"They do prayers to statues they own, like you would talk to houses, without knowing anything about what are gods and heroes" Heraclite
Yeah but Marx had a fetish for linen. Pretty disgusting if you ask me
“What profit is the idol when its maker has carved it, Or an image, a teacher of falsehood? For its maker trusts in his own handiwork When he fashions speechless idols."
-Book of Habakkuk
i don’t know if it’s aimed at underlining the inanimate object aspect or ownership aspect but i’m pretty it’s one of the two
Heraclitus is the founder of dialectics (at least in western philosophy?).
That quote is describing garden variety fetishism, people associating objects with gods and attributing agency to those gods over a humanity that is reduced to being confused and powerless objects through which gods might interact. That's been around for millennia.
Commodity fetishism is specifically the phenomenon of that inverted attribution of agency being applied to economic relations. That is ceasing to recognize economic activity as being a social interaction between people as subjects affecting the material world around them; and instead seeing the products of their labour as merely specific manifestations of commodities, with humans being merely passive component in the interactions between those commodities.
