The Fetishism of Commodities 1 The Fetishism of Commodities Karl Marx explain how society has changed the perspective towards objects that the human being needs or do for pleasure and have transformed them into commodities, popular things that people want to get, just to have it, instead of finding a real use in their daily live. These situations create what he calls a fetishism of commodities, where people want to buy or sell something just for desire and not for the real meaning of the object. The necessities in people’s daily live leads them to create or develop those objects necessary for existence. However, when people decide to use them as a business and make them in a mass production,
According to Marx, the treatment of labor as a commodity led to people valuing things more in terms of their price rather than their usefulness, and hence to an expansion of the system of commodities. Marx also observed that some people bought commodities in order to use them, while others bought them in order to sell them on at a profit.
Marx’s commodity theory is a two-category theory; objects become commodities when they have more use than their standard value. When commodities are traded they can either have exchange or sign exchange value. Exchange value occurs when monetary value is placed on an object and is traded and sign exchange value is when a commodity is exchanged social status is obtained (Tyson 62). As Tiana goes along her adventure to achieve her goal of buying a building to open her restaurant she, as well as other characters use their commodities in hopes to gain something in
The Industrial Revolution was an era that consisted of trading your own labor for the means of production. Machines had become more dominant in work fields, and people were selling their labor just to survive. In works such as Engels, he describes the conditions of the working class in England and the effects it had on the proletarian class. In Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto he outlines the class struggle of the Industrial Revolution between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois people ultimately have control over the means of productions in this society. Within the Industrial Revolution, the concept of communism was inspired by the class struggle of the proletariats against the bourgeoisie.
A remarkable trait in which literature embodies is the ability to capture and preserve cultural and societal beliefs. One may read a literary work published in the 1800’s and observe how society has evolved since then, or in contrast observe how society has digressed since then. Regardless of the genre and content, one may still infer when the piece was produced based on the diction and syntax of said piece. This is possible because literature is essentially written picture- it is a time machine for your conscience, a window to the past. This beautiful quality can be exemplified through analyzing “A Doll’s House,” a play written by Henrik Ibsen in 1879 that portrays a Marxist view of society and oppresses women unreadily seen today.
Today people have many possessions. Possessions range from cell phones to property to even people’s individual selves. There are also many laws that protect their property and rules that govern the transfer of property as well. But how did society get private property? Karl Marx argues that private property initially began through theft, violence, or other unjust mechanisms. Does this mean that people should not have private property since it was based on unjust methods? I believe that Hume would still defend individual property ownership, despite Marx’s critique of its origins because the origins do not damage people or society when Hume’s theory of justice is applied. Hume’s theory requires justice when people have individual property, justice in turn provides stability, and finally, this stability allows for everyone to forget the past and forge their own future.
Marx viewed the ‘commodity’ as the most elementary form of modern wealth. The essence of the commodity is the
The working class, or the proletariat, as Karl Marx referred to them, is often overlooked for their role in the economy, particularly in the manufacturing of goods. When discussing this ideal, Marx refers to this notion as the fetishism of commodities. The conception that the people behind products produce the real value of it, the labor. Without such labor, these products would just be a large heap of disassembled pieces, instead of a functioning commodity (Marx, Lecture 3). Capitalists buy this labor at
Marx’s analysis of capitalism begins with an investigation of the commodity because the wealth of capitalist nations is essentially “an immense collection of commodities” (Chapter 1). Marx differentiates between the use-value and the exchange-value of any given commodity. The use-value of a commodity refers to its qualitative ability to satisfy a human need, while its exchange-value is the “quantitative relation… in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind” (Chapter 1). Therefore, exchange-value is not an intrinsic quality of a commodity; it is only discovered in comparing a fixed quantity of commodity A to a fixed quantity B. Since differing quantities of these two commodities appear to have the same value,
Within society, human nature refers to the characteristics of individuals, such as the foundation that constructs people’s thought process, emotions that drive human actions because of the environment which people become accustomed to. This in turn develops the essence of individuals as societal expectations are created and enforced through the power of institutions. In Adam Smith's philosophical foundation The Wealth of Nations (1776), he exemplifies the power of free-market economics, in relation to how focusing on individual success is beneficial for all, while Karl Marx discusses about historical materialism, which explains the formation of society and characteristics of individuals is a process of historical development and becomes an adaptation to cultural dominance in The Marx-Engels Reader (1844). For example, people within society are expected to work for an hourly wage not only because we become dependent on it for survival, but because people have been culturally adapted to working, and the relations it brings. Notions of work have been linked with success in a way that allows people to follow this guide to become socially acceptable. If individuals did not work, they are labelled inferior, which justifies the imbalances that are in placed because of structural inequality. Instead of viewing not working as deconstructing the dominant narrative of economic exploitation, society labels it as negative and the people as failures of society. Both Adam Smith and Karl
What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when you hear the word “fetish”? When some people hear the term “fetish”, it may triggers their dirty mind to immediately envisage an image of someone wanting to be fed with a baby bottle while wearing a diaper. The term “fetish”; however, simply mean an idolization of things. It’s when an object is believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishes can be applied in many contexts, such as sexual, religion, and economic. Once such economic fetish, commodity fetishism, a term coined by Karl Marx, a philosopher and a revolutionary socialist, in his 1867 economic work, Capital: A Critique of Production of Capital (Mulhern 479). Marx argues that real social relations of production are masked by the presence of commodities and that people treat commodities as if the object themselves contained intrinsic value, rather than regarding value as the amount of real labor expended to produce the object.
This intimate relationship between man and nature, his activity and the objects of nature, is the ‘appropriate’ relationship because worker is not capable of creating without nature, that is, without the sensual external world. Hence, the world is the material into which man invests his labor, through which he produces things, and without it he cannot live. However, in a capitalist society, such relationship does not exist and man is alienated from nature, from the products of his activity or work. Under capitalism, workers produce for the market rather than for their own use or enrichment. According to Marx, the object produced by labor in modern society stands as an alien being to the worker. His labor is embodied in the product he created, and this product is an objectification of labor which represents a loss to the worker, as well as servitude to the object. Hence, alienation occurs when worker lacks control over the products of his labor. Additionally, during the process of production, man’s labor are seen as much an object as the physical material being worked upon, since labor is a demand in modern society, which can be bought or sold. The more objects the worker produces, the fewer he can personally possess, and therefore the greater is his loss. For instance, in
Karl Marx’s philosophy defines specific characteristics that came to be known as the Marxist approach. In this critical approach, whoever holds the power and controls the factories or means of production, consequently controlled the whole society. Marx’s opinion states that the laborers running the factories and thus holding the means of production should be the ones holding the power. However, this idea rarely holds true in practical society. Frequently, Marx notes, that the powerful people hire other people to carry out the labor. This decision of power is a reflection of culture. Two main classes or divisions of people exist, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The bourgeoisie are the powerful or those who in charge or production
In Marxism, the value of things, commodities, are based on the money it can be sold for, or the other commodities it can be traded for (exchange value), or the social status it confers to its owner (sign-exchange value), rather than valued for how it is used (use value). For an object to become a commodity it has to have exchange value or sign-exchange value, which is determined by the society where the object it is exchanged. This economic relationship between commodities and their exchange value or sign-exchange value is called commodity fetishism.
Karl Marx, in the Capital, developed his critique of capitalism by analyzing its characteristics and its development throughout history. The critique contains Marx’s most developed economic analysis and philosophical insight. Although it was written in 1850s, its values still serve an important purpose in the globalized world and maintains extremely relevant in the twenty-first century.
Karl Marx is the first in a series of 19th and 20th century theorists who started the call for an empirical approach to social science. Theorizing about the rise of modernity accompanied by the decline in traditional societies and advocating for a change in the means of production in order to enable social justice. Marx’s theories on modernity reveals his beliefs of modern society as being influenced by the advancement of productive forces of modern industry and the relationships of production between the capitalist and the wage laborers. The concept of modernity refers to a post-feudal historical period that is characterized by the move away from feudalism and toward capitalism. Modernity focuses on the affects that the rise of capitalism has had on social relations, and notes Karl Marx and Max Weber as influential theorists commenting on this. The quick advancement of major innovations after the Enlightenment period known as modernity stood in stark contrast to the incremental development of even the most complex pre-modern societies, which saw productive forces developing at a much slower pace, over hundreds or thousands of years as compared to modern times, with swift growth and change. This alarming contrast fascinated Marx who traced the spawning of modern capitalism in the Communist Manifesto, citing this record speed as the heat which generated the creation of the global division of labor and a greater variety of productive forces than anytime before. Ultimately,