Letters from Tomis

Introduction

The Marxist concept of commodity fetishism describes a peculiar condition in capitalist society where the social relationships and labor that underlie production are obscured, and commodities are imbued with an illusory, independent value or power. Karl Marx famously wrote that under capitalism “a definite social relation between men…assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” In other words, people come to treat goods and market exchange as if these objects and prices have intrinsic value and agency, rather than recognizing them as products of human labor and social relations. This essay explores Marx’s original notion of commodity fetishism and critically examines how it has been interpreted and extended by contemporary Marxist theorists, with a focus on the digital commodities of today’s capitalism. In the digital era – marked by commodities like data, virtual goods, and platform services – the dynamics of fetishism take on new forms. Drawing on insights from Slavoj Žižek, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson, we analyze how digital commodities embody or transform the fetishism that Marx described. We will see that while technology has changed the form of commodities, the mystification of social relations that Marx identified is arguably more pervasive than ever, manifesting in everything from social media “likes” to the monetization of personal data. The discussion proceeds with an overview of Marx’s theory, followed by contemporary reinterpretations, and then a critical analysis of digital commodities under the lens of commodity fetishism in late capitalism.

Marx’s Theory of Commodity Fetishism

In Capital, Volume I (1867), Marx introduced commodity fetishism to explain how the exchange-value of commodities (their price or market value) comes to overshadow and mystify their use-value and the labor that produced them. A commodity’s value, Marx argued, is not a natural property of the thing itself but a reflection of the human labor and social relations behind it. However, in a market-driven society, this origin becomes invisible – commodities appear on store shelves (or webpages) with price tags that seem to emanate from the objects themselves. Marx drew an analogy with religious fetishes: just as devotees attribute supernatural powers to a carved idol that they themselves created, consumers and producers under capitalism attribute inherent value and agency to commodities. We “forget” that it is human labor and social organization that give products their value, and instead treat commodities as if they have value sui generis. In Marx’s words, the products of labor are “treated as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own”, and the social character of labor is “reflected back to us as the intrinsic value of things.” This mystification has real effects: it reinforces alienation (workers and consumers remain unaware of their interconnected roles) and buttresses capitalist ideology by making exploitation less visible.

Marx’s analysis emphasizes that commodity fetishism is not a mere illusion in individual minds, but a structural reality of the market. As later commentators note, Marx did not consider fetishism simply a mistaken belief – it arises objectively from the way production and exchange are organized. The value of a commodity appears to be an objective fact (e.g. a $1000 smartphone seems “naturally” worth $1000) even though that value is actually a crystallization of many hidden inputs: miners extracting rare minerals, factory workers assembling components, engineers designing hardware, and so on. Because these real relations are hidden, commodities can “achieve fantastical powers” in the public imagination. We begin to treat commodities as if they directly bear social qualities: for example, owning a luxury car might be seen as conveying prestige or personality, as if the object itself carries these human attributes. This classic form of fetishism was a key insight for Marx in diagnosing how capitalism “naturalizes” its social order.

Contemporary Marxist Perspectives on Fetishism

Marx’s theory has been revisited and expanded by many Marxist thinkers. Slavoj Žižek, David Harvey, and Fredric Jameson are among those who have offered influential interpretations, connecting commodity fetishism to culture, ideology, and the new forms of capitalism. Each provides a lens to understand how fetishism operates in contemporary society – including the digital sphere – often extending Marx’s insights beyond the 19th-century industrial context.

Slavoj Žižek: The “Virtual Soul” of the Commodity

Slavoj Žižek, a contemporary Slovenian philosopher, frequently returns to Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism as a starting point for analyzing capitalist ideology. Žižek emphasizes the form of the commodity rather than its material content: what fascinates us is not the physical object but the abstract value and symbolic aura it carries. He notes that Marx “suggests that the most intimate core of the commodity is to be found in its form rather than in its empirical content.” In Žižek’s analysis, commodities possess a “virtual soul” – an intangible allure or social signification that captivates desire and keeps us chasing new products. This recalls Marx’s idea of the commodity as a “sublime object,” something that, beyond its utility, embodies an undefined social value that we almost religiously esteem.

Žižek builds on this by linking fetishism to ideology and psychoanalysis. He argues that people may consciously recognize that a commodity’s value is a social construct, yet they behave as if the commodity had intrinsic worth – a phenomenon he terms “fetishistic disavowal.” We might “know very well” that, say, a luxury brand handbag is just a sewn piece of leather and status hype, but we “nonetheless” treat it as if it had magical properties of prestige. This cynical distance (knowing the truth but acting as if one doesn’t) is, according to Žižek, a hallmark of modern ideology. In the context of digital commodities, one could argue similarly: many users know that their social media habits are exploitative or that online metrics (likes, followers) are ultimately arbitrary, yet these digital tokens exert real power over behavior – they are fetishized as indicators of social worth. Žižek’s perspective thus helps explain how desire is organized around commodities even when their mystified nature is partly understood. The empty core of the commodity – its lack of inherent value – paradoxically becomes the source of an endless drive, since consumers project their desires into that void and keep the cycle of consumption spinning. Žižek echoes Marx in noting that the real challenge is not merely to unveil the hidden labor (“the ‘hidden kernel’ of the commodity”) but to ask why our labor and social relations take on this phantom objectivity in the first place. This question becomes even more pertinent as commodities become more virtual and information-based.

David Harvey: Fetishism and the Hidden Geographies of Value

David Harvey, a Marxist economic geographer, has also underscored the enduring relevance of commodity fetishism, especially as capitalism evolves globally and technologically. Harvey’s work often highlights how spatial and temporal distances in modern capitalism amplify the mystification that Marx described. In today’s world, a single commodity (like a smartphone or an e-commerce delivery) may involve design in California, mineral extraction in Congo, assembly in China, and distribution through a global logistics network – a web of social labor so vast and complex that no consumer could directly perceive it. This “annihilation of space by time” (as Harvey terms the speed-up of global exchange) means consumers encounter commodities with almost no sense of the human and natural realities behind them. The result is an even deeper fetishism: individuals relate to commodities and prices as self-evident facts, while the “true value” – the collective human labor and environmental cost – is concealed. Harvey often points out, for example, that we can walk into a café and purchase a cup of coffee in blissful ignorance of the entire chain of coffee farmers, middlemen, and precarious labor that brought it to us, not to mention the political-economic forces (trade agreements, price speculation) that determined its price. The commodity (the cup of coffee) appears to have a life and value of its own, obscuring the global relations of production – a quintessential case of Marx’s fetishism in action.

Moreover, Harvey extends the idea of fetishism to capital and technology themselves. Under neoliberal capitalism, society tends to fetishize markets, money, and tech innovations as if they are autonomous, almost sentient forces driving progress. For instance, talk of “market forces” or reverence for Silicon Valley entrepreneurship often treats these phenomena as magical or inevitable, masking the class relations and policy choices that actually shape economic outcomes. Harvey’s notion of “accumulation by dispossession” is relevant here: he argues that new forms of commodification (such as privatizing public goods or, in the digital realm, appropriating personal data) extend capitalist accumulation into every corner of life. In doing so, they create new fetish-objects – e.g. viewing personal data as a priceless asset in itself, without recognizing how that data is extracted from users’ social activities. Harvey would likely note that the digital economy’s treasures (big data, algorithms, platforms worth trillions) are saturated with fetishism: they are valued and traded as if inherent assets, while the social interactions, user labor, and material infrastructure (servers, rare-earth minerals, underpaid clickworkers) enabling them remain out of sight. Thus, Harvey helps us see that the core of Marx’s insight – the masking of human labor – persists in contemporary capitalism, perhaps in even more elaborate guises. We treat complex financial instruments, digital currencies, and tech platforms as though they autonomously “generate” value, forgetting Marx’s warning that value is always a product of human work and nature, appropriated under specific social conditions.

Fredric Jameson: Fetishism in the Culture of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson, a Marxist cultural critic, offers another angle by linking commodity fetishism to the cultural and informational dynamics of late capitalism. In his landmark work Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Jameson discusses how in the postmodern era, culture itself becomes profoundly commodified. One of Jameson’s observations is the “reification of information and knowledge” in late capitalism. Knowledge – which in pre-capitalist times might have been considered a personal attribute or a use-value for a community – is now often treated as a commodity to be packaged, sold, and consumed. He draws a distinction between authentic experience (direct, lived knowledge) and “counterfeit” or vicarious experience (mediated through mass media and commodities). In a world saturated by mass media and digital communications, people increasingly obtain their sense of reality second-hand, via commodified images, digital content, and simulation. This corresponds to a kind of fetishism of signs and images: the appearance of things (their image or brand) can supplant their material reality. Jameson’s famous description of postmodern culture as “depthless,” focused on surfaces and instant sensations, resonates with Marx’s fetishism – the surface value of the commodity eclipses its deeper context (history, production, function).

In the digital context, Jameson’s ideas help explain phenomena like the virtual “experiences” sold by entertainment and social media industries. Consider virtual goods (such as in-game items or skins, NFTs, etc.): these are pure signs with price tags, often eagerly purchased despite having no material existence. The fetish here is almost literal – value is attached to a string of code or a digital image, and any connection to labor or use-value is abstracted away. Jameson might argue that late capitalism’s commodification of culture leads to a situation where even our social interactions and personal expressions become commodities for exchange, especially on digital platforms. Social media profiles, status updates, and personal data are objectified and monetized, turning personal life into a spectacle for profit. This blurring of reality and commodity can be seen as an extension of commodity fetishism: the lines between authentic social relations and commodity relations get increasingly hazy. We relate to each other through commodities (likes, shares, digital content), and the media of these relations (apps, platforms) present themselves as neutral or benevolent things, even as they transform our behavior for profit. In Jameson’s terms, the distinction between genuine use and commodified experience collapses – everything becomes filtered through the market form, reinforcing the fetishistic perception that value inheres in the commodities (the platforms, the content) rather than in human purposes or needs.

Digital Commodities and the Fetishism of the Digital Age

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by digital commodities – intangible goods and services like data, software, virtual items, and platform-mediated services. These pose new questions for Marx’s old concept: Do these digital commodities simply continue the tradition of commodity fetishism, or do they transform it? Evidence suggests that the core dynamic Marx identified – the masking of social relations – not only persists but in many ways intensifies in the digital era. In platforms and virtual markets, the commodity form becomes more abstract, and thus the fetish more beguiling. The following are key realms of digital commodification and how they exemplify commodity fetishism:

• Personal Data as Commodity: In the age of surveillance capitalism, personal data (information about our behaviors, preferences, and interactions) has become a highly prized commodity. Tech corporations collect and sell user data to advertisers and analysts, effectively turning our personal lives into a product. This data is often spoken of as the “new oil” – a resource to be extracted and monetized. The fetishism here lies in treating data as an autonomous object of value, separate from the human subjects who produce it. Users of “free” online services often fail to perceive that their own personal information is being alienated (taken from them) and exchanged. The interface of a platform (say, a social media feed or a search engine) presents itself as a neutral tool or even a benevolent service, obscuring the behind-the-scenes commerce of data. Social media thrives on this commodity fetishism, reducing our digital interactions to mere data points and obscuring the human context behind their creation . The platforms fetishize data by assigning it monetary worth and decision-making power (e.g. algorithms treating data as truth), while users fetishize the platform – believing it to be a natural part of social life, not recognizing it as a profit-driven machine fueled by their data. As a result, the social relation – in this case, the exploitation of user information and attention – is hidden behind the glossy interface of an app.

• Virtual Goods and Digital Content: The rise of virtual goods (such as in-game items, virtual real estate, cryptocurrency tokens, and NFTs) provides clear examples of commodity fetishism in digital form. These items often have no tangible use-value; their value is entirely dependent on social perception and artificial scarcity. Yet, people spend real money on them and often attribute significant personal or cultural meaning to owning them. For instance, a rare cosmetic skin in a video game might be fetishized as a status symbol within that game’s community – it bestows a sense of identity or prestige on its owner, much like a designer handbag might in the physical world. The social relation (competition for status, the community of players, and the labor of developers/artists who created the item) is inverted: the virtual object itself seems to possess the status and power. In the case of NFT art markets, we see buyers paying huge sums for blockchain-certified digital images. The fetishistic perception is that the NFT itself has value and uniqueness – whereas in reality its value comes from a network of social agreements (on the legitimacy of blockchain records, the artist’s reputation, market hype) and from the labor of maintaining the blockchain. This recalls Marx’s analysis of money as a universal equivalent that takes on a life of its own. Today, digital tokens and cryptocurrencies intensify that phenomenon: they are literally code that we treat as valuable property, and their market prices fluctuate wildly based on speculative social sentiment. Participants may be dimly aware that these are social constructs, yet act as if each token had a natural “spirit” of value – a new form of fetish, residing in bits and bytes.

• Platform Services (“Everything-as-a-Service”): Digital platforms like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and others commodify services via apps, often presenting themselves as mere technological intermediaries. The term “platform” itself contributes to fetishism: it evokes a neutral technical infrastructure rather than a traditional company or employer. Users of Uber, for example, request rides through a slick app interface that makes the transaction feel almost like magic – press a button and a car appears. The labor of the driver, the ownership of the car, the algorithmic management by Uber, even the regulatory and tax structures enabling the service, all fade into the background. This is an instance of what some scholars call “digital fetishism”: the tendency to attribute the productive power of a service to the technology itself rather than to the people behind it. The social relations of production – the gig worker’s labor, the company’s control over labor and price – become submerged in the digital commodity (the ride service), which presents its value (a convenient trip from A to B) as intrinsic and tech-generated. Similarly, Amazon’s e-commerce service fetishizes convenience: from the consumer’s viewpoint, a desired item simply arrives at the doorstep as if delivered by the market god, while the warehouse workers’ labor, the delivery driver’s rush, and the global supply chain are invisible. Major technology companies have cultivated this new kind of commodity fetishism, wherein the digital process is opaque but the outcome is instant gratification. Even the very format of an app store or streaming platform – offering a buffet of choices at one’s fingertips – encourages users to see content or services as just-on-demand things, divorced from their production context. This dynamic reflects what Marx called the “secret” of commodity fetishism: the transformation of social labor into the appearance of an object’s intrinsic value.

It is important to note that digital commodity fetishism can also create novel forms of awareness and resistance, although these often remain marginal. The very immateriality of digital goods sometimes makes the question “what am I really paying for?” more obvious, potentially provoking curiosity about underlying relations. For example, campaigns revealing the exploitation of content moderators at Facebook or the CO2 footprint of streaming a video attempt to pierce the digital veil and remind consumers of the human and material substrates of their digital habits. Some theorists, like those in the critical media studies tradition, hope that the internet could be used to de-fetishize commodities by informing consumers about production conditions. However, thus far the dominant trend has been that digital technology extends commodification into new realms (personal time, social interactions, even biological data) faster than awareness can keep up. Social media illustrates this tension vividly. On one hand, it is common knowledge that platforms like Facebook or TikTok monetize user data and content – the adage “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” circulates widely. On the other hand, this knowledge often remains abstract. In practice, users engage with social media as if the platform were a neutral social space or a fun pastime, effectively disavowing the exploitative relation. The design of these platforms encourages fetishistic engagement: features like “likes,” “followers,” and gamified feedback create an almost religious devotion to quantifiable metrics, as users chase these digital tokens of approval. These metrics can be seen as fetish-objects – numbers that take on a social life, driving user behavior and even self-esteem, all while masking the fact that increased engagement directly translates into profit for the platform owners. As one analysis notes, social media’s system of quantified popularity “creates a drive for popularity that in turn promotes further input of free intellectual labor…in order to compete,” exemplified by users striving for more friends or followers, which ultimately benefits the platform economically. The user’s relationship to their own social activity becomes mediated by the commodity form (the data and the metrics), showing how deeply commodity fetishism can penetrate personal life in digital capitalism.

Critical Analysis: Continuity and Transformation of Fetishism

The above exploration shows that commodity fetishism is far from obsolete in our high-tech world. If anything, the shift to digital commodities has transformed the ways fetishism manifests, while preserving its essence. Marx’s original insight – that under capitalism people relate to each other through things, and thereby grant those things a mystified power – remains a powerful tool for understanding phenomena like smartphone obsession, big data hype, or virtual currency speculation. Contemporary Marxist philosophers provide complementary interpretations that help us grasp these new realities. Žižek’s focus on the ideological enjoyment of commodities illuminates why digital consumers can know the pitfalls of, say, a data-harvesting app, yet still compulsively use it; the “virtual” aspect of commodity value that he emphasizes is literally evident in digital goods, which are nothing but virtual form given value. Harvey’s stress on the hidden geographies and processes behind commodities is highly relevant when servers in distant data centers and workers in global supply chains are even less visible to the consumer than the factory workers of Marx’s day. And Jameson’s analysis of a culture wherein image and reality blur helps explain why in digital culture the line between commodities and social life has thinned – with people treating brand identities, digital profiles, and streamed experiences as natural extensions of themselves.

At the same time, digital commodities introduce ambiguities that require us to update Marx’s framework. One complexity is the question of labor: in many digital commodities, the role of labor is unconventional (e.g. the user is also a producer, as with user-generated content). Marx assumed commodities are produced by workers selling their labor power to capitalists, but on social media, users “labor” without a wage to produce content that becomes the commodity (their attention and data sold to advertisers). This blurred producer-consumer role might seem to depart from classical commodity production, yet the fetishism effect is similar or even heightened – users do not see themselves as laborers at all, but simply as consumers or participants, which perfectly conceals the appropriation of value. Thus, the digital era extends fetishism not by eliminating the trace of labor alone, but by recruiting the very subjects of labor into the illusion (we are made to think we are just having fun, while value is extracted).

Another transformation is the speed and scope of fetishism. Financial markets now trade commodities (including digital ones) at lightning speed and in enormous volumes, using algorithms. This can create extreme disconnections between an asset’s price and any tangible reality – consider the volatile values of cryptocurrencies or meme stocks that gain worth primarily through viral online attention. Such phenomena could be seen as hyper-fetishism, where the fetish (price, number, token) completely dominates perception, and any grounding in use-value or actual social benefit is lost. Fredric Jameson once described postmodern capitalism as characterized by a kind of “derealization” of the world – a domination of appearances and information over material substance. The digital commodity exemplifies this: value floats in a cybernetic space of exchanges, while the material bases (minerals, servers, human operators) are ghostlike, rarely considered. This is not to say that material production has disappeared – on the contrary, it undergirds everything – but our consciousness and culture are further removed from it, dwelling instead in a realm of digital appearances.

Nonetheless, the concept of commodity fetishism remains robust for critiquing these developments. It reminds us that behind every digital commodity is a social story. A streaming music track on Spotify may seem like an ephemeral good delivered by a platform, but it is also the product of human creativity and labor (the artist, sound engineers), technical work (the app developers, server maintenance), and new exploitative relations (the meager royalties artists receive per stream, the data profiling of listeners). Commodity fetishism analysis urges us to demystify these processes – to see the social relations where they have been made invisible. Contemporary Marxist theorists, by applying Marx’s lens to today’s world, encourage critical awareness of how fetishism adapts but also how it might be resisted. For example, recognizing social media likes and followers as a form of fetishism (a point implied by several theorists ) can be the first step toward reducing their power over us. Likewise, viewing personal data not as a mysterious asset but as our collective product might inspire demands for data rights or equitable data dividends.

Conclusion

Commodity fetishism, as conceived by Marx, remains a key concept for understanding the mystifications of contemporary capitalism – perhaps even more so in the realm of digital commodities. The fetishism of commodities in Marx’s analysis was about how social relations between people take on the appearance of relations between things. In today’s digital economy, this process is in full force: relations between people (users, developers, advertisers, platform owners) are mediated by and appear as relations with things – whether those “things” are smartphones, apps, digital content, or data streams. The specific form of the fetish has evolved: the commodity’s “fantastic form” can be a line of code, a virtual image, or an algorithmic score. Yet the effect is the same: we are beguiled by the commodity’s appearance and forget the human story behind it. Contemporary Marxist thinkers like Žižek, Harvey, and Jameson help articulate this condition. Žižek directs attention to how we psychologically invest in the virtual dimension of commodities, Harvey reminds us of the concrete labor and ecology veiled by abstract exchange, and Jameson illuminates the cultural and experiential implications of living in a world of commodified information. Their insights converge on a critical point: digital capitalism has not escaped the logic of commodity fetishism but has deepened it, extending its reach into our data, our creativity, and our social connections.

Understanding commodity fetishism in the digital age is not only an academic exercise but also a step toward demystifying our economy and society. By revealing how digital commodities embody the social relations of exploitation, alienation, and profit – even when those relations are hidden behind a friendly user interface – we gain the conceptual tools to challenge the status quo. The task for critical theory and practice is to make visible the invisible, to pierce the “fantastic form” of digital commodities and show that human hands (and minds) still make and shape these new worlds. As Marx would remind us, the enchantment of the commodity can be dispelled once we recognize it as our own collective product . In an era when life is increasingly lived through digital commodities, reclaiming that recognition is more urgent than ever.