What is Commodity Fetishism?

I have been taking a class not-for-credit in Marx's Capital. It is a graduate class and is fairly advanced and led by an excellent professor who is a prominent scholar in Marx's economics. The class has been spending a good deal of time on the fine grained detail of the first chapter which focuses on the commodity and the second chapter which examines money.

I have been quiet up till now in the class because I have been perplexed and yet also deeply curious. I’m taking the class for its use value not for its exchange value for a grade or as part of a credential so I've had the liberty to be silent and the responsibility not to burden the discussion until I felt I had discovered something.

Some questions have come up in class that are perplexing when looked at individually, but are somehow suddenly clarifying as I think of them together. The questions are:

What is use value?
What does use value have to do with labor?
Is happiness the ultimate value?
What is labor?

This community of questions began to act as pieces of a puzzle which merged to reveal a more fully whole concept of commodity fetishism.

Marx starts with an emphasis on the commodity because it is capitalism's fetish. However, if we are to understand the meaning and limit of society apart from capitalism we must start instead with labor. Labor transcends commodities. Labor is anything done in a society that aids in survival, well-being, or civilization. Labor may not result in a commodity or even a product. Labor can be cleaning, or teaching, talking, or maintaining optimal conditions on a farm or in a garden. In short, labor can take many forms of supporting human relationship within the natural world. It may take the form of tending one another and the world as well as making objects.

But capitalism is an “ism” because it has, in a cult-like way, chosen to privilege the labor of producing commodities over all other forms of labor. We have discussed how commodities differ from products in that products are items that are produced for the producer's use value and surplus products are not "commodities" because they are accidental commodities as opposed to deliberate ones. One year you may have a bumper crop and need to either preserve or exchange the excess so as to take advantage of its surplus value. This could really help your community get through a year of drought or pest adversities. Surplus smooths over the vicissitudes of these natural fluctuations.

The point is that labor is a much larger category than work that leads to the creation of any items whether they are products or commodities. (But products inhabit the larger world of labor as opposed to commodities which belong to the specific world of capitalism.) So, what is commodity fetishism? It is the reductive and intensive focus on the production of commodities. Labor within capitalism is narrowly conceived as the necessary power or force to generate commodities in conjunction with necessary spaces, equipment, and material.
Commodities are the preferred form of labor investment because it is has a special ability or propensity to be easily exchanged for money and profit compared with the larger world of labor and its use value. Within capitalism, exchange value is preferred and pursued intensively over use value.

The particular instance of labor and use value has become overcome its particularity and emerged triumphant. The implication is here already in the early chapters that the social result of the dominant economic model pursuing this strategy is that, while capitalism is a specialist and pretty good at generating surplus capital, it operates in a tunnel. It excludes from consideration any labor that is producing social goods of all kinds especially those that do not result in items. Even the word "goods" has semantically narrowed to refer to items, not necessarily ends. So, happiness under capitalism is not the ultimate value. Happiness is the satisfaction of survival needs, well being, and positive social relations. These accrue from the use value of labor broadly defined. But, capitalism does not pursue happiness as its end. Capitalism pursues exchange value as the ultimate end. The substitution of exchange value as ultimate value i.e., as an end, results in a paradox. The paradox is that in order for exchange value to be an end it must not end; it must keep being exchanged by definition. So, in order for exchange value to be an end in itself, it must not end. Its end is to keep going.

Commodity fetishism is the rejection of happiness as an end. Commodity fetishism is the decision to privilege commodity production and exchange as the most important concentration of human effort. Commodity fetishism is ultimately exchange fetishism-- casting exchange as an end which can have no end. It entails a faith, perhaps unconscious, that exchange is eternal and can somehow put the commodity fetishist in touch with eternity. The fetishist wishes to turn the commodity into money and thus to slip the bonds of the material into the near infinite possibility of pure exchange value. Fetishism comprises both obsession and the attributing of numinous value. Marx would view this as superstitious because, while engaged in this narrow obsession, it loses its grasp of society operating as a whole pursuing survival, well being, and some sort of civilization. Commodity fetishism is barbaric because it is a force unable to articulate its power in the language of civilization.