The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Pollution, Contradiction, and Salvation 113
state of things the simultaneous recognition of the negation of that
state, of its inevitable breaking up (Korsch, 1971: 55-56). Sensitivity
to contradiction makes us aware of the unstable and tensioned interplay
between opposites, which otherwise assume the aura of fixed
and meaningful things in themselves. This is the case with the dichotomies
of the Western Church, which reify good apart from evil
as essences symbolized by God and by Satan in a quasi-Manichean
world view. The concept of contradiction urges us to consider, as a
cardinal principle, that God and Satan are not opposed essences.
Rather, they represent two operations of the Divine, "the shadow
and light of the world drama" (Watts, 1968 :80-81). In Blake's idea of
the marriage of heaven and hell, "good" and "evil" are reunited as
angel and devil in the lower depths. The divorce of heaven from hell
is tantamount to the suppression of life's energies by lifeless regulations
and precisely mirrors the difference between Church and folk
religion. In Blake's words: "Without contraries is no progression. Attraction
and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary
to human existence" (Blake, 1968:34).
Based on the mythology of the Fall and salvation, the folk religion
and magical curing of the southern Cauca Valley are just this affirmation
of the dialectical oneness of good and evil. The devil symbolizes
the antithetical processes of dissolution and decomposition, on
the one hand, and growth, transformation, and reformulation of old
elements into new patterns, on the other. Thus, in the devil we find
the most paradoxical and contradictory process, and it is this dialectic
of destruction and production that forms the basis of the association
of the devil with agribusiness production—living death and florescent
barrenness. With the proletarian devil contract, wages grow,
yet they are barren and redolent of death. Under these conditions
production and destruction become interchangeable and interchanging
terms.
The alleged proletarian devil contract is more than an ascription
of evil to agribusiness. Over and beyond that, it is a reaction to the
way in which the system of market organization restructures everyday
life and the metaphysical basis for comprehending the world.
This reaction registers not only alienation but also its mediation of
the contradiction between antithetical modes of production and exchange.
This mediation can be expressed in many ways. I choose to
analyze it both as the antithesis between use-value and exchangevalue
and as a response to the contrasting modes of precapitalist and
commodity fetishism.