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William Clare Roberts is perfectly right in emphasizing the importance that the commodity fetish had in establishing the facts of impersonal domination imposed by the market. However, I think he misses a key importance of the “fetish” as an extended religious metaphor, which colors his later critiques of Heinrich and Postone which in my view fall flat.
Roberts criticizes “Scholars of Marx”, by which he principally means G.A. Cohen based on the footnote, as presuming that “[Marx’s] frequent recourse to the language of “mysteries” and “secrets” is a stylistic peculiarity” (Roberts 3.40). However, his expulsion on the meaning of the “mysteries” of money fails to actually surpass this aesthetic reading of Marx’s usage of esoteric and religious language. He emphasizes the use of esoteric language by republican thinkers in describing the conspiratorial nature of banking and commerce. This understanding of Capital that definitively places ethical responsibility for domination on Capitalists which Roberts argues descends to Marx through Owen and Proudhon is not at all what Marx seems to have had in mind for his “mysteries.” Rather, in Marx there is to be found a real and unique usage of religious terminology, which is a particularly illuminating explicative metaphor to understand how abstractions come to dominate us, exactly what Roberts demands from what he identifies as critical theory (Roberts 3.71).
Marx makes usage of a wide array of esoteric language, from phantasmagoric to fetishistic. It is Marx’s use of the fetishistic which I would particularly aim to focus on. Marx introduces this idea in Chapter 1.4 by declaring, “In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion … I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities” (Marx 1.147). Here Marx makes explicit what his language had only previously hinted at, that he views the mechanism by which these human social abstractions: money, commodities, value, and so on, come to dominate us. This being, they become religious, and come to dominate us socially, much in the same way the Christian God was able to so dominate daily life in the medieval European context. Market logic, in this sense, encompasses the entirety of human possibility and consciousness, which we see play out in the field of Marx’s contemporary Political Economy that he is critiquing, that is, they transhistoricize categories like value.
Obviously, Roberts is not ignorant of this mechanism, and seems to still approach a good understanding of the commodity fetish in Marx of being this impersonal domination, despite a lack of a treatment of the usage of the religious in Marx. As Roberts points out (3.80), Marx makes the claim that in fetishism, “the social relations … appear as what they are” (Marx 1.149). This means that the commodity fetish is not an illusion or a conspiratorial trick, people really are being dominated by these social relations (and abstractions) inherent in the mechanisms of Capitalism as Marx is describing them. However, later criticizes Lukács, Michael Heinrich, and Moishe Postone for being vague about the origin of domination. I would argue, at least for the case of Heinrich, that this is certainly not the case, even with only the quotation Roberts provided. The statement, “people (all of them!) are under the control of things” seems entirely commensurate with this understanding of Marx, and is a necessary consequence of the deification of things which Marx is getting at with the idea of the commodity fetish.
It is for this reason that I believe, at least in this case of esoteric language, Marx is not merely adopting republican and radical traditions, but is doing something novel by importing his critique of religion already found in his early writing, On the Jewish Question, where he is already proceeding from a the normative basis of freedom, or as he puts it, “Human Emancipation.” (Marx, Hackett Selected Writings, 14).
WCR: Gets the Right Answer, Work Shown Incorrect was published on 2022-02-02