this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Genuine question, have you read any of Capital? Not trying to be an ass, but Marx explains in the first chapter, and the book I linked is a good supplementary text too. You don't have to read all of Capital; like I said, the commodity fetish gets explained in the first chapter. (Though I highly recommend taking the time to read all of Capital; it's a great text and provides the basis of a scientific critique of capitalism and class society.)
"Fetish", in "commodity fetish" refers to the commodity appearing to have mystical properties, when in actuality it's an inanimate object. But it appears animate; it appears to be capable of magical things; and it also makes social relations between people appear as relations between things, e.g. the relation of domination between capitalist and worker appears as an exchange of commodities, a wage in exchange for labour-power. The wording of "fetish" comes from an old racist conception where Europeans said that Africans had a "fetish" of particular religious objects, i.e. they ascribed magical properties to these objects that they didn't have. Whilst that old conception is racist and wrong, I think the concept of the commodity fetish still holds true.
The commodity fetish isn't particularly related to what OP is talking about. Clout-chasing is just clout-chasing. The desire to make money is because, well, we live in a capitalist society, and more money means you can get more stuff. The commodity fetish describes properties of commodities, not behaviour of people. It describes the way commodities actually appear; there's no mental process or actions you can take to undo the commodity fetish, because it is a description of the actual way commodities function under capitalism.
Yes, but I definitely don't fully understand it. You and I disagree on the meaning of this concept, and I'm keen to learn, but if it's not too arrogant, I'd like to continue pushing my understanding and having you critique it so I can learn where my error in understanding is.
I always thought this was sort of a metaphorical or poetic way of describing the phenomenon. Like, what even is an example of a "mystical property" that would apply in the context of industrial modernity? I don't think Marx was critiquing the phenomenon of people believing their kitchen knives were sharp because of their connection with the divine or that automobiles were able to heal your epilepsy if you just laid your head against the engine block.
Again, this seems metaphorical. My understanding is that Marx's analysis is that when individual commodities are fetishized he meant that people believe that commodities as commodities are capable of meeting the believer's personal human needs, when in reality it is actually the human relationships that are meeting the needs through the application of labor on nature to produce that which is needed.
To reiterate, I'm presenting my understanding so you can critique it and help expose my incorrect understanding.
I understood this not to be an also but rather a restatement of the same thing referred to by the magical/mystical framing.
Yes, this I see and agree with. I believe it's consistent with my understanding and does not represent a contradiction with my understanding. Although it's interesting to see it framed this way and think "was Marx saying this as individual human relations or as class relations, or both?"
Isn't this mystical thinking? "Money means you can get more stuff" is ascribing a power to commodity (in this case money) that is actually a power inherent in the relationship between humans. Money is a perfect example of "a belief that the exchange values of goods are inherent to them" and an example of a pathway by which "social phenomena such as market value, wages and rent are reified"
Bringing it back to the video thing, content creators see what they produce as a commodity, a commodity collectively call "content". If you've spent any time at all in the world of content, you know that the way people relate to the production and management of content has "absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this" (to quote Marx).
And the OP's post is a prime example. Communication is the fundamental reality when it comes to content. Humans communicate with each other. We've created ways to communicate across time and space. And instead of using it to communicate things that humans need or desire to communicate, content creators see content as a way to make money. As such, they subvert the original communication goals and produce lies, rage bait, or shallow attractors and then fill that content with "calls to action" to "like and subscribe" or spend their time trying to be part of other content to spread their "brand awareness" etc, etc, etc.
All of these things feel like the magical properties Marx is describing. All of these things reify the social phenomena of rent, intellectual property, advertising revenues, etc. And none of these things bear any resemblance to real human communication, which is the fundamental "what" that content actually is.
That's my argument. And I feel like it's pretty solid. But again, it's easy for me to feel that way if I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. If I thought cheese was anything that contained milk, and I poured milk on spaghetti, it still wouldn't mac-n-cheese but I would be real confident it was. So, please don't take my words to be a religious argument or something I hold strongly. I'm happy to abandon my whole argument if you can help me understand what I'm missing or what I've assumed that makes my thinking erroneous.
And if you do engage with this, thanks for your time and effort in helping me develop a clearer understanding.
This is a common misunderstanding, but not correct. The commodity fetish is not something that occurs in people's minds. We could all be consciously aware of the commodity fetish but it would still happen; it doesn't describe a false belief, but it describes the actual appearance of commodities under capitalism. It falls into the category of a "real abstraction", that is, an abstraction that actually happens in real life, rather than one that is psychological. Another example of a real abstraction is abstract and concrete labour. Concrete labour is the actual labour performed, such as sewing, farming, driving, etc. Concrete labour must become abstract labour in order to exchange commodities; if I exchange cookies I baked for a T-shirt you tailored, we somehow have to make baking and tailoring commensurable, even though they are qualitatively different labour. How many cookies is a T-shirt worth? That would seem a nonsensical question at first glance, because those are two completely different things. But the value-form provides a universal quantifier of commodities, that is, socially necessary labour time, which must be a measure of abstract labour, because e.g. 1 hour of highly skilled labour is worth more than 1 hour of unskilled labour (here, "skilled" is not meant disparagingly towards unskilled labour; skilled labour is more labour because it requires education, e.g. a doctor's labour is not just 1 hour of doctoring but also 10 years of medical school split up across the doctor's whole career). Making concrete labour into abstract labour is a real abstraction, i.e. it really happens every time you exchange commodities. You can be aware of it, you can be critical of it, you can hate that it happens, but it will still happen; it is part of the exchange process. Similarly, the commodity fetish is part of the commodity form. If it were psychological, it would be divorcable from the commodity form; the exchangers of commodities could simply decide in their heads to "combat" the commodity fetish and not be beholden to it.
Marx clarifies in the section of Capital I'm talking about (the subsection of chapter 1) that the causation is not "people see objects as homogeneous labour → they exchange them", but the other way round: "people exchange products of labour → they equate different kinds of labour as human labour".
Taking directly from chapter 1 of Capital again, the commodity reflects the social characteristics of people's labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves. This is a peculiar trait of commodities—in pre-capitalist societies, relations between people appeared as relations between people, but in capitalist societies, relations between people appear as relations between things. Examples Marx gives of this:
Again, we're not talking about any kind of thinking. The commodity fetish occurs without awareness, i.e. it is not a process that occurs in the mind.
I mean, no, "money means you can get more stuff" is true in the context of capitalist society. I have a job not because I love doing shitty manual labour for the capitalists I work for, but because I need a roof over my head and I need to eat. I'm alienated from the means of subsistence as a proletarian so I need to sell my labour-power to obtain means of subsistence. This is objectively correct; that's how capitalism works. Being anti-capitalist or a Marx scholar or attaining any kind of consciousness is not going to change these facts.
And content is not a commodity (or it is only in the colloquial sense, not in the Marxist or economic sense). Commodities have an exchange-value. Generally, online content is not exchanged, but distributed for free (since it can be copied nearly-infinitely nearly-freely; e.g. you reading my comment doesn't prevent anyone else from reading it).
Oh wow, that was an awesome clarification. Thank you! I see now that I was greatly confused by the analogy with the European concept of a fetish in foreign cultures, that such a thing was a set of beliefs held by a people. It did not click for me that commodity fetishization is not an analog to what the European's believed foreign cultures believed about certain objects, but rather an analog to the role Europeans believed it to play in that society, specifically a material role, a causative role.
Thank you for that.
On the content front, I think there's a debate to be had, but not now. I need to process and reread with this new focus. Thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
No worries, happy to help :) Yes it's a common misconception like I said. Hopefully if you reread the commodity fetishism section of Capital with that in mind (it's just one subheading under the first chapter, though of course it's relevant to the whole book) you'll see some of the points I took from that section in what Marx says.