Commodity fetish

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As a commodity fetish (also commodity fetishism ) Karl Marx in his main work Das Kapital (1867) describes the quasi-religious material relationship to products that people produce for one another in production based on the division of labor or social work .

The term fetish is used to describe the attribution of properties or powers to things that do not naturally have them. In Marx's time the term “fetish” was used primarily in connection with animistic religions . The connotation of the term fetish with sexuality first came through Sigmund Freud's concept of the sexual fetish in psychoanalysis , from 1890 onwards. Marx's commodity fetish thus initially has nothing to do with the sexualization of products through advertising, but refers to the term fetish in magical-religious sense. In his main work Das Kapital (Volume 1, 1867), Marx transfers the concept of fetish to phenomena of political economy: In capitalism , properties are ascribed to goods , money and finally capital that they do not actually have. There is

"The fetishistic view that is peculiar to the capitalist mode of production and that arises from its essence, which regards economic formal determinations, such as being a commodity, being productive labor, etc., as the material bearers of these formal determinations or categories in and of themselves."

The main idea is that like God, who, although a creature of human thought rules his human creator, the goods they produce appear to the producers like a fetish , although they are only objectifications of their work .

The money fetish (also money fetishism ) and the capital fetish (also capital fetishism) are logical further developments of the commodity fetish.

Commodity fetish

In pre-capitalist societies, the production and exchange of goods were always only marginal phenomena. The vast majority of society consisted of farmers who did not sell their work products but consumed them themselves. If medieval farmers had to give part of their harvest to the feudal lord, it was not because the feudal lord sold these products as goods, but because he, his family, his officials, soldiers, etc. consumed them himself. According to Marx, capitalism, on the other hand, is characterized by the fact that in it all labor products become commodities, i.e. are exchanged via a market . In a society in which practically all products are exchanged as commodities, one needs a generally applicable standard for exchange. To the extent that commodities are work products, the yardstick is the work objectified in them. To put it simply: If twice as much socially necessary labor time is expended in the production of goods X as in the production of goods Y, then goods X and Y exchange in a ratio of 1: 2. One piece of goods X is worth exactly as much as two pieces of goods Y. This exchange ratio determines the so-called “ value ” of the goods, which is expressed in a certain monetary value . The value is therefore a ratio between (at least) two goods, more precisely a ratio between the labor expended in the manufacture of the various goods. The value therefore expresses a social relationship. This social character of value is, however, obscured by the appearance that the products “by nature” and across all historical production relations have the property of being “commodities” or having “value”:

“The fact that work products, such useful things as rock, linen, wheat, iron, etc., are values, certain values ​​of value and goods in general, are properties that naturally only come to them in our dealings, not by nature, such as the property of being heavy or heavy to keep warm or to nourish. "

- Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, first edition, first chapter

The commodity fetish thus consists in the fact that the properties of being a commodity and having value are assigned to the products as material properties, while in reality “commodity” and “value” are socially determined ascriptions. The social character of their own work therefore appears to people as the objective character of the work products themselves, as their natural properties. The social relationship hidden behind the “value” appears to be “hidden under a material shell”.

Marx compares this process with religion:

“So to find an analogy, we have to flee into the foggy region of the religious world. Here the products of the human head appear to be endowed with life of their own, independent forms in relation to one another and to human beings. So in the world of goods are the products of the human hand. This is what I call the fetishism that sticks to the products of work as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. "

- Marx: Das Kapital, first volume, second edition, MEW 23.86

The illusion of an apparent independence of the goods from their producers is not only based on a false consciousness, but has a real core: Because the producers produce independently of one another, i.e. there is no direct sociality in the production process , a subsequent "socialization" about the value must respectively. In everyday capitalist life it is only in the exchange of goods that it becomes clear whether a product fulfills a need and what value it has. This value can change when the productive force changes, i.e. when a social change takes place. But it seems as if the commodity itself changes its value: "For you, your own social movement takes the form of a movement of things under whose control you are instead of controlling." The abolition of the commodity fetish thus sets that for Marx Abolition of the production of goods itself. Since the commodity fetish obscures the actual social relationships of the members of society and "fetishizes" the commodity form of the products as timeless, the commodity fetish makes this abolition more difficult.

Money fetish

The exchange value obtained by Marx in the money own existence. In contrast to other commodities, Marx does not assign any concrete use value to money , except that it represents the universal, socially recognized exchange value. In society, money is usually ascribed the property of having concrete, material value “in itself” or being of value. This increases the fetishism. In this way, money erroneously appears to be the substance of the other commodities to which (material) use value is assigned, instead of their value expression:

“A commodity does not seem to become money first because the other commodities represent their values ​​on all sides in it, but, conversely, they seem to represent their values ​​in general in it, because it is money.” In money, the other commodities “find their own value form ready-made as a body of goods that exists outside and next to them. "

- Marx, Das Kapital Vol. 1, MEW 23: 107

Precisely because creative work is invisible in the form of money, money appears as a power of its own: "Hence the magic of money."

Capital fetish

According to Marx there is not only a commodity fetish, but also a fetishism concerning capital. Analogous to commodity fetishism, this lies in the fact that capital is assigned a property that is not actually inherent in it, namely the property of creating surplus value out of itself . Capital attains its “most outward and fetish-like form” at the level of interest-bearing capital. In terms of interest, the apparent self-realization of capital is driven to extremes. "G-G ', money that creates more money, self-utilizing value, without the process that mediates the two extremes."

“In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish is worked out in its purest form, the self-utilizing value, money hacking money, and in this form it no longer bears the scars of its origin. The social relationship is perfect as the relationship of a thing, money, to itself. Instead of the real transformation of money into capital, only its meaningless form is shown here. [...] In GG 'we have the conceptless form of capital, the reversal and objectification of the relations of production in the highest power: interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it is presupposed to its own reproduction process; Ability of money, resp. of the commodity to utilize its own value, regardless of its reproduction - capital mystification in its most glaring form. "

- Marx: Das Kapital Vol. 3, MEW 25: 405

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process, Berlin 2009, p. 131
  2. ↑ Marx, MEW 23: 89.
  3. ^ Marx, Das Kapital Vol. 1, MEW 23: 107
  4. ↑ a b Marx, Das Kapital Bd. 3, MEW 25: 404

literature

  • Werner Becker : Critique of Marx's theory of values ​​- The methodical irrationality of the basic economic theories of 'capital' . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1972, ISBN 3-455-09071-0 .
  • Konrad Lotter, Reinhard Meiners, Elmar Treptow : Marx-Engels-Term Lexicon . Beck, Munich 1984, pp. 103-105, ISBN 3-406-09273-X .
  • Dieter Wolf : Goods fetish and dialectical contradiction. In: Dieter Wolf: The dialectical contradiction in capital. A contribution to Marx's theory of value. VSA, Hamburg 2002, ISBN 3-87975-889-1 ( PDF; 383 kB ).
  • Hartmut Böhme : Fetishism and Culture. Another theory of modernity. rororo, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-499-55677-7 (Chapter 3: The commodity fetishism)
  • Stephan Grigat : Fetish and Freedom. About the reception of Marx's fetish criticism, the emancipation of state and capital and the criticism of anti-Semitism . ça-ira, Freiburg im Breisgau 2007, ISBN 3-924627-89-4 .
  • Alfonso Maurizio Iacono: The History and Theory of Fetishism. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2016, ISBN 978-1-137-54114-7 .
  • Johannes Endres (Ed.): Fetishism. Basic texts from the 18th century to the present day , suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-29761-2 .

Web links