Capitalist exchange abstracts objects from the real labor that produced them

Evidence

The new world of façades and exhibits, models and simulations, is certainly to be understood in relation to the wider capitalist transformation I have been describing. ‘World exhibitions are sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish’, wrote Benjamin, associating them with that ‘theological’ effect through which Marx understood power to operate in capitalist societies. The effect occurs when production for the market causes the ordinary things people produce to be treated as commodities – objects, that is, whose diverse meanings or values are made comparable and exchangeable, by supposing them each to represent the result of a certain quantity of an identical and abstract process that we call ‘production’. As a commodity, Marx explained, an object is treated as a mysterious ‘social hieroglyphic’ representing this imaginary productive process. It no longer represents to people the real labour and the real social lives of those who actually made it. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 95

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Marx’s commodity fetishism and the ‘social hieroglyphic’ concept concisely.
• ADDENDUM: The mystification of labor behind commodities parallels the tree-as-infrastructure angle of grafting-and-growth, where material production’s human inputs are erased from the finished object.
• XREF: connects to: Money as arbitrary fiction can only represent real social labour — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 612; Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 410; Capitalism breaks with prior production yet continues domination over objects — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1602 (+4 more)