Commodity Fetishism Essay

The idea behind commodity fetishism is that the relationships that were once between people have been transferred over to the products of said people’s creation. The abstractness of the item’s economic value has somehow taken a tangible form that gives the item value through exchange rather than the labor required to produce it. The line between an item’s falsified intrinsic value and the labor that was required to make it has been obscured to the point that we exaggerate the value of the item. Eventually the item is more or less a sum of money in wait to be exchanged. The value of the item being increased and decreased accordingly based on wants and needs in a never-ending cycle of transactions.

Marx claims that fetishism arises from an obscuring of worker production and exchange. The lack of worker appreciation has changed the social interactions from person-to-person to commodity-to-commodity. (76-77) Thus, it is causing people to value commodities more so than actual people. And even if the worker is appreciated, the worker may not value the item they have produced because it has no meaning to them if they have no control over what gets done with the product. In turn, that would mean that the social aspects between people would still be void as it plays into a large, mechanized, system of interaction that only occurs with commodity

Specifically speaking, here in the U.S it is highly uncommon that the average person would produce many of the items that they purchase on a daily basis. The items are given a set value based on characteristics predetermined by analysis of such items rather than through the hours of labor that went into them. This system effectively serves to alienate everyone resulting in a confusing mess run by any form of currency that is commonly