Reading the sections of Marx’s Capital today on ‘the fetish of capital’ and wondering how to convert this into a mirror for reflection re: all the pathological fetishizing of capital being done by ?/acc peeps these days. Capital has never been of-itself and always for us.
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Commodity fetishism is a transcendental operation (process—product). Capital's objects have the same ontological weight as we do, and produces us alongside its objects.
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Capital’s objects are OUR objects because we are doing capitalism. We are producing these objects in the act of production - and thus self-producing (at least in part) via capitalism. There is no in-itself of capital. The entanglement is dominated by our role as desiring-machines
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this is essentially alienation denial
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Yes, I’m denying that capital is alien to the human drives and operations. Our labor can be alienated, specific populations can become alienated from various processes, but at no time is capital itself an autonomous entity. Capitalists are intrinsic to the operation of capital.
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This undercuts the Marxian analysis of fetishism that you alluded to in the OP
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In what way?
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Fetishism is a description of how social relations under capitalism are produced and constitute the real of life under it. It is illusionary insofar as it obscures the relations under the capitalist mode of production, and causes people to take the conditions as transhistorical..
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and not as something unique to the capitalist mode of production itself. But this can only occur if all forces are subordinate to capitalism, as its mode of production becomes dominant in its historical stage. So fetishism is an effect of capital, not its cause.
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