Marx and the Commodity Fetish

In the July 2009 issue of Rethinking Marxism John Lutz goes over Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and how it relates to human relations and the human psyche in a capitalist society:

One of the central contradictions that Marx seeks to identify in his theory of commodity fetishism involves the extent to which capitalism, in inverse proportion to the extent that it expands the power of human beings over nature, disempowers individual subjects by subordinating them to the imperatives of capital.  While it appears to expand the sphere of human freedom, the concrete effects of the labor process lead to the economic and psychological diminishment of the majority in order to benefit the minority materially.  Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is intended to expose the mystification of social relations in the commodity form as the basis for a bourgeois conception of autonomy that exists in the implicit contrast with its socialist alternative.  In this respect, the dual manifestation of commodity fetishism as a mystification of social relations promising power and fulfillment and its reality as a form of economic domination are fundamentally intertwined. (Lutz, 421)

Source

Lutz, John.  “A Marxian Theory of Subject: Commodity Fetishism, Autonomy, and Psychological Deprivation.”  Rethinking Marxism 21, no. 3 (July 2009): 420-34.