“The mother of every insane form: fetishistic interest and capitalistic perversion”

ABSTRACT

Money is the epitome of Marx’s fetishised commodity. And, in Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism, it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of ‘interest-bearing capital.’ Herein, I perform two complementary gestures, one as regards Marxism and another with respect to psychoanalysis. Apropos Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as per the third volume. Apropos psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defence mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money?

KEYWORDS:

• Marx
• capital
• commodity
• fetishism
• interest
• repression

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Postone (1993), pp. 6, 62; Bellofiore et al. (2015), pp. 177–178, 187.

2. (Marx et al., 1962), p. 488 (Marx et al., 1992a),; p. 244; Colletti et al. (1972), pp. 232–233.

3. Fine and Saad Filho (2016), p. 4.

4. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), pp. 73–75, 78.

5. Cohen (1978), pp. 330–331.

6. Marx et al. (1970), p. 49.

7. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), p. 156.

8. Fine and Saad Filho (2016), p. 130; Brewer (1984), p. 157.

9. Marx and Nicolaus (1973), p. 767; Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 267, 400; Marx et al. (1971), p. 459; Rosdolsky and Burgess (1977), pp. 369–370; Brewer (1984), p. 129; Foley (1986), pp. 91–92, 104; Harvey (2010), p. 131; Murray et al. (2015), pp. 189–190; Robles-Báez et al. (2015), p. 306.

10. Harvey (2010), p. 55.

11. Hilferding et al. (1981), pp. 149–150.

12. Marx and Lieber (1964), p. 146; Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 506.

13. Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 503–504.

14. Marx and Fowkes (1976), pp. 254–255; Marx et al. (1963), pp. 270, 282, 389; Marx et al. (1971), p. 296.

15. Marx et al. (1963), pp. 108, 408; Marx et al. (1971), p. 492.

16. A. Smith and Skinner (1986), pp. 151–152.

17. Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 506, 968; Harvey (2006), p. 258; Harvey (2013), p. 200.

18. de Brunhoff and Goldbloom (2015), p. 86; Harvey (2006), pp. 72, 272; Harvey (2013), p. 175.

19. Engels (1999), p. 289.

20. Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 459–460, 464–465, 473.

21. Ibid., p. 517.

22. Harvey (2006), p. 72; Harvey (2013), pp. 171, 183; Fine and Saad Filho (2016), p. 126; Brewer (1984), p. 156; Heinrich and Locascio (2012), p. 156.

23. Foley (1986), p. 109.

24. Hilferding (1947), p. 296; Hilferding et al. (1981), p. 235.

25. Meaney et al. (2015), pp. 47, 49.

26. Ibid., pp. 134–136.

27. Marx and Lieber (1964), p. 157; Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 515–516; Marx and Kautsky (1910), p. 524; Marx et al. (1971), p. 453; Heinrich and Locascio (2012), p. 159; Brewer (1984), p. 159; Foley (1986), p. 112; Harvey (2013), p. 176.

28. Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 517; Harvey (2013), p. 185.

29. Marx and Lieber (1964), p. 249; Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 596, 609.

30. Brewer (1984), p. 51.

31. Marx and Lieber (1964), p. 158; Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 517.

32. Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 516–517, 523–524.

33. Marx and Lieber (1964), p. 683; Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 968.

34. Harvey (2013), pp. 242–243.

35. (Marx et al., 1992b), p. 265.

36. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), pp. 159, 165.

37. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), p. 156.

38. Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 486.

39. Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 486; de Brunhoff and Goldbloom (2015), p. 90.

40. Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 500–501.

41. A. Smith and Skinner (1986), p. 453.

42. de Brunhoff and Goldbloom (2015), p. 98.

43. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), pp. 157–158.

44. Cohen (1978), pp. 117–119, 123–124; Mandel and De Bres (1978), pp. 502–503; Harvey (2010), pp. 41, 46–47; Harvey (2013), p. 243.

45. Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 501.

46. Marx et al. (1970), p. 200; Harvey (2013), p. 389.

47. Hilferding et al. (1981), pp. 99–100; de Brunhoff and Goldbloom (2015), pp. 75–76; Fine and Saad Filho (2016), pp. 50–51, 127–128; Brewer (1984), pp. 90, 156; Harvey (2013), pp. 50–51.

48. Marx and Fernbach (1981), pp. 645–651, 704–705, 709; Harvey (2006), pp. 296–297; Harvey (2013), p. 292.

49. Grossmann and Banaji (1992), p. 91; Harvey (2013), p. 176.

50. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), p. 143.

51. Marx and Lieber (1964), p. 158; Marx and Fernbach (1981), p. 516.

52. Marx and Fowkes (1976), pp. 163–164.

53. Marx et al. (1971), p. 130.

54. Hegel (1986), §15 (p. 28).

55. T. Smith et al. (2015), pp. 39–40.

56. Marx and Fowkes (1976), pp. 167–168.

57. Marx and Fowkes (1976), pp. 167–168; Postone (1993), pp. 136, 151–152; Heinrich and Locascio (2012), pp. 184–185, 198; Harvey (2013), p. 70; Lacan et al. (2007), pp. 14–15.

58. Brewer (1984), p. 181; Harvey (2013), p. 203.

59. Heinrich and Locascio (2012), pp. 159, 165.

60. SE 3: 303–322; Johnston (2005), p. xxx, 8–10, 21–22, 219, 345.

61. SE 1: 356; SE 4: 204–205; Laplanche et al. (1973), pp. 111–114; Johnston (2005), p. xxx, 9–10, 18–19, 22, 57, 119, 141, 218–219, 226–227, 316, 345–346.

62. Lacan et al. (2020), pp. 149–150.

63. SE 3: 322.

64. (Marx, 1962), p. 425; Marx and Fowkes (1976), p. 494.