Jessica Laskey – Commodity Fetishism

While I was sitting in my “Children, Toys and Media” class this morning, my professor began talking about commodity fetishism. I thought that I would share what he explained in the hope that this might help our understanding of the readings this week. This professor defined commodity fetishism as being the outcome of two separate social conditions coming together. The first social condition involves the workplace and how people earn money, or rather tokens. The second social condition is the creation of products or commodities by human labour. In the act of buying a commodity, these two separate social conditions and social relationships are meeting and becoming intertwined. People are exchanging their earned money (tokens) for products that have been produced. He went on to further talk about how this relationship can be described as magical. Buying commodities becomes alluring for consumers, and they find themselves hooked on experiencing the encounter between these two social conditions.