ABSTRACT
Karl Marx’s theory of fetishism is an attempt to understand how the objects produced in the capitalist economy, that is to say man-made objects, can appear as magic objects. Marx and Friedrich Engels never wrote a book devoted to literature, or art. To understand nonetheless their materialist approach to aesthetics, it is necessary to imagine what their book on aesthetics could have been by collecting pieces coming from several letters, different articles, and books, which manifestly focus on other topics – politics, economics, philosophy – but refer to art, sometimes very precisely, sometimes only in passing. One should first define the culture industry as the economic strategy aiming to turn culture into products tailored for consumption by masses, that is to say commodities. Economics matters, but as Stuart Hall explains, the economic level only gives the “raw materials” of thought, because a thought does not exist without a body and an environment to sustain it.
