Commodity fetishism is perhaps one of the most insightful and groundbreaking concepts from Karl Marx's tour de force of economic philosophy Kapital, first published in 1886. For those not familiar with commodity fetishism it is somewhat of a magical mystique around a particular physical thing (commodity) that determines its social value, expressed by Marx as exchange-value. An example of this in the current state of capitalism would be branding. Slavoj Zizek uses Coke vs. generic cola beverage as an example in his 2011 book Living in the End Times. A consumer may be willing to pay more for the Coca-Cola brand soda than the generic simply because of the magical gravitas of the Coke name/logo and all other psycho-social associations that go along with. According to Zizek, this marks a departure by Marx from Marxism. He thus deems Marx's writings from after 1850 to be the post-Marxist Marx.
Of course, there are other ways to determine the value of a commodity apart from fetishism. The labor theory of value posits that a commodity is worth the amount of labor (labor = time spent working + rigorousness of work (this is perhaps an over-simplification, but let's use this rudimentary definition for the sake of argument)) it takes to make something. Adam Smith also subscribed to this idea. This is the first element of a materialist conception of capital.
The second factor is use-value. Since labor is required to fashion a commodity that suits human wants or needs, the value of a commodity also reflects its usefulness. This is a bit more of a complex formula than labor-value as the determination of use-value is often a combination of social relations and material concerns.
Commodity fetishism comes in at the level of exchange-value. Exchange-value under capitalism involves profit. Zizek eloquently defines profit as "the price of the 'nothing' we pay for when we buy something from a capitalist. The capitalist economy counts with the price of nothing, with reference to a virtual Zero which has a precise price (2011: 210)." It has perhaps become almost a cliche when a communist insists that wage labor under capitalism is always robbery because if the boss were to pay the worker what her/his labor was really worth the boss would make no profit. However, it is precisely the mystical element of the fetish that the boss provides. In this sense the bourgeois capitalist (boss) acts as a kind of priest; a gatekeeper to the heavenly realm of the transcendal commodity fetish.
So how then does the concept of commodity fetishism inform us that Marx has disavowed Marxism in Kapital? The philosophical writings of the young Karl Marx were primarily based on Hegelian dialectics. However, Marx differentiated his dialectical materialism from Hegel's dialectical idealism.
In Marx's materialism, ideology, society, civilization, our species' entire symbolic culture arises from material conditions that are clearly discernible by science. Those conditions are most often those which Charles Darwin had identified as being traits of a species "fit" for survival in On the Origin of the Species. Primary among those would be subsistence and reproduction. One also may note that in nature, a species' evolutionary trajectory is often determined by these factors. For example, opposable thumbs in the great apes may have been a mutation that stuck around because those who could pick things up with one hand were more likely to be able to feed themselves. Another extreme example from the other side is the flamboyant plumage of a male peacock. Even though these bright colors may make them more susceptible to predators, they also make the most brightly colored males more likely to be noticed by potential mates and thus more likely to have offspring.
Certainly this materialist theory is sound when we look at things zoologically (although we do now know that some of the great-apes such as chimpanzees do display ritualistic behavior, which one could argue is in some ways symbolic). And it is even consistent when one considers those human cultures that had or have hunter-gatherer type subsistence (again, the existence of animism in these societies also displays a kind of symbolic culture).
Where this theory of materialism breaks down, however, is when it comes to those human societies that have a complex symbolic culture. Ethnologically speaking, symbolic culture (i.e.: not only language, but abstract meanings (signifiers) given, at times seemingly arbitrarily, to certain symbols (signified)) tends to arise with consolidation of political authority (from loose egalitarian bands into tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, states, empires) and also a change in the mode of production (from kinship to tributary, mercantile, capitalist, industrial capitalist, monopoly capitalist). Interestingly enough, a change in religiously seems to coincide with these apparent phases in political-economy. The trajectory seems to go from animism (spirits in all things) to polytheism (many gods), to monotheism (single God) and then perhaps even to atheism (no god) or nihilism (nothing at all). There is a corresponding localist versus universalist approach to religiosity as well here: animism and polytheism being more localist, and monotheism, atheism and nihilism more universalist.
Zizek points out an interesting paradox in Marx's Katpital. It is expressed by Marx himself in the following passage, "... the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things...." I would even make a more bold paraphrase, saying that persons are treated like things, and things are treated like persons under capitalism.
Another paradox can thus be extrapolated. Capitalism takes on the character of a sort of universalist animism, whereby commodities are possessed with a spirit, akin to Hegel's geist, but involving things rather than persons. If we were to compare capitalism to vodou, the capitalist then takes on the status of a bokor: a black-magic priest involved in the business of creating zombies. A zombie would here be a person who becomes a thing; un-dead: the Hegelian negation-of-the-negation. Additionally, a thing (here a commodity) then is given a spiritual dimension, a soul. Also, like vodou, capitalism allows interchanges between the spiritual realm of the fetish and the physical world through liaisons: bokor (hougan or mambo) in vodou, marketeer in capitalism. These liaisons must become possessed by the spirit in order to communicate its message. They must fully identify with the myth in order to propagate the myth.
Parallels come to mind with the fictional House of Fetish cult from Albert Camus' short story "The Renegade", of his collection entitled Exile and the Kingdom, published in 1957. An unnamed missionary renounces his Christian faith and follows the deity known as "the Fetish," after a period of being tortured, culminating in the cutting out of his tongue. The House of Fetish follows a sado-masochistic philosophy of spirituality. Pain, suffering, destruction, hate and unchecked power are celebrated as sacraments of this religion. Isn't this akin to the masochism of the proletariat class under capitalism?
Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, argued against the masochistic nature of the proletarian work ethic in his critique of capitalist conceptualization of efficiency entitled The Right to be Lazy, from 1883. He there explains that the drive to over-produce, a result of the profit motive, has lead to a puritanical work ethic where efficiency is a virtue and sloth a vice. Is not this crisis of over-production what has lead to the imminent ecological and financial crises we face today?
For Lafargue the crucified Christ is the ultimate symbol of this masochism. He makes note that in pre-Christian societies work was the duty of lowly slaves, whereas the philosophers of ancient Spain and Greece praised laziness.
At the end of Camus' "The Renegade", the apostate missionary again renounces his faith, this time the faith of the House of the Fetish. As he lay dying next to the high priest of the fetish from a wound inflicted by the Christian colonialists who came to exterminate the House of the Fetish he expresses a Hegelian negation-of-the-negation, put forth by the following passage:
Who is speaking, no one, the sky is not opening up, no, no, God does not speak in the desert, yet whence comes that voice saying: 'If you consent to die for hate and power, who will forgive us?'
Is it another tongue in me or still that other fellow refusing to die, at my feet, and repeating: 'Courage! courage! courage!'? Ah! supposing I were wrong again! Once fraternal men, sole recourse, O solitude, forsake me not! Here, here who are you, torn, with bleeding mouth, it is you my beloved master! Cast off that hate-ridden face, be good now, we were mistaken, we'll begin all over again, we'll rebuild the city of mercy, I want to go back home. Yes, help me, that's right, give me your hand...."
A handfull of salt fills the mouth of the garrulous slave.
(1957: 60-1)
At first glance, it appears as though Camus' unnamed protagongist may have reverted back to Christianity here, but I would posit that he is merely expressing his religious status as a Hegelian negation-of-a-negation. To Hegel this double negative does not make a positive as it does in grammar. Rather it puts the individual (here Camus' "renegade" protagonist) in a third, liminal category. Just as the undead zombie is neither living, nor dead, the "renegade" here is neither Christian, nor zealot for the Fetish. He has renounced both faiths.
Implicit in the above passage is that the "renegade" protagonist has come to understand that the cruelty of the Fetish has been defeated by the cruelty of the Christians. He has come to understand that the perceived dialectic between Christian mercy and the cruel sadism of the Fetish is not necessarily so black-and-white as he had assumed all along.
In the religion of capital, money is the transubstantiated sacrament with which we create meaning out of nothing. Capital's dualistic nature can thus be described in Christian terms. The commodity is the person - of a dualistic nature itself, possessed of both flesh (thing) and soul (fetish). Money is the Holy Spirit, the vehicle through which commodities are transubstantiated from soul (fetish) to "fleshly" object. One cannot buy the fetish directly. It is physically nothing. The fetish must come as part of a package: physical thing (shoes, food, electronics etc.) plus fetish (symbolized by the "brand" - Nike (athleticism), McDonalds (fun), Apple (innovation) etc.).
Finally, I would insist that commodity fetishism must be ethnographically and ethnologically studied as a form of religiosity. Michael Taussig's book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism approaches this category, specifically in relation to the connection between capitalism and Satanism in South America. Historian Patrick Geary's paper entitled "Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics" published in Arjun Appadurai's (ed) The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective from 1986 is another. However, these studies primarily explore capital and the commodity's relationship with preexisting religiosity. To get to the heart of the matter, economic anthropologists must also approach capitalism as a religion in-and-of-itself: a black-magic, universalist animism that has dominated the entire world.
Of course, there are other ways to determine the value of a commodity apart from fetishism. The labor theory of value posits that a commodity is worth the amount of labor (labor = time spent working + rigorousness of work (this is perhaps an over-simplification, but let's use this rudimentary definition for the sake of argument)) it takes to make something. Adam Smith also subscribed to this idea. This is the first element of a materialist conception of capital.
The second factor is use-value. Since labor is required to fashion a commodity that suits human wants or needs, the value of a commodity also reflects its usefulness. This is a bit more of a complex formula than labor-value as the determination of use-value is often a combination of social relations and material concerns.
Commodity fetishism comes in at the level of exchange-value. Exchange-value under capitalism involves profit. Zizek eloquently defines profit as "the price of the 'nothing' we pay for when we buy something from a capitalist. The capitalist economy counts with the price of nothing, with reference to a virtual Zero which has a precise price (2011: 210)." It has perhaps become almost a cliche when a communist insists that wage labor under capitalism is always robbery because if the boss were to pay the worker what her/his labor was really worth the boss would make no profit. However, it is precisely the mystical element of the fetish that the boss provides. In this sense the bourgeois capitalist (boss) acts as a kind of priest; a gatekeeper to the heavenly realm of the transcendal commodity fetish.
So how then does the concept of commodity fetishism inform us that Marx has disavowed Marxism in Kapital? The philosophical writings of the young Karl Marx were primarily based on Hegelian dialectics. However, Marx differentiated his dialectical materialism from Hegel's dialectical idealism.
In Marx's materialism, ideology, society, civilization, our species' entire symbolic culture arises from material conditions that are clearly discernible by science. Those conditions are most often those which Charles Darwin had identified as being traits of a species "fit" for survival in On the Origin of the Species. Primary among those would be subsistence and reproduction. One also may note that in nature, a species' evolutionary trajectory is often determined by these factors. For example, opposable thumbs in the great apes may have been a mutation that stuck around because those who could pick things up with one hand were more likely to be able to feed themselves. Another extreme example from the other side is the flamboyant plumage of a male peacock. Even though these bright colors may make them more susceptible to predators, they also make the most brightly colored males more likely to be noticed by potential mates and thus more likely to have offspring.
Certainly this materialist theory is sound when we look at things zoologically (although we do now know that some of the great-apes such as chimpanzees do display ritualistic behavior, which one could argue is in some ways symbolic). And it is even consistent when one considers those human cultures that had or have hunter-gatherer type subsistence (again, the existence of animism in these societies also displays a kind of symbolic culture).
Where this theory of materialism breaks down, however, is when it comes to those human societies that have a complex symbolic culture. Ethnologically speaking, symbolic culture (i.e.: not only language, but abstract meanings (signifiers) given, at times seemingly arbitrarily, to certain symbols (signified)) tends to arise with consolidation of political authority (from loose egalitarian bands into tribes, chiefdoms, kingdoms, states, empires) and also a change in the mode of production (from kinship to tributary, mercantile, capitalist, industrial capitalist, monopoly capitalist). Interestingly enough, a change in religiously seems to coincide with these apparent phases in political-economy. The trajectory seems to go from animism (spirits in all things) to polytheism (many gods), to monotheism (single God) and then perhaps even to atheism (no god) or nihilism (nothing at all). There is a corresponding localist versus universalist approach to religiosity as well here: animism and polytheism being more localist, and monotheism, atheism and nihilism more universalist.
Zizek points out an interesting paradox in Marx's Katpital. It is expressed by Marx himself in the following passage, "... the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things...." I would even make a more bold paraphrase, saying that persons are treated like things, and things are treated like persons under capitalism.
Another paradox can thus be extrapolated. Capitalism takes on the character of a sort of universalist animism, whereby commodities are possessed with a spirit, akin to Hegel's geist, but involving things rather than persons. If we were to compare capitalism to vodou, the capitalist then takes on the status of a bokor: a black-magic priest involved in the business of creating zombies. A zombie would here be a person who becomes a thing; un-dead: the Hegelian negation-of-the-negation. Additionally, a thing (here a commodity) then is given a spiritual dimension, a soul. Also, like vodou, capitalism allows interchanges between the spiritual realm of the fetish and the physical world through liaisons: bokor (hougan or mambo) in vodou, marketeer in capitalism. These liaisons must become possessed by the spirit in order to communicate its message. They must fully identify with the myth in order to propagate the myth.
Parallels come to mind with the fictional House of Fetish cult from Albert Camus' short story "The Renegade", of his collection entitled Exile and the Kingdom, published in 1957. An unnamed missionary renounces his Christian faith and follows the deity known as "the Fetish," after a period of being tortured, culminating in the cutting out of his tongue. The House of Fetish follows a sado-masochistic philosophy of spirituality. Pain, suffering, destruction, hate and unchecked power are celebrated as sacraments of this religion. Isn't this akin to the masochism of the proletariat class under capitalism?
Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, argued against the masochistic nature of the proletarian work ethic in his critique of capitalist conceptualization of efficiency entitled The Right to be Lazy, from 1883. He there explains that the drive to over-produce, a result of the profit motive, has lead to a puritanical work ethic where efficiency is a virtue and sloth a vice. Is not this crisis of over-production what has lead to the imminent ecological and financial crises we face today?
For Lafargue the crucified Christ is the ultimate symbol of this masochism. He makes note that in pre-Christian societies work was the duty of lowly slaves, whereas the philosophers of ancient Spain and Greece praised laziness.
At the end of Camus' "The Renegade", the apostate missionary again renounces his faith, this time the faith of the House of the Fetish. As he lay dying next to the high priest of the fetish from a wound inflicted by the Christian colonialists who came to exterminate the House of the Fetish he expresses a Hegelian negation-of-the-negation, put forth by the following passage:
Who is speaking, no one, the sky is not opening up, no, no, God does not speak in the desert, yet whence comes that voice saying: 'If you consent to die for hate and power, who will forgive us?'
Is it another tongue in me or still that other fellow refusing to die, at my feet, and repeating: 'Courage! courage! courage!'? Ah! supposing I were wrong again! Once fraternal men, sole recourse, O solitude, forsake me not! Here, here who are you, torn, with bleeding mouth, it is you my beloved master! Cast off that hate-ridden face, be good now, we were mistaken, we'll begin all over again, we'll rebuild the city of mercy, I want to go back home. Yes, help me, that's right, give me your hand...."
A handfull of salt fills the mouth of the garrulous slave.
(1957: 60-1)
At first glance, it appears as though Camus' unnamed protagongist may have reverted back to Christianity here, but I would posit that he is merely expressing his religious status as a Hegelian negation-of-a-negation. To Hegel this double negative does not make a positive as it does in grammar. Rather it puts the individual (here Camus' "renegade" protagonist) in a third, liminal category. Just as the undead zombie is neither living, nor dead, the "renegade" here is neither Christian, nor zealot for the Fetish. He has renounced both faiths.
Implicit in the above passage is that the "renegade" protagonist has come to understand that the cruelty of the Fetish has been defeated by the cruelty of the Christians. He has come to understand that the perceived dialectic between Christian mercy and the cruel sadism of the Fetish is not necessarily so black-and-white as he had assumed all along.
In the religion of capital, money is the transubstantiated sacrament with which we create meaning out of nothing. Capital's dualistic nature can thus be described in Christian terms. The commodity is the person - of a dualistic nature itself, possessed of both flesh (thing) and soul (fetish). Money is the Holy Spirit, the vehicle through which commodities are transubstantiated from soul (fetish) to "fleshly" object. One cannot buy the fetish directly. It is physically nothing. The fetish must come as part of a package: physical thing (shoes, food, electronics etc.) plus fetish (symbolized by the "brand" - Nike (athleticism), McDonalds (fun), Apple (innovation) etc.).
Finally, I would insist that commodity fetishism must be ethnographically and ethnologically studied as a form of religiosity. Michael Taussig's book The Devil and Commodity Fetishism approaches this category, specifically in relation to the connection between capitalism and Satanism in South America. Historian Patrick Geary's paper entitled "Sacred commodities: the circulation of medieval relics" published in Arjun Appadurai's (ed) The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective from 1986 is another. However, these studies primarily explore capital and the commodity's relationship with preexisting religiosity. To get to the heart of the matter, economic anthropologists must also approach capitalism as a religion in-and-of-itself: a black-magic, universalist animism that has dominated the entire world.