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In Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, Marx went deeper into the problematic of alienation, linking his economic and political analysis more closely to each other. In the capitalist mode of production, the separation between the workers and the means of production—a prerequisite for the buying and selling of labour-power—reaches the point where the conditions of labour appear before the worker as autonomous persons. Moreover, in Capital, Volume One, a new formulation for alienation took shape: that is, commodity fetishism, the phenomenon through which human beings are ruled over by the objects they have created and live in a world where the definite social relation between men themselves assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things.

The influence of political economy and economic reason on my formulation of Equity fetishism—a new theory of civil justice—prompts the need to consider a particular formulation of fetishism able to account for that influence. Beginning with an analysis of Equity’s language as key to understanding it as a property basis of civil justice, Equity fetishism brings together the political and economic considerations of commodity fetishism under capitalism, and the fetishism related to the fantasies and desires for complete justice also promulgated under capitalism. To reconcile these two positions, this chapter discusses the relationship between Marx and Freud’s theories of fetishism.

In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, written after the fall of the Berlin wall and in controversary with Fukuyama’s book about the end of History, he points out that when Marx talks about commodity fetishism in his book Capital he refers to the dancing tables of a spiritualistic seance, and when he gives the example of the table, he uses the term auftritt which means enters the stage. A table is a table when it has use-value and is made of wood, an organic material that takes shape (a table), it changes and transforms itself, but it is still wood. When Marx refers to the table as a commodity which is ‘sensuously supersensitive’, placing the accent on the adverb ‘sensuously’, he emphasizes materiality, that is, a referent that is not an original, but a support that has to have a physical dimension. It is supersensitive because the table has an exchange value which is its representation of the use-value, exceeding reality while representing it. This excess is both the visible and invisible: the exchange is visible as the result of social labour, of the cooperation among men, of a collective process, it remains invisible. In commodity the immateriality of human and social relationships is presented as an exchange of relations.

This chapter examines the meanings embedded in the material culture of the marketplace (as visible in Borough Market’s built environment and specialized stall displays). It argues that a market-wide system of meanings (e.g. semiotics) emerges as individual elements of material culture assemble together. This ‘material-semiotic’ shapes meanings about foods’ production and consumption and comes to bracket consumption in the marketplace, providing the backdrop to the marketplace’s social-sensuality characterizing, and ultimately governing commodity exchange. Like many such marketplaces, Borough Market has a distinctive visual aesthetic. Derived from a material culture that incorporates objects, signage and photography as well as timeworn building materials, and coupled with an architecturally notable and historically built environment, this material culture mobilizes individual temporal and spatial, and otherwise geographical meanings and imaginations about foods’ provenance. As these are drawn together within the space of the marketplace, however, these meanings and imaginations slip, becoming generalized to the marketplace and its cultures of consumption. Drawing from literatures concerned with materiality and the material ‘turn’, this chapter traces the disparate meanings of the marketplace embedded in its material culture, interrogates the ways in which various forms of social sensuality emerge from their assembly into a material-semiotic, and examines the ways in which these materialities and meanings combine to provide the ‘architecture’ from which commodities are valued and the market is made.

This chapter explores four key tropes of Marxism that are often misinterpreted, to arrive at an understanding of Westworld as an example of commodity fetishism. We demonstrate that while Westworld serves as an apt metaphor for understanding Marxism, it nevertheless confuses the form of social revolution Marx identified with the fantasy of a robot rebellion. The pop cultural Westworld is shown to be a site of struggle and is explored to help understand alienated labour, false consciousness and how the fetishisation of commodities is realised. The breathtaking cruelty the host robots are subjected to seem to make them obvious candidates for revolution. However, while Marx might have seen Westworld as a metaphor for being schooled in forms of capitalist exploitation he was repulsed by– he believed that for social revolution to be viable it would need to create an economic system more productive than capitalism. While the hosts are clearly exploited, they do not inhabit a real society. Rather they are commodities within a larger society—something produced to be purchased. As such, they are incapable of providing an economically viable future society, regardless of the extremity of their exploitation. The fact these robots are all-too-human in appearance increases our fetish towards them, misdirecting our attention away from what Marx would see as the real revolutionary force capable of ending exploitation. This chapter looks deeper at what Marx saw as the driving forces compelling social revolution and why the revolts of the host robots would remain for him something of a side-show.

This chapter introduces the case study through which the arguments of this book are developed: London’s Borough Market. It explains the relevance of this particular example in examining the complex dynamics between market and marketplace, and explains the importance of understanding these dynamics through the lenses of place and place-making, which highlight the material, social-spatial, temporal and imaginative practices that reproduce such marketplaces and markets. Urban marketplaces such as Borough Market once played an important role in food provisioning for the City. Typically occupying positions on the urban periphery, they served as a key interface between urban and rural economies. With changing systems of food provision and urban political and cultural economies more generally, as well as broader shifts in the tastes and expectations of urban residents and consumers, such marketplaces are increasingly valued for the consumer culture and experiences of consumption they seemingly engender, rather than for their roles in food provision. This chapter details the history of Borough Market and contextualizes it as part of broader economic, social and cultural change within the city. It charts the marketplaces history as a key food market for London, and its decline in the last half of the twentieth century. It also presents the marketplace’s re-emergence as a fine and alternative food market in parallel to new and emergent forms of ‘alternative’ food production and consumption, and the ways which they have transformed marketplaces as sites of urban consumer culture increasingly orientated towards conspicuous consumption.

I present a preliminary exegesis of the concept of fetishism, based on the famous quotation from Chapter 1 of the first volume of Capital: “There (with commodities) it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic from of a relation between things”. I discuss what other writers have made of this, before analysing each component of the statement in turn: ‘a relation’; ‘a social relation between men’; ‘relation between things’; and ‘assumes the fantastic form of …’. This raises a number of issues: most notably Marx’s emphasis on the social as opposed to the material, or natural; and his rather equivocal phrasing: ‘assumes the fantastic form’. This appears to leave open the question of whether the capitalist system somehow ‘produces’ this form, and whether it is ‘real’ or a self-serving and deliberate mystification.

I suggest that in order to comprehend commodity fetishism it is helpful to begin by analysing the fetishism of money, capital and interest-bearing capital. I therefore draw on a selection of quotations from Marx’s writings, mainly from Capital Volume III and Theories of Surplus Value. With commodity fetishism, Marx asserts that relations between producers appear ‘as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (my stress). This contrasts with the self-serving mystification of ‘higher’ forms of fetishism, most notably expressed in the Trinity Formula, which leads me to distinguish my position from that of Analytical Marxists, most notably Cohen.

This chapter looks at the influences of global capitalism and colonialism on attitudes toward economic development, resulting in an unusual use of commodity fetishism theory. As Buddhists, Thais are taught that their desires for things should be eliminated because they reflect a defiled nature. As members of families they learn that, in many cases, love and the value of a relationship are best expressed through material gifts. As Buddhists grow richer in Thailand’s developing economy, this conflict between otherworldly disconnection and validation through material goods has grown more evident. Therefore, some Thais reinterpret their stories about human nature in terms of commodity fetishism theories, explaining the defiling desire for material goods as a product of a weakened psychological state imposed upon them by global-capitalist forces. Ironically, the vision of human nature they have chosen to experiment with is one which, they believe, allows them neither to choose nor to experiment.

Arnost Kolman (1892–1979) was a Czech mathematician, philosopher and Communist official. In this paper, we would like to look at Kolman’s arguments against logical positivism which revolve around the notion of the fetishization of mathematics. Kolman derives his notion of fetishism from Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism. Kolman is aiming to show the fact that an entity (system, structure, logical construction) acquires besides its real existence another formal existence. Fetishism means the fantastic detachment of the physical characteristics of real things or phenomena from these things. We identify Kolman’s two main arguments against logical positivism. In the first argument, Kolman applied Lenin’s arguments against Mach’s empiricism-criticism onto Russell’s neutral monism, i.e. mathematical fetishism is internally related to political conservativism. Kolman’s second main argument is that logical and mathematical fetishes are epistemologically deprived of any historical and dynamic dimension. In the final parts of our paper we place Kolman’s thinking into the context of his time, and furthermore we identify some tenets of mathematical fetishism appearing in Alain Badiou’s mathematical ontology today.

This chapter considers the desert island settings of the film Cast Away (2000) and the TV series Lost (2004–2010). Each represents a tension between solid and liquid modernity, as described by Zygmunt Bauman. In Cast Away, Chuck Noland is a radically mobile agent of liquid modern repression. His relationship with a Wilson volleyball speaks to commodity fetishism, but exists alongside his continued preoccupation with repressive time. The film critiques repressive aspects of liquid modernity but endorses a life strategy that depends on those aspects. Lost sets up a desert island governed by repressive control, as abjected characters learn to conform to communal norms. The series’ ‘liquid cinematography’ and the island’s topological and temporal fluidity destabilise this solid modern paradigm, but it is ultimately reasserted.

The chapter deals with the status of the theory of fetishism in Marx’s critique of political economy. It seems that Marx has grasped fully the significance of commodity fetishism only in preparing the second German edition of Capital (1872), where he gives a systematic exposition of it. One has to distinguish the moments of critique and dialectics in Marx. The analysis of capitalism and its fetishistic illusions is the job of the critique, whereas dialectics is used in the presentation of the results of the analytic investigation. The passage of fetishism in Capital is thus not a part of the dialectical exposition, but rather formulates the presuppositions of it, since it shows the illusions against which an adequate theory of capitalism has to be developed and its concepts justified.

The contribution presents the concept of the property in terms of philosophy, law, economics, sociology, politics, and economic psychology. A concept of “hexagon of property” has been developed taking into account all aspects of this complex category. The contribution considers the process when a person acquires a property object and its development taking into account various aspects of the property: philosophical; cognitive, legal, emotional, strong-willed, profitable, political (domineering) and social aspects. The life cycle of the property object is considered from the standpoint of economics, law, sociology, psychology, and politics. The emphasis is on the ownership from the perspective of economic psychology: components of ownership (cognitive, emotional and volitional) and their formation at different stages of the property development, as well as specific subject-object relations related to the notion of “commodity fetishism” are shown. With the help of statistical data, it is justified that property objects are the extension of personality, especially for intellectual property objects.

With e-commerce advertising messages have a high reach and visibility, with the new technologies of mobile connectivity that is able to permanently track and monitor consumers and automatically observe patterns of consumed commodities it becomes easy to manipulate the consumers into psychographic commodity fetishism that will tackle individual taste and aspiration according to pre-collected profiles. It intoxicates and transforms signification into banality that renders all images to pornography-like similes. This will lead to the production of images of violence, images that violate the individual’s privacy through influences, monitoring and surveillance, through panoptical shadowing of direct and indirect control that will manipulates consumption habits and political aspirations.

Neue Marx Lekture was probably the most popular school of Marxism in Germany at the time of the 150th Anniversary of Capital and the Bicentennial of Marx’s Birth in 2017–18. In its reading of Capital, Neue Marx Lekture emphasizes Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism instead of the theory of surplus value. This reading of Capital was formulated by the students of the first generation of the Frankfurt School around the centennial anniversary of Capital and 150th anniversary of Marx’s birth in 1967–68. It will be argued that an interpretation of Capital that emphasized the concept of fetishism and impersonal domination in Marx’s theory of capitalism, instead of class rule, answered the problems encountered by some readers of Capital in Frankfurt in the late 1960s better than a more traditional reading. It will be argued, however, that these ideas are becoming more and more anachronistic, as the world has changed from what it was in 1968. It is claimed that a more traditional reading, in which the concept of fetishism can only be understood correctly in connection to the theory of surplus value, is a more topical reading of Capital, and it answers better the problems of today.

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other.

Teaching about global economic inequality can be difficult. The physical and social distance between North American students and workers in the global South can make this inequality feel abstract. Instructors need to find a way to ground this experience of labor exploitation in a way that helps students to connect to the lives of workers. In this chapter, I provide details on using student research projects on commodity production in particular, and teaching a commodity-centered class in general, as a method to introduce and reinforce student understanding of social science concepts that explain the reasons why global inequality is persistent.

The suppression of the left wing has remapped class struggle onto a conflict of identities designed to maintain economic inequality. The discourses of identity politics, multiculturalism, and affirmative action act to divert attention from issues of poverty, prolong class stratification, and conceal the connection between poverty and bourgeois prosperity. The psychoanalytic concepts of the narcissism of minor differences, the defense mechanism of projection , and doubling and repetition can illuminate an economy of symbolic commodity fetishism that conceals class inequalities. Whereas multiculturalism and affirmative action policies should augment a socialization of the political economy, they serve instead to replace imperative social programs.

Takes Tennyson’s first Arthurian poem as a classic instance of eternal recurrence, motivated by both the knight’s repeated failure to cast away the sword and by Arthur’s reputed return to his kingdom. Demonstrates how the fabled sword Excalibur functions as an ornate art object within a system of commercial exchange.

Using theories of Empire, immaterial labor, and Marx’s commodity fetishism as a framework, this chapter employs qualitative content analysis in its examination of the mobile game Hay Day and its Chinese players. Throughout the chapter, Zhang and Behrmann explore how Hay Day players communicate about their gameplay on the Chinese networking site Weibo in addition to how players reinforce theories grounded in Empire, immaterial labor, and commodity fetishism. Zhang and Behrmann’s critical examination proves that Supercell and Hay Day simulate capitalistic realities in the game by commodifying virtual goods, reinforcing production and consumption, work, and play, creating player hierarchies, and minimizing relationships among players.

Filipa Subtil and Pedro Xavier Mendonca analyses the technicizing impact of networks on the idea of communication and the influence of the network ideal on the current direction of technology in the service of power and economic advantage. Communication networks, in the Saint-Simonian ideal of the technical network, reduce the distances between classes and peoples, in that they involve people and society. The operation of democracy, itself inherent in and driven by networks, allows this process to take place, as a symbol and vehicle for democracy and equality. Subtil and Mendonca draw on the development of the media to illustrate how the information revolution made possible by networks has become the axis of a new capitalism, and stress the significance of three factors: the consolidation of nations with the introduction of the telegraph; the standardization and industrialization of news procedures; and the institutionalization of the press as an engine of power and economic intervention.