Fabricated Value
- evilponderingartic
- Oct 21, 2025
- 2 min read
Marxists believe that the time and work it takes to make a good is what gives it worth. In late capitalism, on the other hand, value is often not based on work but on ideas, how people see things, and how they can be manipulated. This "fabricated value" is the fake sense of worth that capitalism creates to keep people buying things, making money, and keeping levels of inequality high. That's not what it's based on—desire, branding, and guesswork.
Karl Marx called this "commodity fetishism," which is when everyday interactions between people turn into interactions between things. Things have a spiritual value in a capitalist society that goes beyond their usefulness. One example is an expensive watch. Its value doesn't come from the work that went into making it, but from the status and image that it brings. This is also true for digital things like NFTs or "brands" made by influencers, where the idea of being special and hard to get replaces real value. The idea that philosophy can make money is how capitalism creates value. People learn how to find worth in things that don't have any.
This false belief is necessary for capitalism to stay alive. When work doesn't bring in most of the money, gambling and symbolic trade must do the trick. Some places where fake value is made are the stock market, ads, and the internet economy. To make money without doing anything, they change the way people see things. Marx would say that this process makes alienation worse by cutting people off from two things: the effects of their work and reality itself. The worker's truth, which is what makes life real, is replaced by the show of worth without content in a society where value is made up.
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