Abstract

In Marx’s analysis of the Capitalist Mode of Production and more precisely in his theory of value, the key to decipher the capitalist political and ideological practices and structures is to be found. In this context, many Marxists believed that the analysis of “commodity fetishism” in Section 1 of Volume 1 of Capital renders the basis for understanding ideological domination and political coercion under the capitalist rule. The authors argue, that “commodity fetishism” is only a preliminary notion, which allows Marx to arrive, in subsequent Sections of Capital, at the concept of the “fetishism of capital”.

1. Introduction

From the days of his youth Marx was familiar with the statements of ethnographers on the subject of fetishism and used the term in his own writings.1 Equally important was in this context the influence of Hegel.

In this paper we are not going to deal with the different meanings that the notion of fetishism acquires at different points of Marx’s work, an issue which is related to the various concepts of fetishism in political economy, political philosophy and the social sciences.3 We will focus on the analysis of commodity fetishism, in an effort to contribute to the comprehension of the different dimensions of this concept, especially in Marx’s Capital. For this purpose, we will pursue the following course: At the beginning we are going to present various Marxist approaches to the subject. Subsequently, we are going to read these approaches in the light of Marx’s analysis. In this way we will attempt to investigate if and to what extent the notion of fetishism has itself attained a fetishist function within Marxism, creating inversions, transpositions and misinterpretations, and what is actually its significance in the framework of the Marxist approach to ideology.

Marx introduced the notion of commodity fetishism in Section 4 of Chapter 1, Volume 1 of Capital, to describe the “mysterious character of the commodity-form”, which consists in the fact that “the definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things”.

Commodity fetishism has become, ever since, one of the classic themes in the Marxist bibliography. But what is interesting about these studies is primarily attributable to the fact that the analyses of fetishism are linked to issues which are controversial among Marxists, i.e. that they function as a point of departure for certain political strategies and as a symbol for them. All of which helps to explain the variety of viewpoints propounded, and the ardour of those who propound them, in the discussion on what Marx said in the section of fetishism in the first chapter of Volume 1 of Capital, which is usually considered to exhaust his theoretical deliberations on the subject.

If the philosophers and ethnographers of colonialism found themselves confronted with the methodological question of how it is possible to achieve an outward description of fetishism corresponding to the inward reality of the primitive community, Marx’s Capital is of particular interest for the way it inverts this outlook. Marx aspires to an analysis of fetishism in his own culture, that is, a fetishism in which himself is involved as an inward-looking observer. Marx portrays inward observation as externally valid, i.e. as an objective description of the phenomenon of misapprehension, in which himself is implicated.

This approach is particularly fruitful, but faces the Epimenides paradox: Should we believe someone who says he is a liar? Who is on “the neutral ground of the inward observer”? Marxism gives a variety of answers: through the dialectic of Being and Consciousness, through epistemological studies of bias and analyses of the functioning of ideology and its transcendence.

Commodity Fetishism vs. Capital Fetishism