Error or absurdity? A non-cognitive approach to commodity fetishism

David Andrews

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2018, vol. 25, issue 5, 738-755

Abstract: Karl Marx presented his theory of commodity fetishism as an explanation of the mysterious appearance of social relations in a system of commodity production as natural phenomena. The standard interpretation of this as a failure to perceive capitalist social relations correctly depends on a particular modern sense of ‘natural’. If classical political economy and Marx used ‘natural’ in the Aristotelian sense, commodity fetishism appears quite differently: not as a cognitive error but rather as a manner of living under commodity production, one that is not wrong but absurd, the word fetishism tying commodity production to pre-Enlightenment, preliterate peoples.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2018.1475501

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