page_title: Commodity fetishism
section_title: Cultural theory
hierarchical_section_title: Commodity fetishism / Applications / Cultural theory
context_page_description: In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism is the perception of certain relationships not as relationships among people, but as social relationships among things. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism perceives economic value as something that arises from commodity goods themselves, and not from the interpersonal relations that produce them.
  The theory of commodity fetishism is presented in the first chapter of Das Kapital, at the conclusion of the analysis of the value-form of commodities, to explain that the social organization of labor is mediated through market exchange, the buying and the selling of commodities. Hence, in a capitalist society, social relations between people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, et cetera—are perceived as social relations among objects; depending on the social function of the exchange, objects acquire a certain form.
context_section_description: Since the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented the theory of commodity fetishism, in Section 4, "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof", of the first chapter of Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), the constituent concepts of the theory, and their sociologic and economic explanations, have proved intellectually fertile propositions that permit the application of the theory (interpretation, development, adaptation) to the study, examination, and analysis of other cultural aspects of the political economy of capitalism, such as:
caption: Thorstein Veblen proposed the conspicuous consumption of commodities as the pursuit of social prestige
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