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commodity fetishism ((Marxist theory))   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Media and Communication (3 ed.)

... fetishism (Marxist theory) The qualities attributed to objects in the market that distinguish their exchange-values from their use-values ( see commodity ). Commodity fetishism is seen as characteristic of capitalist society, where the object becomes a fetish—a substitute for the social relations that it supplants. Its origin in exploitation is thus obscured. See also commodification ; fetishism ; reification . ...

commodity fetishism   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Human Geography

... fetishism The habit of treating a commodity as a thing in itself rather than as the product of social and natural relations. Marxist geographers have long argued that consumers routinely fetishize commodities. Once purchased, a commodity is private property and comes to seem like a thing rather than the phenomenal form in which complex, often long-distance relationships are maintained ( see commodity chains ). These relationships may sustain various forms of social and environmental injustice, yet these injustices are not advertised in the...

commodity fetishism   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Geography (5 ed.)

... fetishism The collective belief that the value of things is measured by money; ‘the true source of their value—human labour—is not visible. Consumers perceive commodities as natural, as having a life of their own, rather than as socially produced’ (Leslie ( 2009 ) in J. Agnew and D. Livingstone, eds). Kosoy and Corbera (2010) Ecol. Econs. 69, 1229 provide an excellent overview of this term, and S. Aitken and G. Valentine ( 2006 ), p. 63, claim that ‘commodity fetishism has itself become a commodity...

commodity fetishism   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Sports Studies

... fetishism The attribution of special meanings to the commodity product. In Karl Marx 's first volume of Capital , where the use-value of an object is distinguished from its exchange-value (its worth in the market, or price), the idea of the commodity fetishism is also introduced. The notion of fetishism refers to how the commodity—a sporting event for instance, or a particular item of sporting clothing—has meanings attached to it that are not seen as related to the actual labour that created it. So objects and products appear to have special values;...

commodity‐fetishism   Quick reference

John Halliday

A Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and International Relations (4 ed.)

...‐fetishism An idea added into the second edition of Marx ’s Capital . In general, the analysis of the commodity is held to reveal the microscopic anatomy of bourgeois society, and also to show that capitalist wealth is always bound to appear as commodities. However, according to Marx, the mystical or fetishistic characters of these commodities does not lie in their use‐value but in the fact that they are labour products, such that definite social relations between men assume the fantastic and alienated form of a relationship between things. Here...

commodity fetishism   Reference library

Dictionary of the Social Sciences

... fetishism A commodity is a product of human labor that is entered into a relationship of exchange. Commodity fetishism is the term that Karl Marx used to designate the way that the dominance of exchange relationships in capitalist society destroys people's sense of the world as the product of their own labor. Since in capitalist society almost all dimensions of human productivity are mediated through exchange, Marx argued, including not only the purchase of goods but the sale of one's labor, the material world comes to be perceived as independent...

commodity fetishism   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Critical Theory

... fetishism The mistaken view that the value of a commodity is intrinsic and the corresponding failure to appreciate the investment of labour that went into its production. Karl Marx created this term, borrowing the notion of the fetish from anthropology, where it refers to a sacred or symbolic object that according to its worshippers has supernatural power. For example, in certain indigenous cultures in Australia it is believed that a ‘witch doctor’ can point a bone at a person and thereby bring about their death—such a bone is a fetish. Commodities...

commodity fetishism   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Critical Theory (2 ed.)

... fetishism The mistaken view that the value of a commodity is intrinsic and the corresponding failure to appreciate the investment of labour that went into its production. Karl Marx created this term, borrowing the notion of the fetish from anthropology, where it refers to a sacred or symbolic object that according to its worshippers has supernatural power. For example, in certain indigenous cultures in Australia it is believed that a ‘witch doctor’ can point a bone at a person and thereby bring about their death—such a bone is a fetish. Commodities...

commodity fetishism   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Sociology (4 ed.)

...who see only the resulting relationships (of price) between commodities. They therefore mistakenly view these relationships as autonomous, and as governing rather than dependent on the social division of labour, and the relations it establishes between different and unequal producers. When generalized, this delusion is the commodity fetishism that Marx criticized in bourgeois economics, which took economic value to be an intrinsic property of commodities, like their use-value. The commodity is a fetish, in the sense that it is endowed with the powers of...