The Illusion of Things
In capitalist society, relationships between people do not appear as relationships between people. Instead, they appear as relationships between things. This is the essence of what Karl Marx called commodity fetishism—one of the most powerful and misunderstood ideas in Marxist thought. Under capitalism, we do not simply produce goods because we need them. We produce commodities to be sold on the market. And once everything is produced for exchange, the social relationships behind production become hidden. The worker who makes the coat, the miner who extracts the iron, the driver who transports the goods—all disappear behind the price tag. It begins to look as if commodities have value in themselves, as if the objects possess some magical property that gives them worth. But in reality, value comes from human labour. It is people who create value, not things. Marx wrote that it appears as if “the thing itself possesses the ability to establish production relations.” This is the great ill...
