In Marxist philosophy, the term commodity fetishism describes the economic relationships of production and exchange as being social relationships that exist among things and not as relationships that exist among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.
Commodity fetishism: In the economics of the marketplace, the producers and the consumers of goods and services perceive each other as the money and merchandise they exchange.
A South African fetish figurine whose supernatural powers protect the owner and kin in the natural world (c. 1900)
A political poster shows gold coin as the basis of prosperity (c. 1896)
The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács developed Karl Marx's theory of commodity fetishism to develop reification theory.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of what Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought.
The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an important figure in the development of Marxism.
