Fetish Value

= from the book, Capital Redefined, to be contrasted with True Value

Discussion

S.A. Hamed and Barry K. Gils:

"In this book, we introduce the term ‘fetish value’ to distinguish our conception of value from that of classical political economy and its Marxian critique, encompassing Marx’s idea of (commodity) value but extending beyond it, as we will elaborate. Fetish value should not be confused with Marx’s ‘fictitious value’ that refers to ‘fictitious capital’ as its embodiment versus ‘real value’ embodied in productive capital. While keeping the notion of value within the contours of production relations, David Harvey instead prefers the notion of ‘anti-value’ (Harvey, 2018b). To avoid confusion, we have chosen to use the terms ‘fetish value’ (not to be confused with Baudrillard’s concept either) and ‘True Value’ instead.

...

As we will argue in the rest of the book, capital can be seen as ‘fetish value in motion and operation’; a form that is ‘negative’ both in function as a destructive force and in magnitude as it is a loss in true value, necessary for the survival and self-fulfillment of organized life. This approach will avoid ambiguity caused by assigning the term ‘value’ (which inherently implies normativity) to (unfree) labor under capital. Labor in its natural (un-reified, free) form is a social commons of the efficient type since the (individual) capacity for creativity and re/production is a part and product of historically formed collective coexistences. Ignoring this reality results in confusing labor (under capital), abstract or concrete, with human creative power. Therefore, as we will discuss, for the abstraction of labor out of its commoning sources (i.e., abstract labor as a reified social form of creative power susceptible to exploitation), capital has to disconnect/alienate labor from its ecological, communal, and political settings. In the capitalist mode of production, the rest of the ‘fundamental commons’ are treated as preconditions for the production of fetish value, thus making labor deprived of its access to these now peripheralized or colonized commons."

(https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/290382/1/9781003805588.pdf)