Knowledge of fetishism does not eliminate its practical force.
This distinguishes Marx’s materialism from idealist critique. Ideology operates as practical activity structured by material relations. Consciousness follows from being. Changing consciousness without transforming relations reproduces the same structures.
The labour theory of value
Labour-power as commodity provides the key to understanding fetishism’s necessity. Labour-power is the unique commodity that produces commodities. It is the source of value that cannot itself be adequately valued.
Workers sell labour-power for wages appearing to compensate them for labour performed. The wage-form creates appearance that all labour is paid. Yet surplus-value emerges from the gap between labour-power’s value (cost of reproduction) and the value it produces during the working day.
This gap remains concealed by the wage-form itself. Under slavery and corvée labour, the division between necessary and surplus labour appeared visibly. Under wage-labour, even unpaid surplus-labour appears as paid. This represents the perfection of fetishist mystification.
The proletariat emerges as social symptom because of this structural position. Labour-power embodies the negativity and impossibility at capitalism’s heart. It is the commodity that exposes the non-relation grounding apparently harmonious exchange.
Fetishism and the signifier
Lacan recognised that Marx’s critique of fetishism anticipates the notion of the signifier. Exchange-value operates as signifier with its own autonomy, not reducible to subjective consciousness or psychological phenomena.
The bar between use-value and exchange-value parallels Saussure’s bar between signifier and signified. Both establish fundamental non-relation and groundlessness. Both create autonomous orders of difference producing real effects.
Fetishism operates at the level of the signifier itself. It is not perceptual illusion or cognitive error. It describes how autonomous symbolic systems structure reality independently of conscious grasp. This makes psychoanalytic concepts essential for understanding political economy.
Historical specificity
Different modes of production generate different forms of fetishisation. Slavery and feudalism relied on personal fetishisation. Masters and lords appeared as natural authorities. Social hierarchies seemed ordained by nature or God.
Capitalism replaces personal fetishisation with abstract fetishisation. No individual master commands obedience through personal authority. Instead, economic abstractions (value, money, capital) impose impersonal imperatives. Everyone must submit to market logic regardless of individual preference.
This shift enables new forms of domination alongside new possibilities for critique. Personal authority can be confronted directly. Abstract systems prove more difficult to oppose because they lack identifiable agents. Yet their impersonal character also reveals their contingency.
Self-fetishisation of capital
Fictitious capital represents capitalism’s purest fetish form. Interest-bearing capital appears as M-M’ (money directly engendering more money). All mediation through production disappears. Money seems to breed money through its own mysterious power.
This constitutes self-fetishisation where capital presents itself as autonomous subject. The source of surplus-value (exploitation of labour-power) becomes completely concealed. Capital appears as creative force generating value from nothing.
Financial abstraction extends this logic. Derivatives and complex instruments create layers of mystification claiming to manage risk through sophisticated mathematics. These conceal structural instabilities whilst presenting themselves as objective knowledge.
Generalised indebtedness
National debt functions as capitalism’s cement. The invention of public credit transforms religious debt into quantified abstraction binding all subjects. Every citizen becomes debtor whilst financial institutions occupy creditor positions.
Debt proves more efficient than direct coercion for securing subjection. It creates obligations appearing as impersonal economic facts rather than imposed domination. Subjects internalise imperatives to labour and consume to service debts.
The narrative of primitive accumulation legitimates this structure through myth of diligent capitalists and profligate workers. Contemporary austerity policies mobilise this myth despite its empirical falsity. The actual function is reproducing conditions for capitalist exploitation through generalised indebtedness.
Ideology and material practice
Commodity fetishism reveals ideology as material practice. The problem is how people act within structures determining their activity.
Slavoj Žižek’s formula captures this: “They know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it.” Cynical distance does not eliminate fetishism’s practical force. One can understand value’s social origins whilst still treating money as valuable thing.
This insight challenges traditional critiques relying on consciousness-raising. Exposing mystification proves insufficient if material structures remain unchanged. Ideology persists through practice even when beliefs shift.
Political implications
Understanding commodity fetishism as structural rather than psychological transforms political strategy. Revolution cannot proceed simply through changing consciousness or exposing illusions. It requires transforming material relations structuring how people actually live and work.
However, this does not reduce to crude economism. Symbolic and material dimensions remain inseparable. Language and value both operate through the signifier’s autonomy. Transforming economic relations requires engaging with how these relations are symbolically structured.
The fetish also indicates where capitalism remains vulnerable. The mystification it produces is necessary precisely because the system contains structural contradictions. Labour-power as the source of value that cannot be adequately valued represents permanent instability.
Critique exposes the mutual dependency between production of value and production of fantasies sustaining that production. It reveals the interdependency of exploitation and fetishisation at capitalism’s heart. This opens possibilities for acting against established orders by targeting the structural impossibilities they systematically conceal.