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The Fetishism of Commodities

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Abstract

The ghostly presence of Karl Marx has been haunting these pages. So, as we now enter into the mystifying territory that he identified as “commodity fetishism,” it seems fitting that I should once again summon up his words. “All our inventions and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life and stultifying human life with a material force.”1 This statement served as a background for several of my previous discussions of the fetishism strategy. Now I will be bringing Marx’s words into the foreground, linking them with his meditation on “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” the title of the fourth section of Chapter One of his magnum opus, Capital.2

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© 2006 Louise J. Kaplan

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Kaplan, L.J. (2006). The Fetishism of Commodities. In: Cultures of Fetishism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601208_8

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