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Citações e comentários:
HARVEY, David. Section 4: The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret. In: A Companion
to Marx’s Capital, Volume 1. pp. 38-47;
Partindo da análise de Harvey, enquanto comentador da obra marxiana, o fetiche da
mercadoria configura um meandro tácito dentro d’O Capital – sua recorrência tange as
contradições e parte fundamental da compreensão da abordagem política econômica e os
alicerces do argumento marxiano. (p. 38)
Na quarta subseção do primeiro capítulo d’O Capital, a análise de Marx percorre dois
eixos centrais: a identificação do fetiche e sua função enquanto aspecto do capitalismo, em
primeira via, e a revelação de sua má representação na sociedade burguesa na literatura clássica,
em segunda via.
“Marx’s point is not, however, about the moral implications. His concern is to show
how the market system and the money-forms disguise real social relations through the exchange
of things. He is not saying that this disguise, which he calls ‘fetishism (165) (and please note
that Marx’s use of this term is technical and quite different from other common usages), is a
mere illusion, that it is a made-up construction that can be dismantled if only we care to try. No,
in fact, what you see is the lettuce, what you see is your money, you see how much, and you
make tangible decisions based on that information. This is the significance of the phrase ‘appear
as what they are’: it really is this way in the supermarket, and we can observe it so, even as it
masks social relations.”
“This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a
fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What
Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow
of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative
value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism.” (p. 46)
Para Harvey, a teoria de valor em Marx não é uma norma universal temente aos tempos, senão
um produto social do desenvolvimento histórico a ser substituído para atingir uma imagem
distinta e estruturante da sociedade. “By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how
the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on
revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism.
Our task is to question it.” (ibid.)