Commodity Fetishism

What is the riddle in the "price" of a thing?

When the price of bread rises, we say "the market decided". Gold is simply valuable; shares rise and fall of their own accord, and people change jobs, take on debt and rearrange their lives to follow them. Prices feel like the weather, a force no one can do anything about. Yet bread, gold and shares are all made and exchanged by people. Why should what people make appear as a power ruling over them? Commodity fetishism is Marx's answer to that question, and the starting point for the Marxist view of the market economy as a particular historical set of social relations rather than "nature".

Marx opens the last section of the first chapter of Capital, volume I, like this: "A commodity appears at first sight a self-evident, trivial thing. Its analysis shows that it is a very tricky thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological whims."

Eine Ware scheint auf den ersten Blick ein selbstverständliches, triviales Ding. Ihre Analyse ergibt, daß sie ein sehr vertracktes Ding ist, voll metaphysischer Spitzfindigkeit und theologischer Mucken.

His example is a table. Make a table out of wood and the wood changes shape, but the table is still wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. As soon as the table comes forward as a commodity, though, it turns into "a sensuous supersensible thing". Marx mocked: the table "not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain whims far more wondrous than if it were to begin dancing of its own accord". Marx added a footnote: "one remembers that China and the tables began to dance when all the rest of the world seemed to stand still". The joke mocks the table-turning séances that swept European drawing rooms after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions.

Er steht nicht nur mit seinen Füßen auf dem Boden, sondern er stellt sich allen andren Waren gegenüber auf den Kopf und entwickelt aus seinem Holzkopf Grillen, viel wunderlicher, als wenn er aus freien Stücken zu tanzen begänne.

What did Marx call a "fetish"?

"Fetish" today usually has a sexual meaning, but that sense came only with Freud from the 1890s. In Marx's time the word meant an object worshipped because a magical power was believed to dwell in it, the cult object of a "primitive" religion. Marx first used the word in 1842, taking the concept from his excerpts of the French Enlightenment writer Charles de Brosses's On the Cult of Fetish Gods (1760). Commodity fetishism means that the way people treat commodities and money has the same structure as a believer's relation to a cult object.

In Capital, volume I, chapter 1, section 4 (1867), Marx explained the secret like this: "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that it reflects back to people the social characteristics of their own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things." In this optical illusion "the definite social relation between people themselves" assumes "the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things" (the passage the entry on reification also quotes). Just as in the religious world the products of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with a life of their own, "so it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands".

Das Geheimnisvolle der Warenform besteht also einfach darin, daß sie den Menschen die gesellschaftlichen Charaktere ihrer eignen Arbeit als gegenständliche Charaktere der Arbeitsprodukte selbst, als gesellschaftliche Natureigenschaften dieser Dinge zurückspiegelt

Why does this happen? Marx's answer lies in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces commodities. Objects become commodities only because they are "products of private labours carried on independently of each other". The shoemaker, the farmer and the weaver each decide for themselves what and how much to produce, yet in fact all are bound together in a vast division of labour in which each works for the others. That connection appears not through a plan or an agreement but only when their products are exchanged on the market. So to the producers their social relations appear "as what they are": not as direct social relations between persons in their work, but "as material relations between persons and social relations between things".

als sachliche Verhältnisse der Personen und gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse der Sachen.

The key phrase is "as what they are". Fetishism is not simply false consciousness. In a society of commodity producers there really are no direct social relations between producers, so what appears as a relation between things accurately reflects that society's reality. By equating their different products in exchange as values, people equate their different labours as human labour. In Marx's words, "they do not know it, but they do it." Value does not have what it is written on its forehead; rather, it turns every product of labour into "a social hieroglyph".

Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es.

For contrast Marx shows worlds without commodity production. Robinson on his island knows exactly how much of his labour time goes where. Medieval corvée and tithe are personal dependence, but the relations are not hidden; nor is the shared labour of a peasant family. Finally he imagines "an association of free people working with communal means of production". The life-process of society sheds its "mystical veil of mist" only when it stands "as the product of freely socialised people under their conscious and planned control". Fetishism, then, is not a mistake that enlightenment can clear up, but a reality that disappears only when the relations of production change. Marx went on to extend the analysis to money (the money fetish) and interest-bearing capital (the capital fetish).

How did Rubin reread the theory?

This section moved to the centre of Marxist economics in the Soviet Union just after the revolution. Isaak Ilyich Rubin (1886–1937) was a social democrat who joined the Jewish workers' Bund in 1904 and, after the revolution, stayed with the Menshevik-leaning wing of the Bund rather than the Bolsheviks. He was nonetheless recognised as an authority on Marxist economics and became a professor at Moscow University in 1921. He was arrested repeatedly and spent 1923–1926 in prison and exile, where he wrote some twenty works. His main work, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (Ocherki po teorii stoimosti Marksa), first appeared in 1923 and went through four editions in the Soviet Union.

Rubin opened the book: "Marx's theory of commodity fetishism has not until now occupied the place it ought to have in the economic system of Marxism." Supporters and opponents alike treated it as an appendix to the theory of value, "an interesting literary-critical excursus running parallel to Marx's main text". Rubin concluded the opposite: "The theory of fetishism is the foundation of Marx's entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value."

Теория фетишизма представляет собой основу всей экономической системы Маркса и в частности его теории стоимости.

The usual reading took the theory as an exposure: "behind the relations of things lie hidden the relations of people." Rubin thought that was not enough. Marx had also shown that "conversely, in a commodity economy the social production relations of people necessarily take on a thing-like form and cannot manifest themselves otherwise than through things".

Маркс показал не только то, что под отношениями вещей скрываются производственные отношения людей, но что, обратно, в товарном хозяйстве общественные производственные отношения людей неизбежно принимают вещную форму и не могут проявляться иначе, как через посредство вещей.

Rubin's account is concrete. In a commodity economy production is organised by independent commodity producers, and society does not directly decide who produces what and how much. Whether the shoemaker makes more shoes or fewer is decided only by watching shoe prices rise and fall on the market. The labour connection between producers is carried out only through the movement of the prices of things, so things really acquire a special social role and social properties. Rubin called this "the reification of people's production relations and the personification of things". Read this way, the theory of fetishism is not a theory of illusion but "a general theory of the production relations of the commodity economy, a propaedeutic to political economy".

Теория товарного фетишизма превращается в общую теорию производственных отношений товарного хозяйства, в пропедевтику политической экономии.

What became of this reading in the Soviet Union?

Back from exile in 1926, Rubin headed the political economy office of the Marx-Engels Institute under David Riazanov. From 1928, however, the scholarly debate around his book turned into political persecution. A campaign named "Rubinshchina" (Rubinism) denounced the book as "idealism" and a "falsification" of Marxism. Critics charged him with treating economic categories idealistically and metaphysically and with separating form from content; at issue was that his reading explained value from the side of social form and exchange rather than production. Rubin answered in successive editions with an appendix, "Reply to Critics".

The campaign was part of a broader shift from the relative intellectual freedom of the New Economic Policy to the dogmatism of the Stalin era. Arrested in December 1930, Rubin was broken by the methods of interrogation into a false confession and in March 1931, at the trial of the "Union Bureau of the Menshevik Central Committee", was sentenced to five years, commuted to exile in Kazakhstan. Arrested again at his place of exile, Aktyubinsk, in November 1937, he was shot on the 27th of that month. The Russian Wikipedia notes that the party leadership was especially irritated by Rubin because many Bolsheviks regarded his ideas as true Marxism. He was rehabilitated only in 1989–1991, and the Essays remained banned in the Soviet Union until the late 1980s.

At the same time the legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis carried the analysis of fetishism over to law, writing that "commodity fetishism is supplemented by legal fetishism" (see the entry on the commodity exchange theory of law). This 1920s Soviet current, which set out from the commodity form to explain society's other forms, was broken off as a whole in the early 1930s.

Товарный фетишизм восполняется правовым фетишизмом.

How does it differ from reification, and who took it up?

In 1923, the year Rubin's book appeared, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács broadened Marx's concept of fetishism in History and Class Consciousness and first used the word "reification" (Verdinglichung). Lukács found reification outside the economy too, in journalism, law and philosophy, and combined it with Max Weber's theory of rationalisation. The two overlap but differ in focus. Commodity fetishism is Marx's analysis of the economic structure in which the social connection of labour takes the form of things under commodity production; reification is Lukács's generalisation of how that structure spreads through society as a whole and into consciousness. Reification has its own entry in this glossary.

Through Lukács the concept passed into the cultural criticism of Western Marxism. Walter Benjamin wrote the fragment "Capitalism as Religion" in 1921; Adorno and Horkheimer analysed the "culture industry", in which even human imagination becomes a commodity, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944); and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967) portrayed a modern society in which relations between people turn into relations between images.

Rubin himself was discovered late in the West. With the English translation of the Essays in 1972 he became a classic of international Marx scholarship. From the 1960s the West German "New Reading of Marx" (Neue Marx-Lektüre) treated fetishism as the key to understanding Marx properly and named Rubin as its forerunner; one of its leading figures, Hans-Georg Backhaus, placed the problem of fetishism at the centre of his research (see the entry on the value-form).

Why read it today?

The theory of commodity fetishism explains where the habit of accepting market movements as laws of nature comes from. Its core is that this habit is not due only to ignorance or propaganda. In a society where people's production is connected only through the market, things and money really do have the power to move people. Fetishism therefore does not disappear just by teaching correct ideas; for Marx and Rubin it disappears only when people organise production together and consciously. Read together with the entries on the value-form, reification and the labour theory of value, this entry lets one follow the lines of interpretation within Marxism around the problem.