| This question <156|177> overall <163|165> MsMarx: <88|169-1>. |
| Question 144: How does Marx's use of the term “fetishism” compare with its modern dictionary definition? |
| [164] MsMarx: Fetishism Marx's use of the term “fetishism” is quite different from the modern dictionary definition. Webster defines fetishism as a worship of an object or image superstitiously invested with divine or demoniac power, invested with reverence. Marx does not intend it to mean this excessive devotion to material goods. |
| Marx's meaning of the “fetish character” of the commodity arose because the source of its value, the social labor of man working in interdependence, was transmuted in capitalism into an objective character of the product, into a price. That interdependence was isolated and indifferent; it could not straightforwardly assign value to the satisfaction of needs, but only to sales on the market, the only place where private labors became social. |
| His concept of fetish implies the inversion of persons and things. The fetishism of commodities has its origin in the peculiar social character of the labor that produces them. Commodity fetishism is the belief that goods possess value just as they have weight, as an inherent property. To the unmystified mind, it is clear that a commodity has exchange value only because it stands in certain relations to human labor and human needs. In the bewitched world of commodity fetishism, goods appear to exchange at a certain rate because of their inherent values. |
| Hans does a good job of explaining that fetishism is in part the illusion that commodities, money, and capital have properties and powers of their own. However, whether people are aware or not of the social origin of the quasi-physical properties of the commodity, they must treat the commodities as beings with supranatural properties if they want to survive in a commodity society. It is easy to think that commodities really do have supernatural properties. Most of the people most of the time forget that the powers of the things which they are trying to take advantage of originate in their own activity, but nobody is forced to see the commodity this way. This false consciousness implies Marx's meaning of “fetishism.” |
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