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

Fetishism and Dialectical Deconstiuction 11
ing, and unjust exchange can be found. However, this hostility was
intensified and became associated with the belief in the devil only
in the late Middle Ages, the same time that capitalism was on the
rise.
Societies on the threshold of capitalist development necessarily
interpret that development in terms of precapitalist beliefs and practices.
This is nowhere more florid than in the folk beliefs of the
peasants, miners, seafarers, and artisans who are involved in the
transition process. Their culture, like their work, organically connects
soul with hand, and the world of enchanted beings that they
create seems as intensely human as the relations that enter into
their material products. The new experience of commodity production
fragments and challenges that organic interconnection. Yet the
meaning of that mode of production and of the contradictions that it
now poses is inevitably assimilated into patterns that are preestablished
in the group's culture. Those patterns will be changed, to be
sure, but not until the commodity economy has created a new epistemology
in which the soul itself becomes either a commodity or a
deeply alienated spirit and disenchantment sets in. Until the new
spirit, the spirit of capitalism, displaces the creations of the imagination
that give meaning to life in the precapitalist world, until the
new "rules of the game" are assimilated, the fabulations that the
commodity engenders will be subject to quite different sorts of fantasy
formation. In short, the meaning of capitalism will be subject to
precapitalist meanings, and the conflict expressed in such a confrontation
will be one in which man is seen as the aim of production,
and not production as the aim of man.
Although the insights that are intrinsic to such a reaction seem
inevitably to pass away with time and the progressive institutionalization
of capitalist structures and common sense eventually accepts
the new conditions as natural ones, certain bodies of thought,
as well as enormous social movements, have kept them alive and
functioning as a critical world force. Marxism and Marxist revolutionary
movements in the modern era represent the "rationalization"
of the early precapitalist outrage at the expansion of the capitalist
system. In this sense Tawney was justified when he referred
to Marx as "the last of the Schoolmen." Emphasizing this commonality
between Marxism and the precapitalist hostility toward
the flowering of the market economy, we must not forget that they
also share epistemological features, as well as an anticapitalist moralism
and a lauding of the producers' ethic. This common epistemological
basis is all too easily overlooked because it is precisely this