The Fetishism of the Commodity by Karl Marx

Notes on article on The fetishism of the commodity  by Karl Marx. Accessed from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1.

A commodity is some thing outside us; satisfies human wants of some sort or another.

Use value is the utility of a thing, "independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful quantities." Exchange value is the quantity of other commodities the commodity will trade for: this tacilty assumes a barter economy, although in contemporary thought we can take it that exchange value = price.

Use value is trivial to Marx - there is nothing mysterious about wood being converted to a table, this is a process that evidently satisfies a need. That does not define anything mysterious about commodities. What does define the mystique of commodities is that the social character of men's labour is presented as an objective character in the form of exchange value. This exists not intrinsically but in the form of their output. To quote verbatim:

"...[with commodities]....the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities"

For the purposes of the project, this is as far as we need to make detailed note on. The remainder of the article goes into more detail about how value comes about. An interesting point for this project ias this quotation:

"whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it."