I understand David Harvey's explanation of how the commodity fetish obscures the social relations and the labor in the commodity and how value is perceived to be a property of the commodity itself. However, don't people now know about labor conditions in the global south in terms of their commodities, but don't really care? Or do consumers still think that labor isn't the primary source of value even if they know that the social relations are exploitative?
Additionally, I recently read Marx's Inferno, which introduced me to the value theory of labor and its relationship to the commodity fetish. I read Rubin's book and Perlman's intro (posted elsewhere on this forum), but I'm still not entirely clear how the commodity fetish acts as a form of domination. I tried to explain this to a friend, but failed, since I don't think I fully understood how market choices are dominated by supply and demand. The assumption is that consumer demand stimulates the supply of commodities, and therefore we do have a form of deliberation in the market, but the argument is that exchange value always dominates over use-value? or that with the commodity fetish, we can't know the abstract labor until exchange, which means what, exactly? Couldn't it be argued that we do have a fair bit of knowledge about abstract labor since we do look at price fluctuations and what commodities are exchanging for before we enter the market to exchange? Or is this more about how demand is stimulated by the rich, rather than democratized? How would that relate to the fetish?
Any clarity would be most appreciated!
Quote: However, don't people
It's not about global south per se, but all workers of course. Sure, labor conditions for a product can be generally known to suck, but (for a customer) it's not known how much socially-necessary labour time (or value) the product contains. There is only the price. Not only does the labour time for a product become unknown, it becomes even irrelevant, only the price of the product matters. Price is the fetishism. It is the expression of a product's value in another thing, in money (money is itself a commodity, a thing, ultimately still gold).
In order for your needs to be met, possession of money is required. So "demand" is not your actual needs, but how much money you have. No money, no satisfaction of your needs. Further, the producers are working not to satisfy their own needs, but in order to sell their products. They become dependent on the market. Maybe it doesn't make sense to call this domination (there are no capitalists and laborers yet up to this point in Marx's analysis). Nevertheless commodity fetishism can already be criticized just for the above reasons.