Commodity Fetishism Again. Labour,Subjectivity and Commodities in “Supply Chains Capitalism"

The aim of this essay is to reconnect Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism and the use that he makes of this anthropological category with a general critique of global capitalist relationships. Based on Marx's anthropological insights into the concept of fetishism, it explores the political relationship between labour, subjectivity and commodities in supply chains capitalism. For this purpose, it empirically examines the materials of ethnographic research on the production of Italian companies that produce in an Eastern European country (Romania) and then sell mainly to countries in Western Europe. In this way, the spatial separation between the places where the investments are made (production) and those where profits are generated (market) becomes very clearcut, just like the alienating division between people and the products of their work. In the light of the Marxian analysis of the commodity form, this detachment will be analysed in a fragment of the productive, organisational and social mosaic of contemporary capitalism.