Marx’s Distinction between the Fetish Character of the Commodity and Fetishism

Abstract

Already in his early writings such as the Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood (1842), Der leitende Artikel in Nr. 179 der »Kölnischen Zeitung« (1842) and the Economic Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), Marx uses the expressions ‘fetish’ and ‘fetishism’ (MEW 1, p. 147, p. 91; MEW EB1, p. 532) but it is not until the Grundrisse (1857) that Marx embeds their use into his analysis of the commodity or his critique of political economy. Analysing chapter one, section four of Capital Vol.I, Ehrbar (2010) points out that Marx draws a conceptual distinction between the ‘fetish character’ and ‘fetishism’. However, Ehrbar does not explain their respective meaning in detail. This essay is an attempt to show that Marx uses the terms ‘fetish character’ and ‘fetishism’ in the following sense: the term ‘fetish character’ describes the regulating social power that objectified value relations gain under capitalism. It is a social power achieved by virtue of a process of autonomisation of reified social relations. Accordingly, the false belief that social properties ascribed to fetish-bearing things are natural and inherent represents a fetish-induced illusion. Marx designates this illusion as ‘fetishism’. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated how the central features of the fetish character of the commodity and fetishism reappear in other forms of bourgeois production, namely money and capital. These features appear in even greater clarity in money and capital than they do in the simple commodity. Thereby, it will be shown that evidence for the distinction between the fetish character and fetishism can be found beyond chapter one, section four of Capital Vol.I.