O conceito de fetichismo na obra marxiana: uma tentativa de interpretação

Abstract

In this paper, I try to offer an interpretative analysis of the concept of fetishism (of commodity, of money and of capital) in Marx’s work. To this end, I outline the historical genesis of the words fetish and fetishism (I), in order to show, in the sequence, that Marx reverses the use of these concepts, so that he doesn’t refer to the “other”, but, on the contrary, in order to designate something essential to capitalist modernity (II). I examine, furthermore, the appearance of this concept both before and in Capital (III), with the aim to show that the concept of fetishism in Marx’s work is always bound with the phenomenon of transubstantiation (of work always present in the commodity) and that the object fetish distinguishes itself from others because it always has a “double existence”. In the sequence, I analyze the resemblance of the capitalism to religion as forms of social “opacity”, as ways of enchantment of the world, an enchantment that prevents the creation of a just and rational situation (IV). I conclude my article with a succinct analysis of how it would be possible, according to Marx, to overcome the fetishism, i.e., in an analysis of what a non-fetishist society would be.