What Is A “Commodity Fetish,” And Do I Have One?

Today I bought a bottle of wine, a gilt cup, a pretty blue ceramic mug, some kind of Italian pumpkin spice bread in a little paper box with a tassel on top, a box of kimchi-flavored instant ramen, a square of chocolate and a tea towel.

That’s right. I went to World Market.

I went there yesterday probably for the same reason that you and everyone else goes there. Not because I wanted to, but because I needed to. I couldn’t not go. Why? I’m depressed. Depression is probably the main thing keeping World Market and stores like it going these days.

I’m sitting at home, with nothing much to do and no one to talk to. I’ve already played video games, bothered my cat, and had a coffee, so I’m stuck. I’m unemployed too. Although recently I scored a couple jobs, neither of them starts til the end of the month. So I’m this weird limbo with nothing to do.

Nothing to do, that is, but buy shit I don’t need.

What is Commodity Fetish?

You find the pretty thing on a shelf or a rack. You pick up the pretty thing, take it to the register and swipe your card or hand over the money. Then you get to take the pretty thing home. It’s there in your car. Then in your room. The receipt is proof. It’s yours. You feel good. You proceed to never look at or use the thing and throw it away years later when you move houses and realize that it was utterly useless.

Why do we do this? Why do we buy stuff we don’t need?

It’s a tricky question, bound up with how we are socialized in a material culture and an economic system based, according to Karl Marx, on the “commodity.”

Marx: “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.”

I’ve got feelings about Marx. You’ve got feelings about Marx. We’ve all got feelings about Marx. In case right away my citation of a Marx quote is turning you off, rest assured that this is not Marx the manifesto-writer but Marx the philosopher, and you can hate his guts if you want to while still acknowledging the clever truth of his idea of the “commodity fetish.”

What Marx says is that typically, economists have discussed commodities as simple items which provide some kind of use and thereby posses a “use-value.” A hammer is a tool that helps you build shit. A shoe is something that helps you get around, but not as usefully as two shoes. However, Marx argued, it’s a great oversight to pretend as if commodities are really that simple.

Again, my World Market purchases:

1 bottle of wine

1 small cup

1 ceramic mug

1 Italian pumpkin spice bread

1 box of kimchi-flavored instant ramen

1 square of chocolate

1 tea towel

The value of these things? Many economists would talk about the labor costs, material costs, transportation costs involved in, say, the bottle of wine (the bottle itself, the label, the cork, the liquid all separately), as well as its use-value as a “luxury” item (zero).

Marx would argue that when the purchaser (me) sees the bottle of wine on the shelf, they are not actually thinking about all these different kinds of costs nor the humans whose labor created the object. Walking into a shop full of things, like World Market, we are living in a dream world where instead of a bottle of wine representing relationships between humans, we only see relationships between things.

“…the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves.”

In other words, we forget that the value of a tea towel lies in its usage and instead imbue the tea-towel itself with value. Which is absurd.

A wealthy person has a bottle of wine on the wine rack in their cellar. They have no intention of ever drinking it. Merely having it and looking at it and thinking about its history, where it came from, who made it, etc, provides this person with satisfaction. Here is a subtle irony: the fetishizing of the bottle may include an idolization of the laborers who crafted it, which would seem to contradict the idea of “alienation” which I’ll talk about in a second. (Think of the common marketing tagline, “hand-crafted.”)

Marx’s term “fetish” has two meanings for us. First we have the anthropological definition: an object which is imbued with spiritual animation and power. Next we can use the modern colloquial meaning: getting a kick out of something. “Commodity fetishism,” I’d argue, fits both.

Marx argued that the commodity fetish results in a process of “alienation.” Simply put, “alienation” means that we grow to separate the work we do from the product of our work, which has taken on this totemic life of its own. We start to feel useless and our labor ceases to be gratifying. You don’t work in order to provide a service or a thing that places you into a community of richly dependent relationships; you work in order to survive. This abstract thing called “capitalism” appropriates your labor and doesn’t even bother to tell you to fuck off.

The people who made the tea towel did not sell the tea towel to me. They sold their time and labor to the tea towel company, which sold the product of that time and labor to World Market, which sold it to me.

And I love this little tea towel. Because it’s cute. Also because it itself bears the value of the process of its production. The person making it didn’t care if it got used, World Market doesn’t care if it gets used, and I don’t care if it gets used. It has value in and of itself (which, again, is absurd). That’s why I got a dopamine rush when I bought it, when I think about it, and when I see it lying on my bedroom floor where I dropped it yesterday. Hell, if I had to feed it I probably would.

So here’s the irony of the commodity fetish: the people become objectified, and the objects become peopleified.

Sound healthy?

The Greatest, Shittiest Irony

I’ve been, like I said above, unemployed for a few months. I got a new job where I will sell my time for minimum wage. But until then I will continue to float in a world without rich dependent relationships and thereby suffer from lack of community. In short, I will continue to be marginalized because I enjoy an even lower status in the capitalist system than the alienated worker: the unemployed alienated worker.

The greatest irony of all? To soothe my capitalism-generated loneliness, I bought shit. Not because of the shit’s usefulness but because of the inherent value imbued in the shit by the Commodity Fetish. I got a little dopamine rush. Like pets, they surrounded me in my bedroom, ends-in-themselves.

Did I buy them in order to fantasize about the time when I too would be able to sell my labor to produce fetishized commodities for people I’d never meet? Did I buy them because, like the wealthy wine-collector, they gave me the illusion of connecting with craftspeople who don’t quite exist? Did I buy them for some other “metaphysically subtle” reason?

I don’t know. Probably a combination of all of these things.

The Commodity Fetish is a complicated thing, hard to break down. Maybe it’s not the sort of thing we really need to be breaking down at this stage in what feels like the not-so-slow collapse of society, the near-disintegration of democracy (such as it is), the climate emergency, the pandemic.

“Let me fucking have World Market, jerk,” I can almost hear you mutter.

Well, okay. Sorry. It is a kind of fun store.

I guess, just remember this going forward: next time you buy something because you’re depressed, the reason you’re depressed might be the very same reason that buying something made you feel better.