Abstract

Commodity fetishism and the fetish of capital as an effect of western civilisation. Marx was aware that economic categories do not live an autonomous conceptual life, that they presuppose, in particular, the material and practical relations which humanity, as an organic living species, establishes with non-human nature. Such relations are to be examined in terms of their development in various historical and geographical milieus. The aim of the article is to highlight the importance of such variable conditioning. To do so, it addresses the categories of fetishism and value, looking at the quantitative orientation of the production of material goods which has developed in western-type civilisation over the last 5,000 years.