Commodities and Marx: Response by Natalia, Fernando, Martin

In “The Fetishism of Commodities”, Carl Marx explains the Capitalist model of turning products into commodities, and its implication on the social aspects of society. He argues that a product is turned into a commodity as soon as it is alienated from its producer, thus perverting the relationship between objects, their makers, and their users. Commodification, according to Marx, is characteristic to the Capitalist society because the means of production, such as large factories, always create a rift between the product and its maker. Marx discusses the difference between use-value and exchange-value or products, which is the difference between evaluating something based on its use, or based on its value in the market. While the use-value of an object is a natural consequence of its properties (a chair is useful because you can use it for sitting), its exchange-value is not inherent to the object and is a result of society in which it’s defined (a Bauhaus chair is no more useful than an Ikea one). The separation of the use-value from the exchange-value naturally flows out of the separation between the producer and the product, to the point where they appear to be entirely separated. Commodity fetishism, according to Marx, is when a consumer covets a product based on its exchange-value, and not on its use-value. As a result, the process of production of commodities takes control over their producers, defining what they make and how they make it. Marx argues that this system must be altered in order to give the power back to the producers. He believes that the alienated relationship between the maker and the product must be healed, but on a social level, where makers are compensated based on their labour, and the products are defined through their use-value, thus stopping the process of commodification.

One can immediately see the relevance of Marx’s model in today’s North American consumer society which has embraced the commodity in its every aspect. Globalization and outsourcing can be said to be the ultimate expressions of Marx’s alienation between the producer and the product, as most commodities are made in Asia by people who will never be able to afford them. Some things are made simultaneously in different places: a part is brought from one country to another, assembled in the third, packaged elsewhere, and sold in the United States. Following Marx’s line of thought, we can say that the exchange-value and the use-value have experienced a similarly tremendous rift as a result. Branding and marketing are aimed at heightening the exchange-value of products, creating luxury goods that serve no particular purpose and are extremely cheap to make. People buy them for the “image” that they carry, not for their usefulness. Whether it would be possible to turn away from this model and heal the rift created by globalization is a difficult question, considering that a number of world economies have been shaped by commodification in the capitalist West.

Question: Where does the trend of marketing fair-trade local goods, ethical working conditions, and connecting the workers with the consumers, fit into Marx’s model of commodities? Is it a gradual movement away from commodity fetishism, or merely another “trend” that separates the use- and exchange- value of goods?