Fetishism of the Commodity - Book Report/Review Example

Therefore, human work acquires a social character with a material characteristic, formed by the exchange relationship among these goods, and instead of seeing human relationships in society, what we have is a relationships of things (332-334). Economists forget that human labor is the source of the value of a commodity and describe the world as if goods trade independently of humans. They fail to see that only capitalist production treats goods this way and gives real social relationships its mystique, unlike in other economies - such as the legendary Robinson Crusoe's, the medieval economy that was built on dependence, or the peasant economy - that do not fail to recognize the social value of the human relationships of work, and where the economy was the result of social relationships that was not separated from the humans that form them (335-336).

The reduction of actual human labor through an abstraction has led to the mystification or fetishism of commodities, whereby goods are detached from the human work that produced them and their values are determined not by the work input but by their exchange values, can be traced to the dominant Christian religion of capitalist societies that reduced actual human beings through a similar process of abstraction and given humanity a different meaning. This is unlike other non-capitalist societies not dominated by commodities and trade who retain their connection with and dependence on nature and humanity, and so continue to worship Nature in their religions (337-338).

This mystification will not disappear until the production process is the result of free human association regulated by the workers, and for this kind of society to emerge a radical change is needed. People must overturn the mastery of production in capitalist society to get rid of the fetishism of commodities. This would enable people to regain mastery over the output of their work and establish the independence that these commodities have on those who produce them. The bourgeois economists who see this fetishism wonder at the lunacy of the inherent value of commodities other than the value people give them.

These same economists do not see their own fetishism, being blind to the fact that capital has no value other than what people give it through their labor, that commodities have no value in themselves, and that the value of commodities comes from the labor that produced them (337-340).Summary No. 2 (3 paragraphs) A commodity is the product of the labor of workers who, in a capitalist society characterized by mass production, do not come into social contact with one another until the goods are exchanged.

Thus, the specific social character of each worker's labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange. This means that a worker's labor contribution acquires significance only by means of the relations established directly by the act of exchange of commodities and through them, between the producers. Thus, the value of human work, though directly connected to the goods produced, is separated or abstracted from the value of the goods themselves