ABSTRACT
Political economy justifies relations of domination as relations of freedom, Karl Marx argues, by reflecting upon and developing part of the common sense of participants in the sphere of market exchange. This chapter summarizes the Owenite-Proudhonian account of the ‘mystery’ and ‘fetishism’ at work in the market, emphasizes Marx’s two theoretical innovations, and draws out the political consequences of Marx’s own theory by way of a comparison with the accounts of Michael Heinrich and Moishe Postone. Marx sought, in Capital, to decisively and definitively displace this sort of explanation of workers’ troubles. Marx, despite his proclivity for arresting turns of phrase, was much more precise and careful than Georg Lukacs and his followers. Although Marx does refer to ‘objective’ or ‘external’ dependency or domination, he also clarifies, as in the Grundrisse, that objective domination is not domination by objects, but domination by ‘social production’, or by the ‘mutual social relationship of individuals’.
