Rhetoric 170, Spring 2004
The following article is © Michelle Walker with external references noted.

Commodity as God: Karl Marx turns to Fetishism to make sense of the apparently magical quality of the commodity: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" (163). Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems). Marx borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms "commodity fetishism." As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value. When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness" (163). The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. As Marx explains, "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (164-65). What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes "the fantastic form of a relation between things" (165).

Marx’s Capital uses religious analogies to examine how commodity fetishism has replaced God with material objects, in a world—or, market—which are man made yet at the same time appear all-powerful and autonomous. Commodity exchange shifts the social interaction between humans to between commodities, primarily by eliminating the commodity’s “essence,” or observable presence of human labor or human interaction. Foley’s Understanding Capital and Godlier’s Marxian Economics, further explore how commodities eliminate the relation between people and themselves, in favor of the relationship between “[people] and things” (Foley: 29). This relationship takes on an almost “magical,” religious nature, in which the human element is concealed and “pervasive distortion” (F: 29) revealed.

In Marx’s discussion of commodities, he notes, “A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx: 42). One tends to think of commodities as plainly obvious physical objects, with nothing more to them than what they are… Yet through Marx’s analysis we find that simply thinking such about a commodity is a display of fetishism, in which we overlook the human input in said commodity, and our only relation to it is that it is some object which fulfills our needs or desires.

For a simple product of human labor, which one might make for oneself, “so far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it,.. from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants” (M: 42). Or, once “articles of utility [for satisfying wants] become commodities,” the character of a worker’s product “does not show itself except in the act of exchange” (M: 44). If character is to be taken as exchange value in this case, it seems workers have no influence at all over the product once it enters into the market for exchange.  Marx notes that at this stage, “the relations connecting the labour of one individual [with that of another] appear… not as direct social relations between individuals… [but] material relations between persons and social relations between things” (M: 44). Thus personal relations amongst people, socially and individually, seem to be dictated by material objects—or even abstract objects, as commodities seem, at a social value level, detached from their physical properties and use value.

Further, Marx notes that despite a supposed lack of human control over products, they are nevertheless “functions of the human organism,.. essentially the expenditure of the human brain, nerves, muscles, etc” (M 42)—they do not create themselves. However, “as soon as [a product] steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (M: 43)—once this product enters the market as a commodity for exchange, it becomes more than a simple product, made by humans, for use in our everyday lives. Therefore, “the mystical character of commodities does not originate,.. in their use-value,.. [nor] from the nature of the determining factors of value” (M 42),  but rather in something larger than simple use-value, some larger system in which products of human labor take on supernatural powers and relations to people.

This mystery surrounds commodities in that “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour,” and “their own labour is represented to them as a social relation” not between the workers themselves, but between their products (M: 43). Worker A does not say to Worker B, “Hey, I think I spent more time on Product A and it is better than your Product B”—the value of, and relation between, Product A and Product B, as commodities, will have little, if anything, to do with the feeling or relation between the workers. The workers seem to be simply eliminated from the exchange process as if commodities are just floating out in the universe without any kind of human input. Consequently, Marx states commodities must be akin to some figure within the “mist-enveloped regions of the religious world… [where] productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life” (M: 43). Though this suggests atheism, in the implication that religious deities are products of the human brain, it highlights the metaphysical powers we somehow place in the “hands” of man-made objects.

Foley deems this fetishism a “curious and pervasive distortion” rooted in Marx’s “concern with the phenomenon of alienation in modern society” (F: 29). As exchange emphasizes the relation between people and things, one discovers “social relations of production that transcend the commodity form itself” (F: 29), perhaps the reason Marx finds commodities and their social “hieroglyphs” so incredibly absurd. The absurdity is especially apparent when “we consider how helplessly and deeply dependent we are on commodity forms to meet our needs and mediate our conflicts” (F: 30)—rather than produce a simple “product” for oneself, one is more likely to participate in commodity exchange in order to get the “commodified” form of the desired product. Godlier extends this idea of the “essence” (a product of expenditure of human labor) of commodities being distinct and hidden from “visible movement” of commodities within the market (Godlier: 152). A commodity’s “twofold nature” of being both abstract and concrete reveals the “enigmatic, fetishistic nature of all commodities” (G: 154), and therefore, “all money.” A commodity is not valued by its “property as a useful object… it has to be exchanged for other commodities” (G: 155)—thus it is not the human care or skill invested in the product, but its exchange value relative to other commodities, which ultimately determines the social value of the commodity.

This valuation of a manmade product somehow takes place above and beyond the human labor itself, making it an “enigmatic” commodity in which we place strange powers and in and dependency on. The “social form,” not the natural form, of a commodity is what determines “the value of any commodity” and reins such bizarre control over the very workers who have produced it. Money and commodity form take over their creators, becoming seemingly independent entities—this is where Godlier finds Marx’s analysis to “reveal the absurd, ridiculous nature of those… living in market societies” (G: 158). Godlier further points out that “the fetishism of a commodity is not the unique, subjective result of one person’s experience, but the general and objective result of collective experience” of consumers in a materially obsessed capitalist system (G: 159). This fetishistic form of value “has the property of concealing the real nature of value while showing precisely the opposite” (G: 159).

Godlier takes this deception further in his chapter on fetishism and religion, analyzing Marx’s discussion of “mystical realms” within religion and the market system. As a product’s human labor value is masked in the commodity exchange, value becomes a “social reality” rather than a personal one, a “feature of things” (G: 169) rather than of “human brains.” He concludes, “therefore, fetishism in the market world consists basically in the fact that the apparent form of value has the property of concealing the real essence of this value and shows the exact opposite” (G: 170)—a commodity’s value comes from “a dissimulation of reality of social relations from and behind their appearance” (G: 170).

These bizarre “social relations within which relations of dependence and exploitation take fantastic forms” are “obscured behind a mystical cloud” (G: 174). Godlier notes that “religious forms of ideology play a dominant role in history” (G: 176), and as Marx indicates, in capitalist markets as well. If man has a “limited degree” of “domination over nature,” a nature which is simultaneously created by and “analogous to the world of man,” nature, or interchangeably, commodity, becomes “personified by invisible forces, [with] mysterious and superior powers” (G: 176-77). Man has thus, somehow, taken the products of his own labor, his own brain (be it God or commodities), and elevated them to such a superior level with absurd powers and dominion over their creators. Godlier also notes that for Marx, man tends to invest invisible realities in nature in order to organize and make sense of the world, during which “human thought builds a double, imaginary idea of the human world… [and] the superior powers who regulate the order and course of things” (G: 177). However, when considering these “superior powers” may take the form of commodities, dictating order and life, the absurdity is undeniable. He argues Marx would “insist” on religious analogy as in this scenario, a commodity becomes Godlike, an “automatic substance endowed with its own life… but the way in which this occurs is cloaked in mystery” (G: 178).

Godlier further states “in origin and content, religion is the spontaneous and illusory representation of the world,” and again, “religion” and “commodity” seem interchangeable. Moreover, as “society progressively becomes ‘obscured’ [as by these strange determinations of value], loses direct control over itself… then ideology seizes hold of the social powers and confers on them supernatural attributes” (G: 180). So if labor and human relations do not determine value, nor does the inherent nature or use value of the product, then what, for Marx, exactly determines a commodity’s value (ideology, etc) seems strange, mysterious, and highly fetishistic.

It seems then, for Marx, man has assumed “sacred forms” (G: 181) in nature, which he has placed not only in the realm of religious ideology but in commodities and their exchange as well. As the human element of labor, and the quality of being a product of the human brain, is obscured from the illusory appearance of a commodity, one can see the shift in relations between man and each other to man and things, or even between objects themselves—objects in which man has placed Godlike powers, and toward which he has almost become subordinate. This mysterious obsession with, power in, and dependence on commodities takes on a highly religious, absurd character for Marx, and it seems commodities are to the capitalist system what God is, say, to the Christian faith. All of this however, being so abstract and detached from the actual physical manifestation of the product or commodity (or human labor) is highly absurd and even frightening, and presumably why Marx found commodity fetishism so ridiculous.