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Commodity-Fetishism

Page history last edited by Robert Goldman 15 years, 9 months ago

Commodity fetishism is a concept developed by Karl Marx, which he believes arises in capitalist market based societies. 

 

 Capital is created by exchanging commodities in order to maximize production and produce profit. When the products of labor become commodities Marx argues that they are given a two-fold character of use and exchange-value.  Use value represents the value of a commodity in terms of utility; corn, for example, has a particular use value based on its quality as food, or for fuel.  Exchange value represents reletive scarcities: to use Marx' example, exchange value is a relationship of value of the amount of corn that is worth a certain amount of Iron.  Thus, exchange value does not represent an inherent quality of the commodity: it is a relational value among various commodities.  Capitalist production necissitates creating a more standardized method of exchange, namely, capital (or money).  The exchange of corn for iron can be conducted in terms of an objective (abstract) value - number of dollars, for example.  Marx' posits that the capitalist mode of production functions through exchange values, rather than use value.  

       

The next postulate of commodity fetishism is that production is a social relation.  Laborers are united in a social process of production, particularly in the context of high division of labor (thus many laborers are all involved in the production of even a single commodity, see example below).   In the context of capitalist exchange, the amount of labor applied to a commodity affects the value of the commodity in equal ways - a unit of labor equals a unit of labor.  Marx argues that a duration of labor comes to be equal to any other similar duration of labor.  The equilibration of labor leads to the social process of production being reduced to the exchange of labor values equilibrated across an economy.  The relationship that once existed between consumers and producers is replaced with the relationship between commodities. The social aspect of labor deteriorates except in the act of exchange itself and products of labor become abstracted.  Individuals no longer care about how something is created but rather how much it can be exchanged for. The world of objects takes control and exchange-value becomes the sole measure in which value is calculated and individuals’ lives become consumed with the obsession of maximizing their personal worth as commodities.

 

This separation of labor and the individual leads to Marx's theory of alienation.  The idea that laborers are removed from their craft given small and insignificant jobs that could be done by anyone; skill is not necesary.  Alienation, according to Marx is a direct descendent of a capitalist economy.

    

The relationship between subjects and objects is inverted (reification). Humans subjects are objectified, for they are viewed as units of labor and stamped with a price while objects are given social characteristics and embody an identity, taking on a life of their own. Thus, everything can be commodified and given a price. With commodity fetishism social life becomes more about maximizing production and exchange-value rather than quality or what is best for the individual and their community.

   

Marx argues that capitalism always tries to circulate and expand into overseas markets resulting in a market system in which commodities are completely alienated from those who produce them and in which fetishism is so firmly rooted that consumers only know how much their commodities cost but never where they are made or by whom.  According to Marx, internal tensions such as these will ultimately lead to the destruction of the capitalist system itself.

 

An example of commodity fetishism could be seen by looking at the industrialization of the auto industry. First, there is the deskilling of labor.  Before the assembly line, there would be highly skilled laborers who were indispensable in building a car. They would know all aspects of the labor, and could likely even do everything themselves, with enough time.  The deskilling of labor is a process by which all elements of production are front-loaded into capital in production.  The complex details of automobile manufacturing are front-loaded into the production of machines and processes that allow each laborers' conribution to the end product to be minimal.  When labor is deskilled, this laborer would be fired, and an assembly line would be created with 10 workers doing the work that used to be done by one. The difference now is that each laborer does only one small aspect of the labor, and doesn't know how to do anything else.  The companies can pay these laborers much less than they did the previous high skilled laborer because through the deskilled assembly line, if you need to take out a worker, it's ok. They're just one easily replacable cog in the machine.  The knowledge intensive elements of production are integrated into either a) machines that make labor-intensive production very simple, or b) a process that, via division of labor, relies on laboers' knowledge to a limited extent.  (Pauperization is one of the contradictions of capitalism in which capitalists have a large reserve army of cheap laborers.  Thus they are able to pay what they want because if one person wants to be paid more, there's hundreds of others who can do the same work who will do it for whatever you're willing to pay them.)

 

 Once the labor has been thoroughly deskilled, production can increase and costs can go down. More people will be able to afford to buy this car that is cheaper than before (think of the Model-T!), and with so many identical cars out on the road that were created by a long line of unskilled workers, consumers will be unable to conceive of a connection to the producers. There were so many of them! Instead of knowing your car was created by a team of highly skilled workers, you would know nothing about how it came to be, and your connection will be only with the car itself.  Just like a certain pair of jeans can make you cool or an iPod can give you friends and new dance moves, the fetishized commodity can carry meaning within itsself, with no connection to the producers, and allowing the consumers to buy into whatever meaning they so chose.

 

Contemporary scholars such as Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes have used the idea of commodity fetishism when looking at modern social and economic relationships.  In her article The Global Traffic in Human Organs Scheper-Hughes uses a Marxian analytical lens to look at global organ trafficking. 

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/300123

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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