In Marxist philosophy , commodity fetishism is the perception of the economic relationships of production and exchange as relationships among things money and merchandise rather than among people.
As a form of reification , commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce , from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services. In the first chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , commodity fetishism is used to explain how the social organization of labour manifests in the buying and selling of commodities goods and services.
In the marketplace, social relations among peopleβwho makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, etc. In the process of commercial exchange , commodities appear in a depersonalized form, obscuring the social relations inherent to their production. 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.
