Marx’s Capital lays bare the peculiar nature of commodity fetishism and the social constructions that go into ascribing inherent value to objects; simultaneously erasing the rich social relations that unconsciously accompany any product of labor. Like a first sip of coffee, it took some time before the impact of Marx’s words had fully made their way into my brain. Not to accuse a long dead philosopher of being willfully dense, but the man squeezes all the terms that he can get out of concepts about labor. Despite the short waiting period for comprehending the text , Marx does make an interesting point about how the constructions of bourgeois society have extended so far as to make actual value-less phrases like “Venmo me $12 for the chicken pad thai” or “This matcha latte is $8” become imbued with value.

Commodities, that is to say products of human labor with use-value, are not simply commodities rooted in some objective inherent value that always resides within the object. Objects have to pass through many hands before they become commodities. They are made by workers with varying degrees of effort and with varying labor-times, they undergo a number of manufacturing processes, they are then exchanged between producers but “the specific social character of each producer’s labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange.”(665). From my understanding, the end product in which the object of the producer’s labor is deemed useful to others therefore it has value, is all we see on the surface, when there were a number of social and human relations underneath that that are obscured by the object’s newfound value which can be equated to other ‘valuable’ objects, despite the fact that this value is assigned. When this happens objects then “act and re-act upon each other as quantities of value”, and a pound of gold and a pound of iron, as Marx exemplifies, can have equivalent value despite the fact that the two objects are extremely different and have different chemical make-up, different qualities, etc. (666). Apples to oranges becomes reconfigured as apples to apples within this Fetishism. Value based on labor-time and the human effort placed into these newfound commodities are rendered irrelevant. We lose the rich social context of the valuable objects we hold so dear and instead

Marx also utilizes one of his most reliable analogies, religion. In religion, we create “independent beings endowed with, and entering into relation with one another and the human race” (665). Plainly, these gods and archangels that essentially came from our brain are now imagined and understood as fully formed things that exist outside of ourselves, interact with each other, are weighed against each other and rule us from the heavens. If my Marxist lens isn’t fogged up too badly, at its core capitalism, like religion, mediates objects and ascribes meaning to them to create the sense of a rational world around us and perpetuate a particular system. If we stripped away the top layers of constructed meaning, we would find a whole lot of complex and rich human occurrences underneath.