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In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things (money and merchandise) and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.[1][2]
- ^ Marx, Karl (1887). Capital Volume One. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Archived from the original on 7 June 2019. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.
- ^ Isaak Illich Rubin said that "The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx's entire economic system, and, in particular, of his theory of value." — Essays on Marx's Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990, p. 5.