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

no Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
tellectually diffuse and emotionally intolerable unless it incorporated
one or another of the patterns present in the group's culture.
"The assimilation of such patterns," he proposes, "is the only means
of objectivizing subjective states, of formulating inexpressible feelings,
and of integrating inarticulated experiences into a system"
(19673:166).
In this case the system is an organized contradiction, the opposite
poles of which are mutually animated by their contrasted reflection
in each other. On the peasant side is the ideal of reciprocity and
cyclical exchange, guaranteeing production, reproduction, and fertility.
On the plantation side, by contrast, exploitation, barrenness of
human relations, and death coexist with the production of wealth.
The former mode is felt to be self-perpetuating, whereas the latter is
self-extinguishing. It is the transaction that ends social interaction
by bargaining away sociability for thralldom to the kingdom of
things. As layer after layer of its various manifestations are peeled
off, the underlying nature of the contradiction is revealed: the meaning
of personhood and thinghood is at issue as capitalist development
reworks the basis of social interaction and subjugates that interaction
to the fantastic form of relations between things.
What Polanyi meant by the "commodity fiction" is precisely this
socially organized confusion of persons and things that is established
by the assault on the lower classes in the southern Cauca Valley
by the rule of commodities. Yet, for all its fictional nature the
commodity fiction is real and effective in a specific form of social organization:
it supplies the vital organizing principle of a market society.
It is the social principle that simultaneously organizes and
erodes the society of man, and, as Marx reminds us, drains the creative
power of socially active man into a world perceived as redolent
of magically active things, the fetishism of commodities. This critique
of the market and commodities parallels an earlier critique of
God. Man creates God in a self-alienating act the consequence of
which is such that God is seen as having created man. The product
of man's creative imagination enthralls the creator. Man becomes
the passive offspring of a power that he himself creates, a power that
is anthropomorphized and animated to the degree that man denies
authorship of his own creation. As with God, so for the market and
commodities—social entities created by men, yet working in the
collective imagination as animated beings endowed with the life
that men deny themselves. Man's collectively created products enshroud
his life with phantom objectivity.
But in the popular culture of the southern Cauca Valley the phantom
objectivity of commodity structures concealing the world of so-