Carrol:
'Within capitalism relations between persons cannot appear otherwise than relations between things because that is their _real_ appearance.'

I agree, but I don't think that what Marx said on this was difficult.  He wrote, "the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as WHAT THEY REALLY ARE, material relations between persons and social relations between things." (Capital 1 p. 78). But in my experience the usual quotation provided is, "There it is a definite social relations between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things", which I think is less clear.  

But I don't think that this is because people are ignorant, but because they want to pick bits out of Marx while denying the point of his work, namely the need to transcend capitalism.  So the term commodity fetishism is torn from its context and Marx the revolutionary becomes Marx the poet.

I object to Carrol's demand that, "People should swear off using the phrase until they have read and reread Rubin on Marx."  First, it's not so difficult that we need glosses before we can talk about it. This is politics, not a rabbinic debate. Second, it reads like such an 'in' point - you don't even tell us which Rubin (there are 19,190 results on Amazon books - starting with Robert E Rubin!). I don't want to sound philistine - I'm all for reading books, especially those by I I Rubin (assume he's the one you meant?) - but we can argue about the concept in its own terms, and in a political context.

--James