Marx And Marx's Theory Of Commodity Feetishism

This paper will outline Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, outlining the intellectual climate in which it emerged and its basic tenets. This will then be compared and contrasted with Lukacs’ theory of reification, which built upon and extended the basic premises of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism. Lukacs takes Marx’s analysis of the ‘secret’ behind commodity production, and extends it beyond the more limited application that Marx gives it.

In delineating his broad theoretical project, Marx sought to distinguish his approach from other intellectual currents in two significant ways. Firstly, he wanted his social theory to have practical implications, and thus contrasted his approach with that of his more idealist ‘young Hegelian’

This is why it is in fact mistaken to assume that Marx critiques the production and exchange of things per se, for not every object produced is a commodity, and not every exchange is of the specific sort Marx describes; rather, Marx critiques the particular social relations that underpin the production and exchange of things in a capitalist society. Likewise, it is erroneous to conclude that commodity fetishism refers to an obsessive fascination with the objective form of the commodity itself. Rather, the fetishism that Marx refers to is, in essence, the fetishization of money as a stand-in for abstract human labour power that has achieved an ‘autonomy of representation’, and thus constitutes a human social construction that has achieved an apparently independent existence which turns around and exerts a palpable force on its creators that appears to them to be autonomous. Thus, for Marx, ‘fetishism’ refers primarily to the ‘secret’ of the process of the exchange of qualitatively different objects by way of their being reduced to a common denominator in the form of money which facilitates this exchange. But money only mediates this exchange in so far as it represents labour, which is the real source of exchange value for