Introduction
‘In the United States, where a man who owns a million is referred to as being ‘worth’ a million, market concepts have sunk in deeper than anywhere else’ (Trotsky, 1939, para 3). Though this was written eight decades ago, there is no doubt that market concepts still saturate the global economy today. The measurement of someone’s ‘worth’ in relation to their bank account is just one example of the rampant commodification that has occurred under capitalism. Karl Marx’s ‘fetishism of commodities’ concept helps shed light on the underlying mystifications of the capitalist society. The concealed social relations in the market and the alienation that arises has detrimental implications for liberal democracy. Marx used his concept to assist his fundamental critique of classical political economy.
Fetishism of Commodities
Marx establishes the character of a commodity before he introduces the concept of the fetishism of commodities. He discusses how a commodity has both a use-value and an exchange value. The use-value is the want or need that the commodity serves as a useful purpose. It is essentially the utility that belongs to the particular commodity. An exchange-value is how the commodity is valued when compared to other commodities it could be exchanged for. For Marx, this meant that exchange values take the form of a generalized commodity, and thus hides the actual comparable factor (labour time).
The concept of fetishism of commodities is introduced by Marx in Capital I, Ch. 1, section 4. He begins by stating:
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But it’s analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (p.163).
The commodity has become so entrenched in our society and way of life that it is seen as a natural fundamental assumption. This assumption lends people to think of commodities as having intrinsic value rather than having value from the human labour that produced it. ‘Fetishism denotes the attribution of life, autonomy, power and even dominance to otherwise inanimate objects and presupposes the draining of these qualities from the human actors who bestow the attribution’ (Taussig, 1980, p.32). Fetishism occurs when the human labour behind the production of a commodity is concealed as an exchange occurring between objects. In other words, as Albritton (2012) describes, ‘‘commodity fetishism’ refers to a social situation in which people relate socially to each other not directly, but through the mediation of things (money and commodities)’ (p.68). The ‘metaphysical subtlety’, Marx describes, is thus the way social relations mysteriously disappear by this fundamental assumption of the market-system.
To explain what is happening, here is a straightforward example by David Harvey (2010):
‘You go into a supermarket and you want to buy a head of lettuce. In order to buy the lettuce, you have to put down a certain sum of money. The material relation between the money and the lettuce expresses a social relation because the price — the how much — is socially determined, and the price is a monetary representation of value. Hidden within this market exchange of things is a relation between you, the consumer and the direct producers — those who produced the lettuce. Not only do you not have to know anything about that labour or the labourers who congealed value in the lettuce in order to buy it; in highly complicated systems of exchange it is impossible to know anything about the labour or the labourers, which is why fetishism is inevitable in the world market. The end result is that our social relation to the labouring activities of others is disguised in the relationships between things. You cannot for example, figure out in the supermarket whether the lettuce has been produced by happy labourers, miserable labourers, slave labourers, wage labourers or some self-employed peasant’ (p.39–40).
This concept shows that there are some ethical and moral concerns in having these social relations obscured under capitalism.
Marx uses this concept to criticize the mainstream economists of his time or what he calls bourgeois economists. He argues against their common belief that the capitalist economic system arose organically out of a state of nature. Marx illustrates this by pointing out flaws in the Robinson Crusoe thought experiment, which was commonly used by political economists to allegorize the ‘natural’ development of a market system. In the story, Robinson is stranded on an island and step by step constructs a market economy. Marx, however points out that Robinson had with him ‘a watch, ledger, ink and pen’ and then began ‘like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books’ (p.170). This meant that Robinson had a pre-conceived notion of a market economy, which he then attempts to recreate. Marx condemns these mainstream economists by showing that they harbour false assumptions in their market fundamentalism and how this allegory is clearly not a ‘natural’ state of affairs.
Marx also goes on to further this criticism and explain his concept of the fetishism of commodities by contrasting it to feudalism. Marx seemingly argues that the feudal economy was unfetishized due to its mode of production. ‘Here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent — serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clerics’ (p.170). Production is organised in a simple hierarchy of personal obligations; thus, there are no concealed social relations. Marx states, ‘that there is no need for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality’ (p.170). So, serfs would correctly attribute the production and distribution of goods to human beings rather than the mystical mechanisms of a market system. Marx also gives an example of a rural patriarchal peasant family and how they too, similarly have direct social relations. This is because everything the family produces is determined by their social function and thus do not appear as commodities.
Marx also furthers his explanation of the fetishism of commodities by an analogy with the realm of religion; ‘There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations with each other and with the human race’ (p.165). This analogy is expanded by Fine (2006), who states:
‘Under Feudalism, human relationships with God conceal and justify the actual relationships to fellow humans, an absurd bond of lordly exploitation as it appears to the bourgeois (capitalist) mind. Capitalism, however has its own God and Bible. The relationship of exchange between things is also created by people, concealing the true relationship of exploitation and justifying this by the doctrine of freedom of exchange’ (p.24)
Fine, however, does admit one major flaw with this contrast to feudal religion: Commodities and the price system are real, whereas god is an imaginary entity. Still, this analogy is useful in highlighting the functionality of fetishism. Under capitalism and under religion the believer is subjugated to an unmovable, impenetrable, all-pervasive system. They cannot change the ‘laws of nature’, they are stuck. As Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) said in 2013, ‘The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal’. This analogy to religion illustrates Marx’s point, that the capitalist system is man-made so therefore can be undone.
The contrast with religion also works on a different level. As David Harvey contends ‘Marx argues that our forms of thought — not just those of the political economists — reflect the fetish of our times’ (p.45). This reflection implies that Christianity and especially what Marx terms its bourgeois developments, Protestantism and Deism, became the most fitting religion for capitalism. This is an inverse of Max Weber’s later argument in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
The fetishism of commodities also highlights some aspects of freedom. Marx uses the term when picturing an alternative to a fetishized society: ‘Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’ (p.171). The phrase ‘association of free men’ suggests that under the market system people are not free. The classical economists would view the market as the purveyor of freedom. Thus, according to Marx, under other economic systems such as the feudal system people may have freedom because of their transparent social relations. Whilst of course still being oppressed in other ways. Marx’s utopian hope shows a glimpse of what an alternative system, where social relations are not concealed, would look like.
Alienation
The fetishism of commodities does not only apply to the capitalist and the consumers it also affects the producers. They too have been divorced from social relations due to the fetishism inherent in the market system. Marx discusses and expands this phenomenon using the term ‘alienation’ in his earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Basically, as Mandel and Novack (1973) state, ‘Alienation expresses the fact that the creations of men’s hands and minds turn against their creators and come to dominate their lives’ (p.7).
Marx argues that this alienation takes on a few different forms in the capitalist system. First the actual process of labour becomes perceived as not a need but rather imposed by the capitalist. ‘It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists labour is shunned like the plague’ (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p.30).
Another form of alienation occurs when the capitalist owns and controls the products that are made by workers. They are not in control of the objects they have produced; the capitalist has estranged them from their creation. And as the products that the worker creates become alien, the worker becomes estranged from the physical world.
Alienation also occurs amongst our fellow species. With the loss of transparent social relations people lose the chance to experience a common humanity. The dynamics of capitalism create a situation where humans no longer work co-operatively but are in competition with each other for jobs. This pits workers against each other, which drives down wages. Thus, this form of alienation is beneficial for the owners of capital. They become richer whilst the workers become poorer.
Implications for Liberal Democracy
If the fetishism of commodities underlies our society, this has detrimental implications for liberal democracy. Firstly, it would be difficult to ascertain how truly democratic a society is, if people are blind to the actual processes in the economy. Second, the alienation of the working class would likely create an increasingly polarized, unequal society. This unequal society, characterized by an alienation of ordinary people from their U.S government, was adeptly described by C Wright Mills (1956) in his book The Power Elite: ‘The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power’ (p.1). Such an alienated, fetishized population is unlikely to pierce the veil of the mystifications that conceal social relations. For a truly democratic society this veil would need to be revealed and replaced with an alternative value system that has genuine social relations and equality. According to Marx, this is ‘production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control’ (p.173).
Case Study: Funeral Industry in the United States
One arena where commodity fetishism has become prevalent is in the United States funeral industry. The funeral industry emerged in the United States during the late nineteenth century (Kopp & Kemp, 2007, 154). Gradually this industry became professionalised and the ‘funeral home became the primary service provider for preparation and disposition of the dead’ (p.155).
The increasing commodification of the industry led to it becoming criticised by consumer advocates in the mid twentieth century. Jessica Mitford (1963) in her book The American Way of Death describes a few factors that allowed funeral providers take advantage of their customers. Firstly, the frame of mind of the buyer may be overtaken with grief and insecurity over what to do (p.82). Secondly, the buyer is likely to be uninformed about the options available for funerals (p.82). And thirdly the buyer is likely to be confronted on-the-spot decisions (p.83). These are just some of the factors that have allowed a predatory funeral industry to emerge in the mid-century United States. Mitford stated that ‘the cost of the funeral is the third largest expenditure, after a house and a car, in the life of an ordinary American family’ (p.82). A frugal death is seen as undignified.
In more modern times the industry is still under criticism. Firstly there has been an emergence of large funeral service corporations, showing the tendency of markets to monopolize. One example of this is the SCI Corporation (Service Corporation International), which has over 1,000 funeral franchises in North America (Sanders, 2012, p.269). Funeral directors have also become increasingly adoptive of using brands to symbolize a dead persons ‘personality’. They offer people the option to ‘supplant the corpse with company logos and lifestyle icons’ (p.279). Thus, funerals can also become ‘about the consumers relationship to the commodity form’ (p.279).
The concept of commodity fetishism shows how social relations behind commodities are obscured through relations between commodities. The funeral industry in the United States is just one example of the pervasive attribution of mythical powers to commodities.
Conclusion
It has been over 150 years since Marx wrote about the fetishism of commodities and the mystifications remain relevant today. This is shown starkly with the emergence of an industry that has commodified U.S death rituals. There is likely to be a few people ‘worth’ a million from this death industry. The concealed social relations in the market system has alienated people and continues to dominate our lives, dehumanizing us into commodities. If Marx is correct in his concept, then democracy in the capitalist system has alienated ordinary people and subordinated them to a power elite.
Bibliography:
Albritton, R. (2012). Commodification and Commodity Fetishism. In B. Fine & A. Saad-Filho (Eds.) The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Cheltington, England: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
Fine, B., & Saad-Filho, A. (2016). Marx’s Capital (6th Ed.) London: Pluto Press
Harvey, D. (2010.) A Companion to Marx’s Capital. New York, United States: Verso.
Kopp, S. W., & Kemp, E. (2007). The death care industry: A review of regulatory and consumer issues. Journal of Consumer Affairs, 41(1), 150–173.
Mandel, E., & Novack, G. (1973). The Marxist theory of alienation: three essays. Pathfinder Press.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital, volume I. England: Penguin Books
Marx, K. (1844). Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm
Mills, C. (1956). The power elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mitford, J. (1963). The American Way of Death. London: Hutchinson and Co. Ltd.
Sanders, G. (2012). Branding in the American funeral industry. Journal of Consumer Culture, 12(3), 263–282.
Squires, N. (2013, May 18). Pope blames tyranny of capitalism for making people miserable. The Age. Retrieved from https://www.theage.com.au/world/pope-blames-tyranny-of-capitalism-for-making-people-miserable-20130517-2jru9.html#ixzz2TZDGtjRA
Taussig, M. T. (1980). The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Univ of North Carolina Press.
Trotsky, L. (1939). Marxism in our time. Retrieved from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/marxism.htm
