overall argument (a confusion exacerbated by the fact that this section was moved from an appendix in the first edition of Capital to its current position—along with section 3—only in the second, definitive edition). Those interested in developing a rigorous political-economic theory out of Marx, for example, sometimes seem to view the fetishism concept as extraneous, not to be taken too seriously. On the other hand, those of a more philosophical or literary persuasion often treat it as the golden nugget, the foundational moment to Marx’s understanding of the world. So one of the questions we have to ask is: how does this section stand in relation to Marx’s overall argument?
The fetishism concept was already signaled in his discussion of the ways in which important characteristics of the political economic system get “concealed” or confused through the “antinomies” and “contradictions” between, for example, the particularities of the money commodity on the one hand and the universality of phantom-like values on the other. Tensions, oppositions and contradictions that have already been opened up in the text now come in for detailed scrutiny under the heading “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” (163). Throughout the rest of Capital, as we will see, the concept of fetishism emerges again and again (more often tacitly rather than explicitly) as a essential tool for unraveling the mysteries of capitalist political economy. I consider the concept of fetishism, therefore, as fundamental to the political economy as well as to Marx’s wider argument. In effect, it conjoins the two at the hip.
The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, he identifies how fetishism arises and works as a fundamental and inevitable aspect of political-economic life under capitalism. Second, he examines how this fetishism is misleadingly represented in bourgeois thought in general and classical political economy in particular.
Commodities, he begins by observing, “abound in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists … simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. (164–5)
The problem is that “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.” Our sensuous experience of the commodity as use-value has nothing to do with its value. Commodities are, therefore, “sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.” The result is that a “definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” And it is this condition that defines “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities.” This fetishism is “inseparable from the production of commodities” (165).
This is so, he says, because “the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour,” so that they only come to know “the specific social characteristics of their private labour” in the act of market exchange. In other words, they don’t and can’t know what the value of their commodity is until they take it to the market and successfully exchange it. “To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are”—note please especially the important phrase, appear as what they are—“i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material … relations between persons and social relations between things” (165–6).
So what’s going on here? You go into a supermarket and you want to buy a head of lettuce. In order to buy the lettuce, you have to put down a certain sum of money. The material relation between the money and the lettuce expresses a social relation because the price—the “how much”—is socially determined, and the price is a monetary representation of value. Hidden within this market exchange of things is a relation between you, the consumer, and the direct producers—those who labored to produce the lettuce. Not only do you not have to know anything about that labor or the laborers who congealed value in the lettuce in order to buy it; in highly complicated systems of exchange it is impossible to know anything about the labor or the laborers, which is why fetishism is inevitable in the world market. The end result is that our social relation to the laboring activities of others is disguised in the relationships between things. You cannot, for example, figure out in the supermarket whether the lettuce has been produced by happy laborers, miserable laborers, slave laborers, wage laborers or some self-employed peasant. The lettuces are mute, as it were, as to how they were produced and who produced them.
Why is this important? When I taught introductory geography classes at Johns Hopkins, I always started off by asking students where their breakfast came from. And they’d say, “Oh, I bought stuff at the deli.” But when I asked them to think back further than that, they found themselves consider a whole incredible world of laboring in radically different geographical environments and under radically different social conditions that they knew nothing about and could know nothing about from staring at their breakfast ingredients or going into the deli. The bread, the sugar, the coffee, the milk; the cups, knives and forks, toasters and plastic plates—to say nothing of the machinery and equipment needed to produce all these things—linked them to millions of people laboring away all around the world. One of the tasks of geographical education is to impart something about the variety of socio-environmental conditions, spatial linkages and labor practices involved in every aspect of daily life, down to putting breakfast on the table every day.
The students did sometimes seem to think I was trying to guilt-trip them for not paying more mind to those poor sugar-cane cutters in the Dominican Republic who earned next to nothing. When it got to that stage they would sometimes declare “Sir, I didn’t have breakfast this morning!” To that I would characteristically reply that they might want to do without lunch, dinner, and supper too for a week or so just to learn the truth of the basic Marxian maxim that we have to eat in order to live.
Issues of this kind do raise moral questions. There are those who, for various reasons, propose all manner of codes of moral conduct in interpersonal relations, but who then face the dilemma of whether or how to extend that moral code into the world of commodity exchanges in the world market. It is all very well to insist on “good” face-to-face relations and to be helpful to one’s neighbor, but what is the point of that if we are totally indifferent to all those whom we do not know and can never know, but who play a vital role in providing us with our daily bread? These issues are sometime brought to our attention: by the “fair trade” movement, for example, which tries to articulate a moral standard for the world of commodity exchange, and the anti-poverty movement, which seeks to mobilize charitable contributions for distant others. But even these usually fail to challenge the social relations that produce and sustain the conditions of global inequality: wealth for the charitable donors and poverty for everyone else.
Marx’s point is not, however, about the moral implications. His concern is to show how the market system and the money-forms disguise real social relations through the exchange of things. He is not saying that this disguise, which he calls “fetishism” (165) (and please note that Marx’s use of this term is technical and quite different from other common usages), is a mere illusion, that it is a made-up construction that can be dismantled if only we care to try. No, in fact, what you see is the lettuce, what you see is your money, you see how much, and you make tangible decisions based on that information. This is the significance of the phrase “appear as what they are”: it really is this way in the supermarket, and we can observe it so, even as it masks social relations.
This fetishism is an unavoidable condition of a capitalistic mode of production, and it has many implications. For example, people do not “bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values,
