Karl Marx, born in 1818, was a German philosopher, sociologist and a revolutionary socialist. Primarily known as Marxism, Marx’s theories on society, economics and politics state that society develops through class struggle. The class struggle being a conflict between the the ruling class or the upper elite who control the means of production and the working class (everyone else) who work on these means of production by selling their labour for wages. Through commodification and the exploitation of labor, Marx argues that capitalism facilitates social relations that produce internal tensions eventually leading to its destruction making way for socialism to be its replacement. Capitalism is a system where the labour produced by the worker is …show more content…
The word fetish is defined as any object that people fixate on or are fascinated by. Now according to Marx, when people try to better understand the world around them, a fixation on money comes to mind. This fixation causes a list of questions to arise. Who has money? How is money acquired. How is money spent? If money isn't what's being fixated on then it becomes a fixation on commodities i.e. commodity fetishism. This forms as a result of trying to understand economics. How much does it cost to make a product? How much does it cost to buy a product? How much of a demand does the product have? A Lot of the times people fixate on both; there isn't any means of survival without money but money needs to be spent on commodities to satisfy our needs and …show more content…
These fetishes however, blind people from being able to see the truth behind what they’re trying to understand most: economics and society. The truth that one class of people is able to exploit another class without any repercussions. In everyday life, we all only think of a commodities market value when spending money. The market value being the price that capitalist put on a particular item. But this is the problem Marx was trying to unravel. This monetary value placed on commodities simultaneously depends on and hides the truth that someone was exploited by capitalist in order to make the commodities that we all want and/or need. In capitalism, commodities are able to be produced because of an exploitative economic relationship that has formed between the bourgeois and the proletariat. All capitalist desire to make commodities with surplus labor. They want a bigger return on the money they put forth to produce a commodity. That's all they want and everyone else is left to suffer. In Marx’s studies, his argument is this; Commodity fetishism has blinded us and allows capitalist to carry on with their day to day affairs of creating surplus value in a capitalist mode of production without having to confront any consequences associated with the system of exploitation on which they