Commodity fetishism

"A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties."

- Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Ch. I, Sect. 4.

Commodity fetishism is a concept in Marxist theory. It describes the belief, under capitalism, that value is simply a quality of commodities rather than a quality of the society in which those commodities are produced and exchanged. According to Marx, this is a misleading belief, and a key part of the false consciousness of capitalist society.

Commodity fetishism
According to Marx, value is socially necessary labour time. This means that the value of a commodity is the average amount of time it takes to reproduce that commodity with the current techniques of production, level of technology, skill of the workforce, etc. Therefore it is clear that value is as much determined by the state of society as a whole as it is by the physical qualities of the commodity.

But, under capitalism, it appears that value is purely an attribute of the individual commodity. As Bertell Ollman puts it, value "is taken as a non-social quality of the commodity on a par with its physical character. Shoes have openings for the feet, and cost five dollars a pair."

The existence of money plays a crucial role in maintaining this illusion. As he writes:

Reification
The logic of commodity fetishism has been applied to capitalist society more widely in the form of the concept of reification.