Commodity Fetishism

There’s a concept in economic theory and in Marxist philosophy called “Commodity Fetishism,” which refers to the tendency of people within capitalist societies to disconnect the product of labor from the people who perform said labor.

So instead of thinking about products and services as the consequence of human beings doing thing—people making physical goods, writing computer code, or going to work in offices where they type and speak to other humans and sit for long hours—we often conceive of the end-product of these labors (and assign value to those end-products) as if that labor didn’t happen.

This distinction is important, according to this line of thinking, at least, because it assumes that these goods and services are natural and latent to our environments in some manner, which allows us to ignore the at times abusive conditions of workers who produce the clothes we buy, or the at times environmentally destructive systems and acts that underpin the gadgets we covet and wield.

It also shapes our perception of society and the economy, as focusing on the most superficial, top layer of exchange (those goods and services) without considering everything beneath that layer can lead to thinking about the economy as a sort of natural, inevitable force, its current shape the only possible shape.

This, according to Marxist philosophy, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of value production and exchange, and it leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy that allow contemporary versions of capitalism to perpetuate—not because they’re the best-possible means of managing scarcity and incentivizing value-production, but because they’re the incumbent means of doing so (and thus, they seem like the only possible method to those who have never known anything else).

The term “Commodity Fetishism” alludes to the fetishes (often dolls or talismans or other physical objects) believed to hold some kind of supernatural power.

Some thinkers consider fetishism to be an early (or proto) version of religion, and what Marx was getting at with this terminology is that we perhaps imbue objects with spiritual, supernatural significance, assuming that these numbers go up and others go down based on systems that are akin to mystical forces or globe-spanning weather patterns, when in reality we’ve created these things: the objects, but also the methods by which we make and exchange them.

They’re not weather patterns or magical amulets, they’re (for instance) bananas planted and harvested and shipped and sold by people. None of these things are inevitable, and none have a god-given value (nor do the people involved in their production have a naturally correct place in society or level of compensation).

There’s a lot more to this conception of economic output, but one of the more potentially useful perspectives it offers is that we define ourselves (at least in part) based on what we do for a living because our default sense of these systems causes us to think about our relationship with them as the most important thing about us.

In other words, the economy is the moral and spiritual center of modern society, and our connection to that most vital aspect of humanity is the most vital thing we can or will ever do. And as a corollary to that framing of things, those who fail to participate in this system are something like apostates in a global society run by devout believers.