Marx and Kant's Dialectics : Commodity Fetishism as Transcendental Illusions?

In recent discussions around Marx's Capital, the concept of fetishism and its place in the critique of political economy has obtained considerably more attention than in the Marx scholarship of previous decades. However, all consequences of the more prominent role which the idea of fetishism is obtaining in Marx's theory, have not so far yet been worked out. In this paper I discuss the critical function of the fetishism theory in Marx, which brings his methodological aspirations closer to Kant's critical philosophy. There is a clear parallelism between fetishism theory and Kant's idea of transcendental dialectics as a "logic of illusions". The so-called "dialectical method" in Marx's Capital concerns actually only the second phase of the movement of the method, viz. the exposition of the results of inquiry. Dialectical exposition does not discover new facts; it only lays bare the fetishistic illusions which arise on the "surface" of capitalist economy. In doing this, it justificates the concepts Marx uses in his critique of political economy and helps to overcome the empiristic stance of the previous analytic phase of investigation. ; Peer reviewed