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)’.