Commodity fetishism (Fetischcharakter der Ware) — Karl Marx’s concept according to which, in commodity production, the social relations among producers appear as relations among things endowed with properties of their own. It is set out in Capital, Volume I, chapter 1, section 4 (“The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret”). Marx observes that the commodity seems trivial, yet proves full of “metaphysical subtleties”: the social character of each person’s labor appears as an objective property of the products, and value as a natural quality of things. Producers relate socially only through exchange, so price movements seem an independent law that governs the producers themselves. The analogy is with religion, in which products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures; the word “fetish” came from eighteenth-century religious ethnology (Charles de Brosses, 1760). For Marx, fetishism is not a mere perceptual error: it arises from the social form of labor in an economy of private, independent producers and would disappear only under a different form of organization. Developments: Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), elaborated it as reification (Verdinglichung); see Georg Lukács. Guy Debord took up the theme in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Criticisms: structuralist readings such as Louis Althusser’s (Reading Capital, 1965) reject centering Marxism on alienation and Hegelian categories; economists of other schools dispute the labor theory of value it presupposes, as in Böhm-Bawerk’s critique (see surplus value). See also alienation, ideology, and the article Marx: historical materialism, surplus value, and commodity fetishism.
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