In the world of commodities, fetishism arises because of the unusual social traits of labor that generate or produce such commodities. For instance, at first sight, any commodity emerges as an obvious and unimportant object. However, commodities are just theological refinements.
There is nothing strange about any given commodity as far as its uses and values are concerned. Whether the commodities are considered from the point of view that human needs are satisfied by the properties of such a product, or the commodity assumes the properties which human labor produces, everything clearly explains itself. In fact, it is apparent that, man through his activities, is capable of changing the form in which natural materials exist to any state that he sees them to be very valuable or useful to all creatures, including him.
For example, when chairs are made of wood, the state of wood can be said to have been altered. Nonetheless, chairs continue to be in an ordinary state of wood, but it is now seen as an opulent or anesthetic object. Thus, immediately timber or wood is turned into a commodity, the product transcends richness.
It cannot just position itself on the floor with its legs. If linked to several other wares, chairs come from men carpentry schemes. Commodities only seem to be wonderful because of the brain men use to transform natural materials into finished products, and they do not just emerge from their own free will.
Commodities, therefore, have mystical characters that do not result from their uses and values. While they proceed from the values of natural determinants, whatever might be considered their forms and nature, come from the use of sense organs, muscles, nerves, and brain.
The value of productive activities and labor may be varied, but they stem from the functioning of human organisms, and all individual operations lead to the generation of commodities. Concerning the basis of quantitative value determination, such as labor quantity or expenditure duration, it still emanates that this is obviously diverse from the observed quality.
In every situation, the costs of labor and time needed to produce commodities or modes of life must unavoidably concern human beings. However, the incurred cost associated with the involvement of people is dissimilar from different commodities’ developmental stages. Finally, immediately human beings instigate working for one another, their labors equally assume the social status and form.
This leaves us with a question that needs to be answered; when then does the enigmatic labor product character arise immediately it presumes the commodity form? An answer to this question is quite direct. The traits of labor product results from the product form itself.
In fact, the natural states of human efforts that are equal tend to assume the material status in comparable impartial values of work supplies. Moreover, the association is made apparent by the fact that, the measure of human labor expenditure by its duration, assumes the degree of labor products value. Furthermore, the associations existing among different producers where the manifestation of their social labor characteristics occurs, presumes the kind of social relationships that exist between labor products.
Conversely, the objects that human beings use only become commodities since they are private individuals’ labor products. Such individuals appear to work separately from one another. Nevertheless, the communal work efforts stem from the overall personal labor.
The specific social labor characteristics are observed during product exchange because this is the only time when producers come into social contacts. This implies that, personal individual labor is manifested as a component of the total societal labor through the associations established by the exchange actions that exist between the created products and amid the producers’ mediation.
Hence, to the commodity producers, private social labor relationships just emerge as what they seem to be. That is, commodity producers appear not to have any direct social affiliations between people who work for them, but instead they have social relationships between things and material associations amid people.
Through exchange, the labor products attain their values and socially uniform detachment that is very different from being seen as utility objects. The division of labor product into value processing things and useful things only appear in practice when commodity exchanges have already attained sufficient importance and extension.
This permits valuable commodities to be produced for exchange purposes so that their useful characters are considered during the production process. In essence, from this time henceforth, the individual producers’ labor tends to acquire a dual social trait. The brains of private producers in this case reflect the dual social characters of their labor, which is depicted during products’ exchange.
Thus, the producers’ socially useful character is depicted in labor product form that also seems helpful to others. However, the social traits for different types of labor are portrayed in common form character called the values. Materially different things known as labor product are holding these values.
In conclusion, therefore, men hardly bring their respective labor products into relationships with one another like values. This is because they observe these objects as standardized human labor material integuments. This not true since when the exchange values are equated to different products, it is like equating different types of labor to human work. Product value is part of a social commodity, which men use to express themselves as an outcome of their labor.