But seriously, Ben’s fixation with AOC’s feet is getting kinda out of hand now

Commodity Fetishism and Money

“The first category in which bourgeois wealth presents itself is that of the commodity” – the opening sentence of Marx’s 1859 Critique and the first volume of Capital (1867).

In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism refers to the idea that under capitalism, when commodities are exchanged on the market, there is a perception that there exists a social relationship between commodities as opposed to the actual actors of the exchange (i.e. the producer, the seller). This contradiction, depersonalizes the social relations of production (there is no relationship between the American buyer of Nikes and the laborer who makes them in China) and in a way, gives commodities a life of their own. The downstream effects of this phenomena are that commodities gain some sort of “intrinsic value” in the form of a price on the market and that markets are somehow sentient beings. Think Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and its bogus insistence that markets based on commodity exchange reflect “natural behavior” and that free markets self-regulate themselves in a way that naturally moved towards “economic equilibrium.” For more details on Marx’s idea of Commodity Fetishism, you can check out this video by The Marxist Project.

There is one specific kind of commodity used to facilitate commodity exchange so that if you wanted to sell your goods, you didn’t need to go through the trouble of finding someone who happened to have the exact thing that you want to trade them for. That’s right, it’s money baby. But how does a commodity become money? It’s a gentle mix of having the right physical properties and a lot fetishism.