Cultures of Fetishism (30 page)

opposing the fetishism strategy. By keeping those uncertain forms open to further interpretations, he discovered that some of the bats were vampires. “Capital is dead labor which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour and lives the more, the more labour he sucks.”
5

Many of Marx’s convoluted economic theories changed from one moment to the next, eluding and baffling him until the day he died. But his theory of commodity fetishism achieved a permanence that is as wise today as it was in Marx’s day. The essential components of Marx’s mature formula- tions of commodity fetishism were already laid out in his earliest works on fetishism, money, and alienation.

In an 1842 paper on fetishism, the seed of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism took root.
6
Taking a vigorous stand against a contemporary philosopher’s view that religious fetishism raises man above his sensuous desires, Marx insisted that the worship of inanimate idols
is
the religion of sensuous desire. The material object that the fetishist worships does not pos- sess magical powers. It cannot gratify his desires. It cannot protect him from danger. In fact, by endowing the material object with magical, life-giving properties, the fetishist deprives himself of the real powers of his own living desires.

Two years later, in “On the Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” Marx asserted that the lust for money turns imagination into reality and reality into imagination.
7
That is, real human faculties are transformed into imaginary abstractions while, at the same time, imaginary abstractions are transformed into material and actual powers. What is human becomes unreal and imagi- nary. What is imaginary becomes real and tangible. Unknowingly, Marx was writing about the fetishism strategy. The paper expresses the central tenden- cies of the fetishism strategy, in which material things substitute for living vitalities, and living vitalities are subdued, tamed, and even murdered, if necessary.

“Alienated Labour,” also published in 1844, describes how the exploita- tions and dehumanizations endured by the worker in the production of com- modities lead to his feeling alienated from his own self and from other human beings. When Marx writes that “The product of labor is labor embodied and made material in a thing, it is the
objectification
of labor”
8
he is already allud- ing to the secret of commodity fetishism, what he will later refer to as
surplus labor
.
9*
The varieties of human alienation that Marx describes in that seminal paper become a leitmotif that runs through many of Marx’s writings. Commodity fetishism is stamped on one side of the coin. Turn it over and we see the stamp of Alienation.

Unlike many of Marx’s writings, which remained buried under the rubble of incomprehensible thoughts and unreadable words, at least “The Fetishism

*
In Volume III, put together by Engels from Marx’s scribbled notes, the relationship between surplus labor value and profit is re-examined. As with so many other things that were revised in the transition from Volume I to Volumes II and III, value and profit were given dif- ferent interpretations. However, because of the consistency of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, his ideas on the fetishistic structure of surplus labor value remain constant.

of the Commodity and its Secret” was brought to life. Marx’s scrawling notations on commodity fetishism were not only transcribed into a legible, readable form, they were published. In contrast, many of the words Marx wrote never left his copy books. Some other published words, like many sec- tions of
Capital
, are so dense and incomprehensible that most people give up trying to understand them. They never finish reading the first volume, much less the other, eternally proliferating ensuing volumes. There is an ambiguity here, which I will clarify later when I describe the term “dialectics” as a process of continually materializing reality. At first, I will suggest that this process can, and often does, resemble the archive fevers of biographers. However, as I go on to explain, by enabling a toleration of ambiguity and leaving ideas open to change Marx’s dialectics generate vitality.

It is hard to imagine Marx’s early theories of fetishism, money, and alienation attaining their mature formulations, if it had not been for the presence in his life of another German writer, Friedrich Engels. Early in 1844, Marx read Engels’ essay on the “political economy” of the British and recognized a kindred soul. When Engels came to Paris later that year, he looked up Marx. “They had so much to say to one another that they spent ten days together.”
10
It was the beginning of their lifelong collaboration. Engels, three years younger than Marx, brought a down-to-earth practicality to Marx’s abstract theories.

The darkly brooding Marx tended to be stubborn, suspicious, and sedentary. It was generally agreed that he was arrogant, contentious, obsti- nate, condescending, self-absorbed, penny-pinching, and decidedly unkind and unwelcoming to everyone, except to his wife, his children, and Engels and at least in spirit to the anonymous mass of laboring workers whose terrible plight became the guiding passion of his life’s work. Engels was light-hearted, lively, and physically active—fencing, riding horses, swimming, reading and re-reading Shelley, enjoying life’s pleasures and the company of other men and women. He was generous, caring, yielding, humane, empathic, and open-minded—everything that Marx seemed not to be.

Not surprisingly these personality differences were reflected in the different ways that the two men wrote. Even their handwritings expressed these essen- tial differences. Marx wrote in an illegible scrawl, a veritable scribble of letters and words that were made all the more unintelligible by their blotchy dele- tions and additions.
11
Engels’ script was neat, precise, elegant, and pristinely legible.
12
Their differences were also manifest in the size of their manuscripts. Early on in their collaboration Engels proposed to Marx that they co- author “Critique of Critical Criticism,” a pamphlet on the theoretical absurd- ities of the philosophers
manque
Bruno Bauer and his two brothers. Sensing Marx’s proclivities for endless ruminations, Engels firmly emphasized that the pamphlet should be no more than forty pages, and promptly sent Marx his own twenty-page contribution. He then took off for an extended visit to his family. Several months later, when he returned to Paris, Engels was horri- fied to learn that the pamphlet “was now a swollen monstrosity of more than 300 pages” and had been renamed
The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism:Against Bruno Bauer
.
13
Protesting that he had contributed very

little to this work, Engels pleaded to disown his authorship. “The thing is too long,” he wrote to Marx. “The supreme contempt we two evince towards Bauer’s journal is in glaring contrast to the 352 pages we devote to it.”
14

Despite Engels’ repeated experiences with Marx’s inability to write con- cisely and finish his writings, he did not give up. He continued to prod him. In 1845 he was urging, “Do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will
def- initely have finished
, and make sure it gets into print quickly.”
15
In 1863 he was begging Marx to complete
Capital
and send it off to the publisher. Marx just couldn’t simplify things. Moreover, his endless re-writings and emenda- tions, his total immersion in the physical materiality of writing down endless words, kept him safely distanced from the horrors of the human realities he was writing about. These writing habits were fetishistic devices!

As Edmund Wilson states in
To the Finland Station
, his book on the intel- lectual history of the Russian Revolution, “Marx’s thinking, though realistic in a moral sense and though sometimes enriched by a peculiar kind of imagery, always tends to state social processes in terms of abstract logical developments or to project mythological personifications, he almost never perceives ordinary human beings.”
16
Engels, on the other hand, was sympa- thetic to the life around him. According to Wilson, he possessed an openness and simplicity of heart that allowed him to see into the lives of other people. It was Engels who took note of the conditions of the working class in Manchester, England, where he spent much of his adult life working as a sort of manager-bookkeeper, who kept an eye on conditions in his father’s cotton mill, and conscientiously wrote up neat and legible reports on the financial and practical affairs of his father’s business.

But Engels saw far more than his father had intended. Wilson describes how “He saw the working people living like rats in the wretched little dens of their dwellings.”
17
He smelled the dank earth on which they slept without comfort of beds or blankets, among piles of their excrement and garbage. He could taste the flour mixed with gypsum and the cocoa mixed with dirt, which the workers ate and fed to their children. He saw children being fed into factories at the age of five or six. He observed with horror and trembling how men, women, and children expended the better part of their lives crawl- ing underground in narrow tunnels. He took careful note of the breaking of the rotten ropes, the caving in of the overexcavated seams of the mines, the explosions that resulted from the carelessness of exhausted children, and the inadequate ventilation.

Marx’s abstract theories on the social relations between worker and capi- talist complimented the details of working-class wretchedness that Engels had witnessed and described in concrete detail. The two men recognized the compatibility underlying their differences and recognized how each of them might supplement the energies and thoughts of the other. Marx, as an out- come of reading Engels’ 1845
Conditions of the Working Class in England
, began to read factory reports on the conditions that prevailed in the laborers’ work environments. He went on to include many citations to Engels’ work in
Capital
, Vol I. Engels benefited from Marx’s example by learning to write

more convincingly about theoretical issues. Engels knew that Marx was a genius and felt that he, like all the other political writers he knew, was “tal- ented at best.”
18
His own love of life, of riding horses and spending evenings with his spirited working-class Irish mistress, Mary Burns, were trivial com- pared to Marx’s lofty philosophical truths. Engels, in his subservient ideal- ization of Marx, sometimes handed over to him projects that originated in his own mind, feeling certain that Marx, because he was an accomplished theo- retician and philosopher, would do better with them than he could.

In 1847, on the eve of the revolutions that swept across Continental Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels were commissioned by The Communist League to draft a statement of principles for the upcoming Second Congress to be held in London that November. Engels prepared a draft entitled “Principles of Communism” but then, recognizing its limitations, suggested to Marx that he should redraft, rearrange, and expand that initial draft. By then he knew that Marx had a talent for expanding things. Marx drew on a few of Engels’ passages. But the final version of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written by Marx, whose revolutionary fervor gave force and vitality to his descriptions of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeois capitalist.
19
“Let the ruling classes tremble at the prospect of a communist rev- olution. Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. PROLETARIANS OF ALL LANDS UNITE!”
20

The 1848 revolutions in Europe proved to be monstrous failures. The revolutionary ideals that Marx had proposed in the “Manifesto” had been dashed by the economic upswing that followed the revolutions.

This defeat led to one of Marx’s most brilliant papers, which in the process of illuminating the reasons why humans are unable to succeed in their rebellions against the powers that keep them in chains, evolved into an unintended com- mentary on the cultures that breed and nourish the fetishism strategy.

On this occasion, an idea that Engels freely lent to Marx came out in Marx’s writing as if it had originated in his own mind. Engels, in a wry com- mentary on the coup of December 2, 1851 by Napoleon’s nephew Louis Bonaparte (who soon afterward became Napoleon III) wrote to Marx the next day, “It seems as if Hegel in his grave were acting as World Spirit and directing history, ordaining most conscientiously that it should all be unrolled twice, once as a great tragedy and once as a wretched farce.”
21

Whereupon, a year later, Marx in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” while citing Hegel, actually echoed Engel. “Hegel observed somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”
22
To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has ever discovered the “somewhere” from Hegel. With few exceptions, most of them consistently overlook the source from Engels.

Though Marx starts out “Eighteenth Brumaire” by echoing Engels, he expanded his friend’s words of wisdom into a memorable analysis of the “repetition compulsion,” later to be a central theme of Freud’s
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
.
23
Marx described how the living, as they make every effort

to create a form of human existence that does not yet exist, repeat the slogans and spirits of dead generations. It is as though “the past weighs on the living like an incubus”
24
that smothers their every good intention. Just as men appear to be engaged in a revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, “they anxiously summon up the spirits of the past to their aid, borrowing from them names, rallying cries, costumes, in order to stage the new world historical drama in a time-honored disguise and borrowed speech.”
25

Marx’s commentary on revolutionary repetitions expresses a principle of the fetishism strategy that we encountered in the preceding chapter on the training of psychoanalysts. It is safer to stick to what is known and certain, even if it means to suffer and re-suffer the traumas of the past, rather than to create something new and uncertain, with all its tempting ambiguities and challenging possibilities. Creativity is a danger. Where there is a spark, there may develop a fire. Extinguish it before it is too late.