Marx on Commodity and Capital Fetishism

Dickinson, Colby

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-40775-9_3

Colby Dickinson⁵

Part of the book series: Radical Theologies and Philosophies ((RADT))

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Abstract

That particular objects become fetishized and seep into each domain of everyday life—economic, religious, cultural, social-sexual, and political—is a reality Karl Marx brought to light through his intuition that the fetish-object was capable of intricate substitutions. Here, we take a look at Marx’s transposition of fetishes to understand how they retain an ambivalent structure, capable of both positive and negative valences. What subsequently develops within modern discourses is an attempt to discern how the fetish can be internally divided against itself. Along with Georg Lukács and Alphonso Lingis, we realize too how the fetishistic nature of our selves is a space allowing for the creation of new forms that permit us to move past our “competences” and into new realms of boundary-crossing forces.

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Notes

1.
Franz J. Hinkelammert, The Ideological Weapons of Death: A Theological Critique of Capitalism, trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), p. 15.
2.
Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 97.
3.
Marcia Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother: Psychoanalysis, Modernism and the Fetish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 95.
4.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Progress, 1975), pp. 20–22, 170.
5.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 94.
6.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 94.
7.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 94.
8.
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, p. 94.
9.
I would here also note how, in contradistinction to Hegel’s point, and in a way that points toward the fundamental connection between racism and fetishism that Homi K. Bhabha will take up, Anthony Paul Farley has made an interesting byway into the connection between fetishism and racism in his “The Black Body as Fetish Object (Symposium: Citizenship and its Discontents: Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination),” Oregon Law Review 76 (1997): pp. 457–535.
10.
See also the early receptions of various theories of fetishism of which Marx took notice in Lawrence Krader, ed., The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx: Studies of Morgan, Phear, Maine, Lubbock (2nd ed., Assen: Van Gorcum, 1972), pp. 342ff. We might note here too Andrew Cole’s argument that Marx’s conceptualization of the fetish-object was itself dependent on Hegel’s reading of a particular aspect of western “folk religion” that had earlier reified sacramental (Eucharistic) practices. See his brilliant chapter “The Eucharist and the Commodity” in Andrew Cole, The Birth of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 86–103. This reading may help explain why Marx himself, at certain points, equated fetishism with Catholicism. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 [Third Manuscript],” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels : Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), p. 290.
11.
G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 116.
12.
Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, p. 119, de-emphasized from the original.
13.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, pp. 60–61.
14.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, pp. 67, 79.
15.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 82.
16.
Ian, Remembering the Phallic Mother, p. 84.
17.
For a very interesting account of Joseph Stalin as fetish-object, and political idolatry in general, see Böhme, Fetishism and Culture, pp. 203–222.
18.
Alphonso Lingis, Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 122.
19.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 118.
20.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 118.
21.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 118.
22.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 118.
23.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels : Collected Works, vol. 35 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), pp. 82–83.
24.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 83.
25.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 83.
26.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 83.
27.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 83.
28.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 83.
29.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 85.
30.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 87.
31.
On the role of the “social imaginary”, see Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 159–211.
32.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, in Collected Works, vol. 37 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1998), p. 389.
33.
Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 389.
34.
Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 389.
35.
Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 390.
36.
Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 396.
37.
John Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 111.
38.
Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas, p. 165n. 29.
39.
Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas, p. 89.
40.
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 118.
41.
See Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas, p. 165.
42.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 91. See also Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 10. As Floyd will put it, “[…] reification is a more general concept than commodification, a concept referring to a broader, more complexly mediated social dynamic: no longer confined to the abstraction of social labor and commodity exchange per se, reification refers to an objective normalizing of formal abstraction throughout the totality of social life” (p. 23).
43.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 91.
44.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 92.
45.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 83.
46.
Cf. the attempt to re-define Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in a manner somewhat parallel to Lukács, Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne, “From Commodity Fetishism to Commodity Narcissism,” Marketing Theory 12:3 (2012): pp. 251–265, as well as the intriguing study by Robert Cluley, “The Organization of Santa: Fetishism, Ambivalence and Narcissism,” Organization 18:6 (2011): pp. 779–794.
47.
In this light, we might also note a recent account of reification in the context of Bruno Latour’s analysis of fetishism, Sónia Silva, “Reification and Fetishism: Processes of Transformation,” Theory, Culture & Society 30:1 (2013): pp. 79–98.
48.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 86.
49.
This emphasis on structure over agency of the subject is likewise taken up in Jon Stratton’s The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
50.
See Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 86–87.
51.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 168.
52.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 168, de-emphasized from the original.
53.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 208.
54.
Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 197, de-emphasized from the original.
55.
“It can be overcome only by constant and constantly renewed efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence by concretely relating to the concretely manifested contradictions of the total development, by becoming conscious of the immanent meanings of these contradictions for the total development.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 197, de-emphasized from the original.
56.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 113.
57.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 114. On the migration of relics throughout history, a perspective that only deepens the point being made here, see also the essays collected in Alexandra Walsham, ed., Relics and Remains, Past and Present (2010) Supplement 5.
58.
Lingis, Body Transformations, p. 119.
59.
See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone, 2007).
60.
Alphonso Lingis, Foreign Bodies (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 22.
61.
Lingis, Foreign Bodies, pp. 24–25.
62.
Grayson Perry and Wendy Jones, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (London: Vintage, 2007) p. 151.
63.
Perry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, p. 58. In his own words, which echo Freud’s on this score, “A fetish, in the particular sense of a technical, psychological explanation, is an object that takes the place of normal human relations. Instead of loving the woman, you love her high-heeled shoes” (pp. 57–58).
64.
Perry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, p. 49.

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Department of Theology & Religion, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Colby Dickinson

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Dickinson, C. (2020). Marx on Commodity and Capital Fetishism. In: The Fetish of Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40775-9_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40775-9_3
Published: 27 March 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-40774-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-40775-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)

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