¹ Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I, in the first English edition of 1887 as found online at https://www.marxists.org. The first sentence was uniquely added by Engels for this edition.

² Marx, Karl, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,” in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), p. 53.Google Scholar

³ Balibar, Etienne, The Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 2017), pp. 46-47.Google Scholar

⁴ Marx, “Contribution to the Critique,” p. 54.

⁵ Turner, Denys, “Religion: Illusions and Liberation,” in Carver, Terrell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 320-338.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶ Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, pp. 77-78.

⁷ The word Verdinglichung here describes the “transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world.” See “Reification,” in Bottomore, Tom, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 463.Google Scholar

⁸ See “Fetishism,” in ibid., p. 191: “Yet the mask itself is no illusion. The appearances that mystify and distort spontaneous perception of the capitalist order are real . . . This is how capitalism presents itself: in disguise.”

⁹ Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, p. 72.

¹⁰ This is not to say that the theory of ideology is of less importance than the theory of commodity fetishism—far from it. As Balibar notes, the theories of ideology and fetishism, while similar, represent different starting points (the former centering on the state, the latter on the market) and lead to different conclusions. Nor is it to suggest that such a reframing has not been applied before, as much of the work of Latin American liberation theology centers around fetishism. What I am suggesting, however, is that the common themes of Christian-Marxist dialogue—“religion as opiate,” the role of atheism, etc.—are ideological in nature.

¹¹ A compelling case for this position can be found in Miranda, José Porfirio, Marx Against the Marxists (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1980).Google Scholar

¹² As I will explain in section four, my use of the apophatic here draws heavily on Marika Rose's critical treatment of the subject in A Theology of Failure: Žižek against Christian Innocence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019)Google Scholar. I am also indebted to Denys Turner's work on apophaticism and Marxism, which I see as linked to the context of ideology and which I am expanding to the context of the fetish.

¹³ See Dussel, Enrique, Philosophy of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985), pp. 97-100.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Marx, Karl, Capital: Volume I (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 163.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 163.

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 164-165.

¹⁷ Lewin, Haskell and Morris, Jacob, “Marx's Concept of Fetishism,” Science & Society 41.2 (1977), pp. 172-190Google Scholar. As the authors note (p. 173), commodities, money, and capital all “appear to possess inherent powers of self-motion,” and gradually people within capitalist societies “cannot help thinking of commodities, and especially of money, as things which are inherently full of social power and life.”

¹⁸ Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 6, p. 158Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 195.

²⁰ See Harvey, David, A Companion to Marx's Capital: The Complete Edition (London: Verso, 2018), p. 43.Google Scholar

²¹ Goux, Jean-Joseph, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 11-12Google Scholar, emphasis added.

²² Ibid., p. 62.

²³ Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 164.Google Scholar “The abstraction, or idea, however, is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master.”

²⁴ Ibid., p. 145.

²⁵ Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 158.

²⁶ Iacono, Alfonso Maurizio, The History and Theory of Fetishism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1-2.Google Scholar

²⁷ See Dussel, Enrique, Las metáforas teológicas de Marx (Estella, Navarra: Editorial Verbo Divino, 1993), p. 127Google Scholar; see also Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 208.

²⁸ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 221.

²⁹ See McCarraher, Eugene, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

³⁰ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 222; see also Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 102-103.

³¹ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 232.

³² A line from the Aeneid as quoted by Marx in ibid., p. 163. See also McCarraher's portrait of Marx's early study of fetishism in The Enchantments of Mammon, p. 80: “Fetishism is ‘a religion of sensuous desire,’ . . . in which the worshipper fantasizes that an ‘inanimate object will give up its natural character in order to comply with his desires.’”

³³ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 269-270. See also David Harvey, “Bad Infinity and the Madness of Economic Reason,” video lecture (https://youtu.be/cehxlTrzDiA, accessed on Jan. 30, 2021).

³⁴ Marx uses this word from the German Bible to describe the fetishistic commodity produced under capitalism: “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.” Capital, p. 772, as discussed in Miranda, Marx against the Marxists, p. 197.

³⁵ Miranda, Marx Against the Marxists, p. 216.

³⁶ Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 50.

³⁷ Hence, Capital extends the hegemonic power of capitalism further than had the earlier theory of ideology. With commodity fetishism, even bourgeois institutions and its class representatives are subjected to capital's laws of motion.

³⁸ Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, p. 73.

³⁹ Goux also cites numerous examples of this replication of market logic, particularly, the “monetary metaphor” that haunts early modern philosophy in the work of philosophers like Hegel, Kant, and Berkeley. Philosophical idealism and monetary economy are both, for Goux, symbolic structures that share a common formulation of fetishized general equivalents (abstract concepts in the one example, money in the other), and relative forms (tangible realities and commodities). Goux, Symbolic Economies, pp. 92-95.

⁴⁰ Balibar, Philosophy of Marx, p. 71.

⁴¹ See Rose, Theology of Failure, p. 173.

⁴² Quoted in Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 154.

⁴³ Enrique Dussel draws attention to Descartes’ Jesuit education and the influence of the Ignatian exercises upon the development of the cogito ergo sum. See Dussel, Enrique, “Anti-Cartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the Philosophical Anti-Discourse of Modernity,” Journal for Culture and Religious Theory 13.1 (2014), pp. 11-52.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 19-20.

⁴⁵ Hence, as Dussel argues, Descartes stands as the representative of capitalist modernity's second moment, when “‘colonial being’ had already occurred,” not as modernity's instigator. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

⁴⁶ Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 20.

⁴⁷ Drexler-Dreis, Joseph and Justaert, Kristien, “Introduction: The Projects of Unsettling Man,” in Drexler-Dreis, Joseph and Justaert, Kristien, ed., Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Here it is possible to tie in the bourgeois individualism characteristic of Northern European Protestantism, which, contra Weber, does not so much prepare the way for capitalism as it arrives already conditioned by the rise of capitalism.

⁴⁹ On the distinction between quantitative and qualitative salvation, see Gutiérrez, Gustavo, A Theology of Liberation (London: SCM Press, 1985), pp. 150-152.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 222.

⁵¹ Miranda, Marx Against the Marxists, p. 222. Marx found this anti-fetishism expressed in the radical preacher, Thomas Müntzer: “It is in this sense that Thomas Müntzer declares it intolerable ‘that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.’” “On the Jewish Question,” pp. 50-51.

⁵² This is the difference between Marx's historical materialism and Feuerbach's contemplative materialism.

⁵³ Marx, Capital, p. 173.

⁵⁴ Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, p. 99.

⁵⁵ Rose, Theology of Failure, p. 6.

⁵⁶ For example, on the Dionysian problematic of universalism, Rose writes: “Although Derrida's different perspective on the economy of immanence and transcendence gives rise to a much less confident affirmation of that which constitutes and makes possible human existence, he, as much as Dionysius, affirms a desire—albeit an impossible one—to escape the particular and material for that which is universal, ahistorical, and immaterial.” Ibid., p. 36.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 7. Central to Rose's argument is the Lacanian distinction, taken up by Žižek, between the psychoanalytic terms desire and drive, which marks a profound shift for the Dionysian heritage: “The shift from desire to drive is the shift from the perpetually failed attempt to obtain the object that will provide satisfaction for the individual or social order to a satisfaction that consists precisely in this repeated failure to attain completeness.” Ibid., pp. 56-57.

⁵⁸ Ibid., pp. 172-173.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Proudhon argued that money could be abolished by fiat and replaced with labor-tracking time-chits as an improved, worker-friendly measure of value. But, Marx replied, this solution fatally misunderstood social relations which were “exploited by capital in production [and] secured by private property and commodity exchange in price-fixing markets,” thus ensuring money as an inevitable universal equivalent of value. See Harvey, David, Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 55.Google Scholar

⁶¹ Bloch, Ernst, On Karl Marx (London: Verso, 2018), p. 172.Google Scholar

⁶² Goux, Symbolic Economies, p. 163. There are of course problems that arise in the account of Utopia—not least that it is founded on an act of colonization. There is also the question of what sustains the Utopians in their unmediated economic-productive existence. Goux maintains that it is deference to absolute law which forms an organizational principle from exteriority, a feature which lends the authoritarian aspect to Utopia. Despite these difficulties, the striking feature of More's work is its recognition that universal equivalents form the basis for alienated relations in present society.

⁶³ Ibid., pp. 163-164.

⁶⁴ Goux oddly does not comment on any Christian character of More's text, presumably seeing it as an instance of a “radical humanism” and characterizing it as “atheological.” But it would perhaps be better conceived as a Christian anti-fetishism in line with what I am suggesting here.