theory

This isn't the first time this has come up. A few months ago Pendleton was arguing with the anarchist CJ on TikTok over the same thing, only in regards to the fetishization of black flesh. A fetish is something with an innate value in of itself.

I find it's easier to understand fetishism through the black intersectional perspective. It's when you look at something and can make a guess as to how much it costs rather than what it is. A cup of coffee becomes $5 rather than something grown and harvested by people, cured by experts in tradition, and crafted by an artisan. So if we take this same idea to people suddenly they are no longer lives with hopes and dreams and relationships, rather they are $20k a year.

In my understanding Cori is correct here. I see this misunderstanding so frequently that I was considering making a post here sometime to ask if I was misunderstanding something.

Commodity fetishism is not the idea that the price of a commodity can be consistently above its socially necessary labor time. Commodity fetishism doesn't say anything quantitative about the magnitude of value.

Instead, commodity fetishism is about how the human relationships between each of us are hidden when the product of labor takes the commodity form. The act of buying an apple from the grocery store required actions from other people: the part time worker who stocked the shelves, the delivery truck driver who brought it to the store, the migrant who picked and sorted the apple on the orchard, etc. These human relationships are obscured with an object-to-object relationship between your money and the apple. Commodity fetishism is about how the apple and the money are treated as if they have a magical property of "value" which does not physically exist in any object on Earth!

This is what Marx means by fetishism: just like religious objects are imagined to have magical properties like the ability to heal, grant eternal life, and so on. In capitalism, commodities are also imbued with a magical property of having value, and so the commodities are able to "talk" with each other through the language of value. This is a qualitative description. It is not about the price of a commodity related to its quantity of value.

I hope you are catching on to the analogy with religion. In capitalist society, we have a world of commodities which are constantly in dialogue with each other, seemingly without the input of human action. This is a fantastical existence, yet it has an objective (if not physical) reality that we live with every day. Compare this with for example the Greek gods who were imagined to interact with each other on a higher plane, outside of human input.

Importantly, commodity fetishism does not remove the human relationships between producers. These still exist: you still have a material relationship with everyone who produced the commodity you purchased. But Marx is saying the commodity fetish has objective existence in capitalism - you can't just make it go away by learning that it exists, and overcoming it mentally. Commodity fetishism won't disappear until capitalism disappears.

Cori is correct, it's about alienation of commodities from the labor that created it, or "ceasing to recognize oneself in what they create."

Reproducing the Wallace Shawn quote here, since it was very good and I haven't seen it before:

I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change. [Marx's] explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked. For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.

Wallace Shawn

Read the section from Capital, its short and likely the most straightforward part of the chapter: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4

(I like the penguin edition translation better, but this one is still fine)

Edit: the comment by Cori in the second image is correct btw. It is very much a concept about how all commodities in a capitalist economy are mystified, and are read as objective relations between things (other commodities and money) rather than as social relations of their production. It has nothing to do with how nice a jacket is or how high its price is.

My bad explanation:

Could you plant a pile of money into the ground and grow a coat out of it? Could you put a pile of bills in a cup and an expresso magically appeared in it and how do you even manufacture a cup in the first place, could you do that? Could you throw coins in a well and make a city appear?

I don't mean you , the reader, literally, but consumers in general.

They probably don't know how to do that. They don't even think about the workers at all. Stuff, the commodities they buy, is valuable in and of itself, to them.

Although it might be uncomfortable for a lot of people to hear because yes, all of us engage in it.

Twitter communists oppose opposing book worship. You MUST assume that it is written in the book and you MUST assume that it must be true. They don't read, they only insist others read and determine the winner of an argument based on whomever can claim the larger amount of obscure leftist texts supports their point.

The link in the last reply from cori: https://archive.org/details/a6e8459d-9451-44bd-ad5e-d3962c652ea0

ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.

I think to understand commodity fetishism, people need to first ask "What is a commodity?" Marx's definition of a commodity is an object that was created for the purpose of being exchanged. In chapter 1 of Capital, Marx points out that clothing has existed for thousands of years but a tailor did not exist until clothing became a commodity.

So we had clothing, but then at some point, commodity clothing came about. What is the difference between a jacket that you make for your own use and a jacket that is made for the purpose of being sold? Commodity Fetishism is the intangible traits of a commodity which makes it different from an object that was made for use.

chapter 1, section 4

It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

Marx says that you can take wood and make it into a table, but when you make the table into a commodity, ie make it for sale, then it becomes a new form.

I think the twitter leftist people are not reading the original tweet carefully enough because they are talking about how nice suede feels, but the original tweet says "how good life feels when you wear a brown suede jacket". The original tweet is not describing the physical traits of the jacket, but an intangible, indirect experience in relation to the jacket.

Madeline makes the presumption that the suede jacket is a commodity, ie that it was made for exchange, noting that the jacket in the image was purchased. Though the tweet doesn't specify that the suede jacket must have been exchanged in order to make life feel good. I think Madeline is interpreting the intangible trait of "how good life feels" as a symptom of Commodity Fetishism, ie this specific jacket has intangible qualities because it was made for the purpose of exchange.

I think that they both know the correct definition of commodity fetish but they are interpreting the tweet in different ways.

Madeline Pendleton is extremely qualified to talk about this. They’re well read and also have almost 15 years of experience designing and selling clothes. It seems the need to just spout off some Marxist jargon to win a petty twitter argument seems to have gotten the better of them here.

You buy the Labubu for its social value. It communicates your virtues like a totem- you are wealthy, young, fashionable. You don't see the hidden costs of production to make the Labubu, the human and environmental suffering that it materially represents. The value isn't tied to its use-value in the way a bolt of linen would be or impact in the way nuclear waste would be, but to the quasi-religious significance it's given in a spectacle relationship between people and capital.