Commodity Fetishism - The Concept of Fetishism

The Concept of Fetishism

The theory of commodity fetishism originated from Karl Marx's references to fetishes and fetishism in his analyses of religious superstition, and in the criticism of the beliefs of political economists. Marx borrowed the concept of "fetishism" from The Cult of Fetish Gods (1760) by Charles de Brosses, which proposed a materialist theory of the origin of religion. Moreover, in the 1840s, the philosophic discussion of fetishism by Auguste Comte, and Ludwig Feuerbach's psychological interpretation of religion also influenced Marx's development of commodity fetishism.

The first mention of fetishism appeared in 1842, in his response to a newspaper article by Karl Heinrich Hermes, which defended the Prussian state on religious grounds. Hermes concorded with the German philosopher G.F.W. Hegel in regarding fetishism as the crudest form of religion. Marx dismissed that argument, and Hermes's definition of religion as that which elevates man "above sensuous appetites". Instead, Marx said that fetishism is "the religion of sensuous appetites", and that the fantasy of the appetites tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper. Therefore, the crude appetite of the fetish worshipper smashes the fetish when it ceases to be of service.

The next mention of fetishism was in the 1842 Rheinische Zeitung newspaper articles about the "Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood", wherein Marx spoke of the Spanish fetishism of gold and the German fetishism of wood as commodities:

The savages of Cuba regarded gold as a fetish of the Spaniards. They celebrated a feast in its honour, sang in a circle around it, and then threw it into the sea. If the Cuban savages had been present at the sitting of the Rhine Province Assembly, would they not have regarded wood as the Rhinelanders' fetish? But a subsequent sitting would have taught them that the worship of animals is connected with this fetishism, and they would have thrown the hares into the sea in order to save the human beings.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx spoke of the European fetish of precious-metal money:

The nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of precious metals, and are, therefore, still fetish-worshippers of metal money, are not yet fully developed money-nations. contrast of France and England. The extent to which the solution of theoretical riddles is the task of practice, and is effected through practice, the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory, is shown, for example, in fetishism. The sensuous consciousness of the fetish-worshipper is different from that of the Greek, because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract enmity between sense and spirit is necessary so long as the human feeling for nature, the human sense of nature, and, therefore, also the natural sense of man, are not yet produced by man's own labour.

In the ethnological notebooks, he commented upon the archæological reportage of The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social conditions of Savages (1870), by John Lubbock. In the Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse, 1859), he criticized the statist, anti-socialist arguments of the French economist Frédéric Bastiat; and about fetishes and fetishism Marx said:

In real history, wage labour arises out of the dissolution of slavery and serfdom — or of the decay of communal property, as with Oriental and Slavonic peoples — and, in its adequate, epoch-making form, the form which takes possession of the entire social being of labour, out of the decline and fall of the guild economy, of the system of Estates, of labour and income in kind, of industry carried on as rural subsidiary occupation, of small-scale feudal agriculture, etc. In all these real historic transitions, wage labour appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations in which labour was fixed on all sides, in its income, its content, its location, its scope, etc. Hence, as negation of the stability of labour and of its remuneration. The direct transition from the African's fetish to Voltaire's "Supreme Being", or from the hunting gear of a North American savage to the capital of the Bank of England, is not so absurdly contrary to history, as is the transition from Bastiat's fisherman to the wage labourer.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx referred to A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance of Political Economy (1825), by John Ramsay McCulloch, who said that "In its natural state, matter . . . is always destitute of value", with which Marx concurred, saying that "this shows how high even a McCulloch stands above the fetishism of German 'thinkers' who assert that 'material', and half a dozen similar irrelevancies are elements of value".

Furthermore, in the manuscript of "Results of the Immediate Process of Production" (ca. 1864), an appendix to Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), Marx said that:

. . . we find in the capitalist process of production indissoluble fusion of use-values in which capital subsists means of production and objects defined as capital, when what we are really faced with is a definite social relationship of production. In consequence, the product embedded in this mode of production is equated with the commodity, by those who have to deal with it. It is this that forms the foundation for the fetishism of the political economists.

Hence did Karl Marx apply the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from economic and ethnologic studies, to the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, wherein an economic abstraction (value) is psychologically transformed (reified) into an object, which people choose to believe has an intrinsic value, in and of itself.