What is Commodity Fetishism?

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I need to write an essay on this and need a simplified explanation on what it is. Thanks in advance!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

I can help.

It’s as simple as this. You’ve heard about lines out the doors and down the streets from Apple stores when a new iPhone drops, right? Have you ever wondered why? The majority of people are not that desperate for a new phone. They’re desperate for the new iPhone. They love having the new item from the hip brand before they sell out.

There is some more nuance to it, but that’s the gist.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Hey! Hope this is helpful as a starting point for you to explore the idea:

Commodity fetishism is an idea by Karl Marx (and other Marxist thinkers) about how the capitalist system works.

Trying to ELI5 here: Marx believed that the economy was really about social relationships between people, like laborers (who transform natural stuff into usable products), and the people who use those products.

Capitalism, Marx argues, turns the economy into a bunch of relationships between THINGS, like machines, cash, and products for sale. Even work is treated as a thing, rather than a human activity!

Marxists say that the danger with this way of thinking is that it takes people (and the work they do) out of the way we think and talk about the economy. That’s not a complete definition but I think it’s as close as I might get in two paragraphs of ELI5.

The word “fetish” is a little unfortunate here, since now it’s mostly used in a sexual context. Marx used it in the way some anthropologists of his time were using it: to mean something that is supposedly magical.

In practical terms, you might think about a bunch of bananas at the supermarket. Those bananas (and their price!) are the product of a long chain of relationships between people–growers, workers, shippers, the person stocking the supermarket–but under commodity fetishism, we don’t think about that. The bananas appear in the grocery store–as if by magic–that’s the “fetishism”!–and we only think about the product and its price.