Gabriela Segura-Ballar
Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Fetishism refers to the perception of the social relation involved in production not as relation among people, but as economic relation among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. In Karl Marx’s 1867’s Capital. Critique of Political Economy, the theory of commodity fetishism is presented in Volume I in the first chapter at the conclusion of the analysis of the value-form of commodities, to explain that the social organization of labor is mediated through market exchange. To explain the process where social relations between people assume the fantastic form of relation between things, Marx uses an analogy from the religious world: fetishism. For Marx (1887), fetishism “attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (1887).

Part of Marx’s critique to political economists is that some are misled by the fetishism inherent in commodities. Marx shows that fetishism of commodities has its origin in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them. For Marx (1887), a commodity is a mysterious thing:

Simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.

Massimiliano Tomba (2009) explains that “Marx is looking for a distinctive element, capable of indicating what transforms ordinary products into commodities. It is the very nature of exchange that changes in the capitalist mode of production. The fetishism of the commodity derives from this” (48-49). For Marx, the most developed perversion, the constituted fetish of capitalist society, is the relationship of capital to itself, of a thing to itself. The extreme expression of this perversion is interest bearing capital: the “most externalised and most fetish-like form” of capital (Bonefeld 2001, 3). In his analysis of Marx’s theory in commodity fetishism, Soviet Marxian economist Isaak Illich Rubin (1886-1937), argues that Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has not occupied the place which is proper to it in the Marxist economic system. For Rubin (1990), “The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of value” (5). In his introduction to I.I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, Fredy Perlman points out that Rubin’s book is a comprehensive, tightly argued exposition of the core of Marx’s work, the theory of commodity fetishism and the theory of value. Rubin clarifies misconceptions which have resulted, and still result, from superficial readings and evasive treatments of Marx’s work (Perlman 1990, xi).

As previously mentioned, Marx borrowed a concept from the religious world to explain the process wherein a social relationship of production is transformed into an object. In his essay, “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought” (2003), Argentinian/Mexican philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel provides a textual “rereading” of Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism. Dussel rereads this concept according to Marx’s scattered but significant comments on religion as they extend throughout the whole of his work. In Part I, “The Place of the Subject of Religion in the Whole Work of Marx,” Dussel demonstrates Marx’s differentiation between a critique of the essence of religion and its manifestations, arguing that there is a space in Marx for an anti-fetishized liberatory religion. In Part II, “Toward a Theory of Fetishism in General,” he provides a methodological account of such a religion, as well as a panorama of the content of this essence of religion. These accounts provide the basis for more clearly identifying both religious fetishism and the fetishist character of capital.

According to Dussel (2003b), “Marx always starts from the exteriority of living labor, of the other than capital whose supposed elimination can fetishize capital. The fetishization needs as a condition the annihilation of that which is other than capital” (102). The other than capital, the “no-capital,” is the worker. The worker is the condition of possibility of fetishization (absolutization) of the totality of capital but it is negated by capital. The negation of the worker or the negation of exteriority means the absolutizing self-affirmation of capital—the self-positioning of capital as a totality without an external relation to itself—which is the ontological base of fetishism, of value, and all of its determinations.

Thus, the negation of the other as other is the essence of the fetishistic character of capital. As Dussel (2003b) states, the “absolutization of a ‘part’ (capital) from the ‘whole’ (capital-work) constitutes the reality of the fetishist character” (106). However, capital not only negates the other but also the community of persons as the place of production which permits the constitution of capital. As Dussel (2003b) explains, “On the one hand, the other, the poor, the worker as exteriority is denied and subsumed in capital as a wage earner…On the other hand, concretely and by the dissolution of the former modes of appropriation and production, the worker isolated from his community of origin is individually and privately subsumed by capital” (104).

For Dussel (2003b), in the form of the commodity appears the fetishist character of capital where value, as the ultimate essence of capital, turns into a fetish: “it has turned into an autonomous, autonomized Power, which begins to have all the attributes of a ‘god’: a subject self-creator out of nothing, eternal, infinite in space (destroying all barriers until reaching the world market), a civilizing power, a source of freedom and equality” (107). But capital is the fetish to which the blood of human victims is offered: “the worker is sacrificed in the holocaust of the fetish” (Dussel 2003b, 118). As Dussel (2003b) argues:

For Marx capital is the fetish that accumulates human blood (value). Human blood, value, circulates in capital. And ‘in this as in religion man is dominated by the works of his own brain, in capitalist production he is dominated by the works of his own hand,’ by a ‘cannibalistic voracity of surplus labour.’ If that god made by man’s hand exists objectively to whom living work is sacrificed, the fetish demands, as true worship, the holocaust of the capitalist himself. (108)

Dussel then analyzes the fetishist character of each determination of capital. First, the fetishist character of commodity is based on the fetishist character of capital as a base now separated from every reference to living work. Second, money, the form of manifestation closest to being capital, is the determination or form of capital which by nature appears as the fetish as such. Third, work as capital: the fetishization of live work—for the capitalist and for the worker himself. “Work subsumed in capital, work as capital, is a form of the appearance of capital (as its own creative source of value), and therefore ‘work (living) is indeed identified with wage labour’, work has been fetishized by the worker himself: for him he is a commodity” (Dussel 2003b, 112). According to Dussel, the fetishization of the labour capacity is produced when it is not related to the productive labour force of living work. Thus, “The fetishization of work is the subjective constituent of the fetishization of value, of capital as such” (Dussel 2003b 113). Fourth, the means of production, especially the machine, is fetishized. As Dussel (2003b) argues, “Marx always thinks of the machine as a monster, a fetish, a dead organism that is only revived and resurrected due to living work” (114). Therefore, for Dussel (2003b), Marx “thinks anew on the fetishized means of production, as divine immortal entity in whose veins the absolute circulates (the absolutized value: not relative to work, nor to its social condition, nor to its essential exchangeability or need for realization)” (114). Fifth, the product not as product (the fruit of living work), but as capital first and secondly, capital as a fetishized product. Fetishization or false appearance are two phenomena that come from the same source: the absolutization of value. The product has a value: value refers to all the paid and unpaid labour contained in it. The fetishization of the product consists in believing that the cost price is equal to the value of the article. As Dussel explains, the fetishization of capital (of value) institutes the fetishization of the product. But on the fetishization of this hangs the fetishization of circulation.

The product would seem to have value in itself, as a thing, for that, value would have to be attributed to the product as product, and the market (fetishization of circulation with respect to production) must also be fetishized. “The fetishization of the ‘world of commodities’ of the horizon of circulation, of the market, is what establishes the ‘form of commodity (warenform)’ which all the products of capital adopt” (Dussel 2003b, 117). What the fetishization of circulation hides is the place of production as a curse: “The temple of the Beast, the fetish is the factory; it is the place of the death of the worker and of his exploitation, like a hell” (Dussel 2003b, 118). As Dussel (2003b) argues, “for Marx there is a superficial fetishized level of circulation where it would seem that profit is generated (more value from capital itself) and the other term of the relationship is denied and hidden: the productive process, the deep level. Again fetishization, like absolutization, is to deny one term of a relation by autonomizing the other (in this case circulation, the market)” (119). As Dussel (2003b) explains:

The invisibility of the origin, of the reality and explanation of invisible phenomena permits the fetishization of value (of capital); it is the foundation for such an ideological mechanism. Thus the enigma, the mystery, the mystification, the fetishization of all the determinations of capital and especially profit is possible because everything is situated on the mere horizon of circulation. The fetishization of circulation is an ontological horizon from whence is known that everything that is presented in the capitalist system as the origin of the mechanism of ideologizing the capitalist political economy. By ignoring the production process (where the surplus value is produced), circulation is absolutized. The law of value becomes the law of reality. The totality of capital and circulation has denied the outward appearance of living work and production. (119-120)

Finally, Dussel refers to the progressive fetishization of the valorization process. Capital which yields interest is not related directly to the work which produces surplus value and presents to view the character of a capital that creates new capital, value which produces value from itself. According to Dussel (2003b):

To the false consciousness, interest would seem to be the fruit of money: value created from nothing by the power of capital. God on earth, fetish, Moloch—inasmuch as, in reality, the life of such a fetish is the blood of workers offered in the holocaust of the accumulation of value. Fetishized, autonomized or absolutized (separated from the relation where it is only a term) we reach the final consequence of this “secular” or “worldly religion”…Behind fetishized capital, land and wage labor, is the fetishization of value as such—as the origin of these three fetishes, these three gods, this worldly, secular trinity like the three faces of Moloch, the Beast, like the parody of an inverted Christianity…Each fetish, each face of Moloch has its fruit, its pleasure, its pay and all by virtue of their own value: capital, the profit; land, the rent; and wage labor, its salary…All these fetishized forms (separated from their origin) hide their base: the living work or labor that has created them. The denial of the relation to living work or labor is the origin and possibility of their fetishization. (121)

Marx unveils capital, commodity, money, etc., as religious gods or divine forms. For this reason, Dussel considers that Marx develops a religious critique of political economy. As Dussel (2003b) explains, “In the strict sense Marx makes a religious critique of political economy; that is, he uncovers the mechanisms of domination of capitalism as fetishist structures that are demoniacal, satanic and idolatrous. The ‘fetishist character’ of capital is precisely its strict religious statute” (122).

Bibliography

Bonefeld, Werner. “The Permanence of Primitive Accumulation: Commodity Fetishism and Social Constitution.” The Commoner 2 (2001), http://www.commoner.org.uk/02bonefeld.pdf

Dussel, Enrique. “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought: Part I of II.” Radical Philosophy Review 6, no. 1 (2003): 1-28.

Dussel, Enrique. “The Concept of Fetishism in Marx’s Thought: Part II of II.” Radical Philosophy Review 6, 2 (2003): 93-129.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Critique of Political Economy, Volume I (1887). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf

Perlman, Fredy. “Introduction: Commodity Fetishism.” In Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, edited by Isaak I. Rubin. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990.

Rubin, Isaak I. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990.

Tomba, Massimiliano. “Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective.” Historical Materialism 17, no. 4 (2009): 44–65.