QuestionsCan we be certain of anything?The fetishism of commodities
Can we be certain of anything?We must doubt

The fetishism of commodities

Karl Marx 1818 · 1883History is the history of class struggles.
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What it claims

In the world of commodities, a social relation between people takes on for them the fantastic form of a relation between things: this is fetishism, comparable to religion, where the products of the human brain seem to live a life of their own.

Why

By exchanging products, people link their labor without knowing it, and this looks to them like a property of things.

In short

"The fetishism of commodities" is an argument by Karl Marx (Capital, Volume I, ch. 1, § 4 (1867, revised 1872)) on the question "Can we be certain of anything?" (answer: we must doubt). Its claim: In the world of commodities, a social relation between people takes on for them the fantastic form of a relation between things: this is fetishism, comparable to religion, where the products of the human brain seem to live a life of their own. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Capital, Volume I, ch. 1, § 4 (1867, revised 1872)
Valid with an implicit premise

A phone is "worth" 800 euros: it looks as if that price were a property of the object, like its weight. Marx argues it is a social optical illusion: behind the price there are relations between people who, without knowing it, work for one another. And the strangest part: knowing this does not make the illusion go away.

P1The value of a commodity has nothing to do with its physical properties.
P2By exchanging their products as equal values, people in fact equate their labours: value expresses a social relation between producers. They do it without knowing it.
P3Yet value does not carry a label saying what it is: it appears as a property of things, and this appearance remains even once it is understood.
P4 · implicit premiseWhen a relation between people appears to those people as a property of, or relation between, things, they are mistaken about what they see: it is a fantastic form, an illusion.
Therefore, in the world of commodities, a social relation between people takes on for them the fantastic form of a relation between things: this is fetishism, comparable to religion, where the products of the human brain seem to live a life of their own.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where value is not physical, expresses a social relation and appears as a property of things, without this being an error: just a useful convention, like a note written on a score.
Valid with P4. It says what makes this appearance an error rather than just a convenient way of speaking. Marx compares it to religion: in both cases, what people have produced faces them as an alien power. The debate is about P2 (does value really come from labour?) and P4 (is it really an illusion?).
Analogy. A 50-euro note is just a piece of paper: its value comes from millions of people accepting it. Yet we treat it as if it were valuable in itself. Marx says: the same goes for every commodity. Hayek will answer: and that is just as well, it spares us from having to know everything about each other.

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

E
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (and the marginalist school) 1896 · attacks premise 2

Value does not come from labour, but from the usefulness and scarcity of things as people judge them (Menger and Jevons, 1871). A rare wine, a pearl found by chance are worth a lot without much labour. If value does not express quantities of labour, the "social relation" hidden behind prices is not demonstrated.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1896, after the author's death (1883).
Friedrich Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" 1945 · attacks premise 4

Prices are not an illusion: they sum up in a single number information scattered among millions of people. Not seeing the human relations behind a price is not an error, it is what makes it possible to coordinate a society too vast for anyone to know as a whole.

Marx replies
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
Marx What Capital already says
Let us picture a community of free individuals working with means of production in common: their social relations, in production as in distribution, would remain simple and transparent.
The debate goes on (our summary) Hayek would reply that this is precisely the illusion: no central plan can gather all the information that prices convey.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Slavoj ŽižekHe takes Marx's commodity fetishism and reworks it: today people know they follow an illusion, but still do it. Money is his example.