‘‘for its own immediate consumption.’’ In the commodity form, ‘‘the product
becomes increasingly one-sided.... [I]ts immediate use-value for the gra-
tiWcation of the needs of its producer appears wholly adventitious, immater-
ial, and inessential’’ (Marx 1977 , 952 – 3 ). CommodiWcation thushomogenizes
objects, destroying their ‘‘sensuously varied objectivity as articles of utility’’
(Marx 1977 , 166 ) and reduces them to equivalent units of exchange. Marx
presents this alchemy, through which unequal things are made equal, as a
sinister process (Jameson 1991 , 233 ).
It is sinister not only because people are deprived of ‘‘sensuously varied
objectivity,’’ but also because, as commodiWed entities themselves, people
(workers) come to be treated as mere objects. This objectiWcation of labor
is what makes proWt possible: although a portion of labor is indeed
‘‘exchanged for the equivalent of the worker’s wages; another portion is
appropriated by the capitalist without any equivalent being paid’’ (Marx
1977 , 953 ). The masking of this swindle is the most pernicious eVect of
modernity.
Second to that is its unnatural animation of artifacts. Marx compares the
tromp l’oeilof commodiWcation to the mystiWcation perpetrated by religions:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists... in the fact that the
commodity reXects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective
characteristics of the products of labour themselves.... In order... toWnd an
analogy we must takeXight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of
the human brain appear as autonomousWgures endowed with a life of their own.
(Marx 1977 , 163 – 5 )
In capitalism as in theism, nonhuman entities are empowered and humans
are deadened.
Thus, commodityfetishism: the idolatry of consumption goods. This is an
irrationality quite at home in the modern, rational self. Under its sway, the
human suVering embedded in commodities (by virtue of their exploitative
system of production) is obscured, and mere things gain hegemony as they
dominate attention and determine desire. Commodity fetishism is moder-
nity’s relapse into primitivism, into the superstition that ‘‘an ‘inanimate
object’ will give up its natural character in order to comply with [one’s]...
desires’’ (Marx 1975 , 189 ).
Here again the Eurocentric tenor of the story comes to the fore: the
negative force of the phrase ‘‘commodity fetishism’’ derives in part from an
image of the repulsive non-European savage. More speciWcally, the primitive
is aligned with the negro, the negro with pagan animism, animism with
218 jane bennett