1. Can you think of any examples of commodity fetishism in everyday speech?
People being 'worth a million'. Money 'leaving the country'. 'The markets being dismayed' by a drop in unemployment. Asking 'where will the money come from?' Talking about 'the reward to capital'. And many more.
2. How does commodity fetishism help to maintain a widespread acceptance of bourgeois ideas in the working class?
Commodity fetishism tends to limit our vision of what human beings can or should do to being the 'carriers' of higher- or lower-priced commodities, and of human interactions to 'the cash nexus'. Marx sums it up sarcastically in a passage at the end of chapter 6 (not included in Rühle).
'The sphere... within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself...'
3. How does Marx's critical analysis of commodity fetishism contribute to communist politics?
One of Marx's main purposes in Capital is to subvert common-sense ideas and to show that much that seems natural and straightforward is not so. That is why his argument can seem paradoxical, abstruse, or to be making unnecessary complications. Yet that aspect of Capital is central to one of its most practical purposes: to unchain working-class politics from the fetters of bourgeois ways of thinking. Instead of just thinking that wages are low and should be raised, Marx wants us to envisage the abolition of the wages system.
4. Can you prove the labour theory of value?
This is a tricky one. Opinions differed among the 'tutors' on the course in London. It is best, perhaps, just to quote Marx.