ABSTRACT
Commodity fetishism has become, ever since, one of the classic themes in the Karl Marxist bibliography. The most celebrated political philosophers of the modernity, and also many researchers and ethnographers, were to concern themselves with the analysis of "fetishes" and the description of the "primitive mentality". The centrality which Lukacs ascribes to the problem of fetishism presents a number of questionable aspects. In parallel with the essentialism, the formula of fetishism as the matrix of alienation is patently reductionist. The Soviet jurist Evgeny Pashukanis developed his conception of the forms of the bourgeois legal system on the basis of a particular finding. Pashukanis is commonly charged with economism, i.e. with ignoring the relative autonomy of law. Marx intervenes in fully-formed ideological fronts which make use of commodity fetishism as raw material for elaborating their positions. In "creating" fetishism, capitalism safeguards the absence of transparency of exploitative relations.
