"McKinley Prosperity" by Northwestern Litho. Co, Milwaukee This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b52834. . Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. |
In Karl Marx's critique of the political economy of capitalism, commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade.
As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value. Wiki
Karl Marx explained the philosophic concepts underlying commodity fetishism thus:
As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this.
It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.
In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty 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 both with each other and with the human race.
So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.
My fetish is recycling plastic bags because they are so harmful. |
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