Kapitalfetisch: ‘The religion of everyday life’

Abstract

The importance of the idea of fetishism in Marx's work hardly needs to be argued, especially in light of the famous passage in Capital concerning commodities. However, the extent of Marx's engagement with fetishism has rarely been explored in full. In order to re-examine this question, the paper is divided into two parts. The first sets Marx's discussion in Capital within the context of his lifelong interest in fetishism, from his earliest encounter with the idea in the work of Charles de Brosses (in the early 1840s), through his religious and economic transformations of the idea, to his late interest in its anthropological dimensions in the Ethnological Notebooks from the early 1880s. Included in this discussion is the most famous and well-known treatment of commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital. The second part explores the permutations of fetishism beyond this initial – and what will turn out to be a very preliminary – moment in Capital, focusing on his extension of the term to the whole of capitalism. In the extant section of the third draft of Capital and then in the third volume of that work, Marx first expands the idea of fetishism to include of the many-fold dimensions of capitalism, which ‘stand on their hind legs vis-à-vis the worker and confront him as capital’. Then he begins a process of distillation, gradually working towards the pure essence of M–M', interest-bearing capital. Here he coins a new word, Kapitalfetisch, capital-fetish. Thus, at the heart of capitalism is what may be called the ‘religion of everyday life (diese Religion des Alltagslebens)’.

Keywords:

• Marx
• fetishism
• religion
• commodities
• capitalism

Notes

¹On wealth, gold and silver, see also ‘A contribution to the critique of political economy’ (Marx 1987, 257–417, 387).

²This article in an unashamed exercise in Marxology, not least because a careful analysis of all Marx's texts concerning the fetish shows a religious idea operating at the heart of his analysis of capitalism.

³See also William Pietz (1985, 5–17). Studies of fetishism in Marx's work have been consistent throughout the tradition. For a full bibliography up the early 1990s, see Alfonso M. Iacono (1992). For Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 4), the different positions on fetishism often function ‘as a point of departure for certain political strategies and as a symbol for them’. For a detailed treatment of these key positions – focusing on Lukács, Pashukanis, Balibar, Althusser and Gramsci – see Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 5–22). Dussell (2003, 1–16) covers this early work in a curious fashion. While his survey is reasonably comprehensive, it is also quite superficial and assumes with no verification that Marx was once a believer and that he seeks an unalienated form of religion.

⁴For a detailed account of this early history of the idea of fetishism before Marx, see Pietz (1985, 5–17).

⁵For some unaccountable reasons, Philip Goodchild neglects to make full use of this treatment by Marx. See Goodchild's Theology of money (Goodchild 2009, 264, 21, 71, 34) and Capitalism as religion: The price of piety (Goodchild 2002, 80–7).

⁶Or more fully, this transferral is a ‘mysterious thing, simply because 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’ (Marx 1996, 82–3). See also Marx's ‘Economic manuscripts of 1861–3 (conclusion): A contribution to the citique of political economy’ (Marx 1994, 450).

⁷In the name of informal logic, Finocchiario (1989, 237–44) simply argues that Marx is consistently lacking in logic.

⁸See Graham Ward (2005, 327–39, 333–4), G.A. Cohen (1978, 116–7), Samuel Knafo (2002, 159–60), and Alfonso M. Iacono (1983, 429–36). Pietz and Dupré also tend in this direction, suggesting that the fetish designates false consciousness (Pietz 1985, 10; Dupré 1983, 49). Nancy (2004, 139–47) takes a slightly different line, arguing that Marx sought to ‘diabolize’ commodity fetishism, whereas the task is to re-empower the fetish (in this case with regard to art). Unfortunately, the detailed and perceptive analysis of Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 29–32) tends in this direction.

⁹See the widely quoted observation of Norman Geras (1983, 165). Ehrbar (2010) offers a curious argument, namely that Marx distinguishes between the fetish-form, which is real, and fetishism, which is illusory. However, the importation of this distinction requires significant assumptions regarding the tacit slippage between the two where Marx takes them as the same thing.

¹⁰Author's translation. The English translations try various formulations, such as ‘forms of thought expressing with social validity’ (Marx 1996, 87) or ‘forms of thought which are socially valid and therefore objective’ (Marx 1976, 169). Ripstein (1987, 733–48) attempts a different argument, suggesting that the religious analogy is correct: in the same way that religious institutions produce religious fetishes, so also does the market produce commodity fetishes. The problem here is that he must import a third category, the institution, although he unwittingly anticipates Marx's later argument (without reading beyond volume one of Capital) that capitalism itself is a fetish.

¹¹Indeed, elsewhere Marx (1997, 527) speaks of the ‘fetishism peculiar to bourgeois political economy’.

¹²This is territory that few, if any, critics have dared to tread, preferring to stay with that mesmerizing section in the first volume of Capital (Marx, 1996). See Cohen (1978), Knafo (2002), Ripstein (1987), Finocchiaro (1989), Nancy (2004), Jane Bennett (2001, 7–9). Baudrillard (1981, 90–1) provides a slightly different approach: while staying with the fetishism of commodities, he anticipates Marx's later arguments by seeking to expand the fetish to the whole system of capitalism. Using Marx's work as a springboard, Lukács (1968, 1988) sought to develop his influential theory of reification (an ‘extensive-universalizing’ approach), while Pashukanis (1924) elaborates a category of legal fetishism (an ‘extensive-comparative approach’). See the assessments and critique by Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 5–17). By contrast, Balibar and Althusser seek to minimize the theory of fetishism, as either a feature of bourgeois theory (Balibar) or as an example of the humanizing Marx of alienation (Althusser). See material on Balibar and Althusser supplied by Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 17–21). So also does Mulhern (2007, 479–92), who argues that fetishism is an anomaly in Marx's work, indeed that Marx over-reaches in trying to universalize the fetish. Mulhern (2007, 486) is also guilty of this howler, stating that ‘there is no mention of fetishism, either before or after it, in the published work’. The exceptions to this studies avoidance are Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 23–31) and Düzenli (2011, 172–9). I have benefitted from these insightful contributions, even though I ultimately disagree. Dussell (2003, 17–20) is far less helpful, since his reading is superficial and theologically driven, seeking to appropriate Marx for a liberation theological agenda.

¹³Published at the close of the extensive second draft, known as the ‘Economic manuscript of 1861–63’ (Marx 1994, 455–61).

¹⁴In another discipline in which, for my sins, I work from time to time (biblical criticism and ancient economics), this form of the fetish emerges in the widespread assumption that these ancient Mesopotamians and Hebrews were simply capitalists writ small. These ancients may have desired to be capitalists, but they simply did not have our skill and sophistication to be so. Needless to say, we are then at the triumphant end of this evolutionary path.

¹⁵Or: ‘They confront the workers as shapes of capital itself, as combinations which, unlike their isolated labour capacities, belong to capital, originate from it and are incorporated within it’ (Marx 1994, 458). See also the description of wealth as a fetish in Marx (1987, 387).

¹⁶See, however, Baudrillard's argument that fetishism applies even more forcefully to use value, albeit without reference to these arguments by Marx (Baudrillard 1981, 130–42).

¹⁷The careful reader will have noticed that I have placed my discussion of the ‘Trinity Formula’, from chapter 48 of Capital vol. III, before the treatment of chapter 24. The reasons for doing so should be obvious by now.

¹⁸In the ‘Trinity’ chapter, he speaks of a perverted, enchanted and ‘very mystical, social form’ (Marx 1998, 802, 813–4) (‘sehr mystische, gesellschaftliche form’, Marx 1973a, 823, 35).

¹⁹By giving too much weight to Marx's comments concerning mystification, perversion and meaningless condensation, Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 29–32) and Düzenli (2011, 176–8) interpret all of Marx's deliberations of fetishism in that light.

²⁰In fact, Marx quotes Luther (1540) again and again from the latter's An die pfarherrn wider den wucher zu predigen. See Marx's ‘A contribution to the critique of political economy’ (Marx 1987, 364, 448–9), ‘Economic manuscript of 1861–63 (continuation): A contribution to the critique of political economy’ (Marx 1989, 531–8, 39–41) in Marx and Engels collected works. Vol. 32, ‘Theorie uber den mehrwert (Vierter band des “Kapitals”)' (Marx 1974, 516–24), Capital: A critique of political economy, Vol. I (Marx 1996, 146, 203, 314, 88–9, 741), Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen okonomie. Erster band buch I: Der produktionsprozeß des Kapitals (Marx 1972a,149, 207, 328, 619, 781), Capital: A critique of political economy, Vol. III (Marx 1998, 329, 45, 91–2, 594, 605–6, 889), Das Kapital. kritik der politischen okonomie. Dritter band buch III. Der gesamtprozeß der kapitalistischen produktion (Marx 1973a, 343–4, 59, 407, 613, 14–5, 911). Indeed, Marx credits Luther with providing ‘an excellent picture, it fits the capitalist in general’ (Marx 1989, 539) (‘Allerliebstes Bild, auf den Kapitalisten überhaupt’, Marx 1974, 525). See further the letter to Engels for 5 march 1856 (Marx 1983, 21; 1973b, 25). Vol. 40 (Marx 1983, 19–25, 21), and ‘Marx an Engels 5.März 1856’, in Marx Engels werke. Vol. 29 (Marx 1973b, 23–9, 25).

²¹For Price, ‘One penny, put out at our Saviour's birth to 5 per cent compound interest, would before this time, have increased to a greater sum, than would be contained in a hundred and fifty millions of earths, all solid gold’. The upshot: a state would be able to ‘spirit away the national debt through the mystery of compound interest’, even borrowing against the future (Marx 1998, 392–3).

²²As Dimoulis and Milios (2004, 27) point out, ‘Marx does not expound a theory of commodity fetishism but a theory of the fetishism of capital, of capitalist relations’.

²³Or as he puts it elsewhere: ‘All forms of society, in so far as they reach the stage of commodity production and money circulation, take part in this perversion. But under the capitalist mode of production and in the case of capital, which forms its dominant category, its determining production relation, this enchanted and perverted world develops still more’ (Marx 1998, 814).

²⁴Apart from Walter Benjamin's oft-noted fragment, ‘Capitalism as religion’ (Benjamin 1996, 288–91), the theme has been developed in a very different direction from liberation theology or Marxism by a group of what may be called ‘economic theologians’ such as John Cobb (1999), M. Douglas Meeks (1989), David Loy (1996, 275–90), and Goodchild (2002).