Immediate Mediacy, Iberian Globalization and Commodity Fetishism

Abstract

In this article, I discuss Carlo Galli's view of globalization as a new epoch by appealing to recent scholarship on the early modern Iberian empire. The article begins with an examination of Galli's notion of globalization as an unprecedented explosion of the command of the economic over the political sphere. Galli criticizes Marxism and dialectics for being economicist and, therefore, incapable of explaining the complex interrelations between the political and the economic. In order to avoid what he considers an inherent failure of Marxism to grasp the novelty of globalization, Galli mobilizes the notion of ‘immediate mediacy’. While modernity is characterized by a political mediation of the economy and technology, globalization is characterized by the immediate economic and technological command of deterritorialized networks over all aspects of life. However, in Hegelian dialectics, ‘external reflection’ takes the ‘immediate’ as a given point of departure, while ‘reflexive determination’ considers every immediate presupposition as posited, thus redoubling the contradictions of mediation into the immediate itself. Galli's immediate technological and economic medium is deemed to be given and external. Alternatively, Marx's critique of commodity fetishism transcends ‘immediate mediacy’ because it makes explicit the mutual co-implication of the economic and the political. Marx mobilizes Hegelian reflexive determination to show how neither political power nor the commodity's value is the property of an inner substance but the effect of illusory and fetishistic metaphysical mediations. Recent scholarship on early modern Iberian empire and economics shows that, from its very inception, the political power of the Spanish monarchy depended on the mediation of a global network of credit and circulation of money. Finally, I mobilize Marx's critique of money fetishism to analyze the work of the sixteenth-century Jesuit Jose Acosta titled Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). In this work, Acosta conceives of precious metals as means of exchange that paradoxically enjoy a commanding power of their own. I conclude that the metaphysics of credit implicit in Marx's general theory of fetishism and exemplified in the early modern apologists of the empire is better suited than Galli's schmittology to understanding the theological and metaphysical dimension of the sixteenth-century imperial globalization.