Commodity Fetishism is the idea that under capitalism (at least) the understanding of where and how commodities are produced is severed. We relate to commodities not as things that have a certain quantifiable amount of labour time embodied in them (that someone in South America spent some time mining this ore that was then processed by a facility in Mexico that was then shipped by a team of people at a dock to China where it was further processed by another team of people into a component part of a computer chip for example), but instead as ‘fetishes’, magical idols that simply appear before us that we want for their use-value, but do not think about why it costs what it costs to purchase.

Its link to the climate crisis is that if we’re overwhelmingly severed from where and how our various commodities we consume to live a nice life are produced (in the global North especially), then we’re less likely to get upset, panic or fight-back for the fact that this bit of fruit or that phone took the rape and destruction of some town in Africa or Central America, and that the workers who had a hand in producing those things get paid pennies on the dollar of what it cost us. If we can continue life just consuming commodities without worry or care, then we can walk straight into a climate crisis orchestrated by the capitalist class. The class who are making the active decision to destroy the planet in pursuit of profit, and the active decision to ruin and crush the working classes of the Global South in particular.

EDIT: I should be a little more explicit in my original point on Commodity Fetishism too. I intimated it via the example I gave, but more than just not understanding a commodity as a embodiment of a given amount of labour time, Marx talks about the commodity as a collection of social relations that are obscured under capitalism.

Given other people tried to explain as well, I’ll try to do this more succinctly. We are in a market society, right? We sell our work, and the companies we work for sell commodities (or commoditized services). Then with the money we buy commodities that satisfy our wants, right? (Basically, the C-M-C circuit in the Capital). Our social relations in our current society are of buyers and sellers. When we buy stuff or when other people buy stuff, we are actually maintaining a social relation with other people, which don’t happen directly, but happen by the intermediation of commodities. Here we see an inversion, an interaction between people become an interaction between things.

However capitalism requires accumulation (increasing capital). They need to do so, in order to develop their own capital. The capital exists not only to satisfy more of the capitalist wants, but to increase the constant part of capital (automation, processes, machinery). They need this because the competitive nature of the market drives them to outcompete other capitalists in the same sector, or to compete against new developing sectors in the capitalist economy that intend to make them obsolete (think about Google developing their own models and integrating it in its own search bar, to fight the influence of ChatGPT replacing Google search; or streaming services like Netflix battling against cable-tv providers in the past; or oil companies battling renewable energy companies and forcing industry to rely on fossil fuel). But in this competition and capital accumulation process, there’s another inversion. Capital dictates the capitalists. They end up in this never ending number maxing game because competition drives them towards it.

So that’s what commodity fetishism is about. The things we produce dictate our relationships. And capital dictates the course of production and distribution, not our own free will. In other words, the freedom that pro-capitalism supporters advocate for is actually their own prison. And they are so immersed in the process that they don’t even realize it.

So, with our deteriorating environment, our society is so dominated by this logic of capital accumulation that it’s even affecting our reproduction as society. We are not producing things to satisfy our needs, we are producing because capitalism dictates us to do so. So we don’t even care that we destroy the very things that make our very life sustainable. Capital becomes an end on itself.

No one thinks about it. Consumption can be an addiction, like sex, drugs, alcohol, chemically engineered not-food, scrolling, exercise, TV. And Westerners are addicted to consuming, like people get addicted to banging dope.

I met a lovely person who has several children and a spouse , cooks whole food to manage allergies and other tricky medical conditions, works full time, often with a two-hour commute, gets up before 4:00 to get to the gym and buys stuff. Expensive stuff, so it lasts, stuff for the kids, stuff to cook, stuff to clean, vehicles because with that kind of a commute and kids medical. I don’t know what all else, I’ve met them once, while doing an errand.

Could you go a little into the details of how commodity fetishism connects to climate destruction for the less well-read of us?

Commodity fetishism is about masking the relation between people (for example between the producer and the one that owns the producer’s labour) with the product and thinking the worth of a product is from the object itself. It may lead to hoarding of wealth but that’s an effect of the above relationship.

Climate change is because the above relationship is self produced through the concentration of profit to buy more labour-power, so the external costs such as the negative effects of carbon dioxide production does not have sufficient negative feedback within the short term into the above relationship ie the relationship continues despite the ill effect it may have long term on the labourer (as a class).

Takeaway: everytime you see a problem assigned to an “object” (tangible or not), try to unmask the relationship between classes of people that object embodies.