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Mike Wayne
Fetishism and Ideology:
A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios

Dimitri Dimoulis’s and John Milios’s essay1 on the

significance of the concept of commodity fetishism
within Marxist theory opens up the opportunity
to return to some key questions around the concept
of ideology, which has largely died an unnatural
death within the social sciences and cultural theory.
In particular, it raises questions around the relationship
between ideology and the mode of production,
consciousness and practice, the determinate and
reciprocal relations between mode of production
and the superstructure, and the epistemological
foundations for knowing an object that systematically
presents itself to the subject as it really is, but
as it ‘really is’, is in fact partial, misleading and
spontaneously (but not seamlessly) ideological.2 While
their essay is to be welcomed as an invitation to
further debate, it is, I think, rather problematic and
in need of a rejoinder. The theoretical source for much

1 Dimoulis and Milios 2004.

2 ‘. . . there is a kind of dissembling or duplicity built into the very economic
structures of capitalism, such that it cannot help presenting itself to consciousness in
ways askew to what it actually is. Mystification, so to speak, is an “objective” fact,
embedded in the very character of the system: there is an unavoidable structural
contradiction between that system’s real contents, and the phenomenal forms in which
those contents proffer themselves spontaneously to the mind’. Eagleton 1991, p. 86.

Historical Materialism, volume 13:3 (193–218)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005
Also available online – www.brill.nl
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194 • Mike Wayne

of what is problematic in their essay is easily identifiable in terms of a name:

Louis Althusser. There are no doubt many Althussers3 but it is a very orthodox
one which Dimoulis and Milios recycle in their essay, in largely unmodified
form, and as if all the critiques of Althusserian Marxism undertaken in the
wake of its decline – not all of them wholly unsympathetic4 – had never taken
place. The rigour with which they articulate their high-Althusserian critique
of fetishism does, however, have the merit of starkly posing key questions
which remain outstanding despite the break-up of the Althusserian paradigm
all those years ago. Two questions are particularly apposite here: a) is there
a general form of ideology (in capitalism)? b) If there is, how do we theorise
it? Althusser’s answer to the first question was, correctly, yes. Without such
a proposition, we cannot think the unity of ideology across a socially
differentiated field occupied by multiple ‘players’. However, his answer
to the second question, which so influences Dimoulis and Milios’s essay,
was fundamentally flawed. The makings of an alternative answer can be
derived from Marx’s theory of fetishism which is a critique of the modes of
consciousness tacit in our social relations, as they are determined by the
value-form. Analysis of the value-form – the forms which value takes in
production and circulation – provides an understanding of the general principles
which capital seeks to impose5 throughout a differentiated social structure. A
theory of ideology (and the subject) grounded in fetishism provides the
makings of an understanding of the relations between mode of production
and the superstructure, which avoids both the problems of expressive causality,
which Althusser subjected to critique,6 and the problems which his own

3 Warren Montag’s Althusser is a refreshing example. This Althusser, mediated

through literary and aesthetic theory (including Althusser’s own work, some of it
published posthumously), is a figure whose ideas come across as far more provisional,
tentative and exploratory than usual; more works in progress than rigidly fixed
procedures. I confess to a certain ambivalence here, as my own intellectual formation
as a film and English undergraduate was productively shaped by the Althusserian
critique of the humanist subject in the realm of texts, authors and readers/spectators. In
the realm of history and politics, however, rather more is at stake, and I am not sure
we can afford to be quite as generous as Montag is around some of the key aspects
of the Althusserian system. The notion that the general form of ideology, which this
essay is centrally concerned with, is transhistorical, for example, simply has to be met
with more critical engagement than Montag offers (see Montag 2003, p. 78).
4 See Benton 1984, Lovell 1983, and Elliott 1987.
5 The imposition of capital is periodically frustrated by its own objective internal

contradictions and working-class (or, residually, peasant) resistance.

6 The master philosopher of the expressive causality was Hegel, according to

Althusser at least. In this conception, all phenomena are unmediated expressions of

an essence. In ‘On Materialist Dialectic’, Althusser argues ‘. . . every concrete difference
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 195

model of the social totality (oscillating between ‘structure and conjuncture’)7

fell into.

Reading Dimoulis and Milios

Let me begin with a summary of the Dimoulis and Milios argument, as I
understand it. Their essential thrust is that the theory of commodity fetishism
supposes that ideology is generated up automatically, from the very act of
exchange, and that this automaticity feeds into a view of commodity fetishism
as having a generalised undifferentiated and seamless purchase throughout
society.8 Lukács, in particular, is held up as the founding father of this mode
of cultural/superstructural critique.9 However, Dimoulis and Milios argue
that Lukács’s analysis of reification is, in turn, built on the erroneous
foundations laid by Marx. Dimoulis and Milios are critical of Marx’s initial
sketch of the theory of commodity fetishism, in the fourth section of the first
chapter of the first volume of Capital, because, they argue, it introduces the
concept prior to an adequately concrete framework of capitalist commodity
production (prior to the introduction of the capital/wage-labour relation).
Marxists who have based their theory of commodity fetishism on the first
appearance of the concept in Capital are therefore prone to developing an
over-generalised ‘phenomenology of alienation’,10 actually based on implicit
bourgeois legal categories (the subject ‘owns’ something, which is then alienated
from her in exchange). Dimoulis and Milios usefully remind readers that
Marx made a substantive (and in their view, more useful) return to the theory
of fetishism in Volume III of Capital, where it now re-appears in the context

featured in the Hegelian totality, including the “sphere” visible in this totality (civil
society, the State, religion, philosophy, etc.), all these differences, are negated as soon
as they are affirmed: for they are no more than “moments” of the simple internal
principle of the totality, which fulfils itself by negating the alienated difference that
it posed’. Althusser 1982, p. 203.
7 Montag 2003, p. 133.
8 See also Althusser’s comments on the ‘fashionable’ theory of reification in ‘Marxism

and Humanism’, Althusser 1982, p. 230.

9 Lukács can sound, at times, as if the spread of commodity exchange has snared

its victims in a seamless web of reification: ‘Just as the capitalist system continuously
produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure
of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitely into
the consciousness of man’ (Lukács 1971, p. 93). A central purpose of this essay is to
re-introduce contradiction and breakdown within a theory of ideology grounded in
fetishism.
10 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 38.
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196 • Mike Wayne

of more conceptually concrete categories analysing various manifestations of

capital and its fetishistic forms, particularly, interest and interest-bearing
capital. Commodity fetishism is, as Dimoulis and Milios rightly note, a form
of the ‘fetishism of capital’,11 but, given that the commodity is the ‘simplest
form’ of the capitalist mode of production,12 a theory of fetishism ought, they
argue, to be based on capital fetishism and its concrete economic forms. Much
can turn on the meaning of a ‘simple form’, as we shall see. It is clear, though,
that Marx’s analysis of fetishism in Capital, Volume III, is far more to their
liking because it is less open to what Dimoulis and Milios perceive as an
over-generalised critique of the human condition (itself essentialised) within
capitalism. Ultimately, the aim of their argument is to find a more modest
role for the concept of what they now redefine as capital fetishism. Crucially,
a more modest role for fetishism means that it does not itself have ‘an
ideological causality or force’.13 As a self-generating consequence of the mode
of production, the structural characteristics of capital fetishism provide
‘significant raw material’, such as the ‘primacy of the individual’14 for the
specific regions of the superstructure. But, in their view, it is the superstructure,
especially the state apparatus and its various arms, which are solely responsible
for the production and elaboration of ideologies. Superstructural agencies
work to ‘make available interpretive schemes for politics and the exercise of
power’.15 For Dimoulis and Milios, the political implications of this demotion
of fetishism to a supporting role as ‘one element in a theory of ideology’16 is
that it makes more realistic the possibility of overcoming fetishism, for it is
no longer virtually inscribed into the human condition.17 Ideological struggle –
contesting the use that the dominant ideologies make of fetishism – thus
becomes possible, and, as a consequence, so does social transformation.

11 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 27.

12 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 24.
13 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 29.
14 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 40.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 This is a widely shared concern about the theory of commodity fetishism: ‘the

claim that capitalist relations of production generate their own ideological misrecognition
automatically, merely by virtue of their daily functioning, suggests that capitalism
can reproduce itself indefinitely’ (Callinicos 1983, p. 131). A distinction should be
made between a theory of fetishism which argues that it spontaneously secretes
ideology as an inseparable part of capitalism’s socio-economic practices, and a theory
of commodity fetishism that assumes that such a secretion achieves an automatic purchase
throughout society. Trying to address the latter by severing ideology from fetishism,
necessarily severs from the mode of production the category which ideology is but a
subset of, namely, consciousness itself.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 197

There are, I think, a number of problems with this argument which I will
explore in more detail below. There is nothing wrong with their aim to remind
Marxists of the crucial role of the superstructure in the production and
elaboration of ideology. However, by expunging ideology from what is left
of the(ir) theory of fetishism, they grant too much autonomy to the realm of
the superstructure. Reducing fetishism to ‘raw material’ turns it into a very
passive phenomenon and fails to give sufficient theoretical clarity to the
determination of fetishism (and therefore the mode of production) on the
superstructures. The old problem of how to think a relation of mutual
interdependency and reciprocity, while also retaining the ontological priority
of one term in the relationship, is badly resolved by letting the superstructure
effectively break free from any substantive determination by the base. With
the superstructure becoming the exclusive site for the production of ideology,
we have little materialist grounds left for understanding what is the real basis
for the unity of ideological production by the superstructure across its different
regions and through many different kinds of ‘content’.
Commodity fetishism, I shall argue, is no more than a materialist (and not
economistic) account of how social relations and the forces of production,
within a given configuration and at a given level of development, are inscribed
with a tacit ideological consciousness, ‘appropriate and rational . . . to a
particular typical position in the process of production’,18 as Lukács writes
of class consciousness generally. This tacit ideological consciousness constitutes
the conditions of possibility for a wide and creative variety of interpretations
of society. The particular typical position which commodity fetishism designates
is the logic of capital, which, of course, penetrates, in variable and contradictory
ways, the consciousness of the working class and the intelligentsia at the level
of individuals. The tacit consciousness of fetishism is, ‘therefore, neither the
sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who
make up the class’.19 We are talking here of the ‘langue’ of social relations,
perhaps less a consciousness than ‘a class-conditioned unconsciousness of one’s
own socio-historical and economic condition’.20 Labour, however, is subjected
not only to the forces of commodity fetishism (variable and historically specific
as that will be amongst individuals), but is also constituted within the collective
social relations which capital depends on, while also repressing. Gramsci, as
much as Lukács, recognised that the contradictory consciousness of the

18 Lukács 1971, p. 51.

19 Ibid.
20 Lukács 1971, p. 52.
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198 • Mike Wayne

working class was fought out, not just between rival philosophies derived
from the superstructure, but also between that contestation and the worker’s
consciousness ‘implicit in his actions, which unites him with all his colleagues
in the practical transformation of reality’.21
The ideology of fetishism derives from its form and its tropes (equalisation,
inversion, repression, fragmentation, autonomy, and so forth), which are no
mere discursive figures, but real material practices, are numerous. The
superstructure, I shall argue, then produces and elaborates ideological forms
and contents that work in conjunction with the ideology of the fetishistic
form, in all its tropes. In arguing that fetishism is vital to any theory of
ideology, I also aim to demonstrate that Dimoulis’s and Milios’s reading of
Marx’s first chapter in Capital, where the theory of commodity fetishism
appears, is fundamentally wrong. Marx’s commodity fetishism theory is not
constructed on ahistorical and idealist foundations abstracted from the historical
specificity of capitalism. In Chapter 1 of Capital, Marx is discussing the
commodity-form of capital, and Section Four reflects on the consequences for
consciousness that this form has. Moreover, Marx starts with the commodity-
form and commodity fetishism for reasons that are absolutely integral to his
dialectical method of immanent critique, and it is this that Dimoulis and
Milios, following their guides on this matter, Althusser and Balibar, fail to
appreciate. I will show that this failure to appreciate Marx’s methodology
has consequences for their theory of ideology, which ironically reproduces
the same tendency towards a seamless and inescapable social purchase that
they say commodity fetishism theory promotes.

Marx’s method
Strongly influenced by Althusser and Balibar, Dimoulis and Milios argue that
the analysis of commodity exchange in the first chapter of Capital, Volume I,
(and, indeed, the first three chapters where commodities, money and value
are explored) is insufficiently grounded in an analysis of the capitalist mode
of production.22 The result is an ahistorical and therefore idealist account of
mystification which ascribes to commodities, which clearly pre-date the
capitalist mode of production, the automatic tendency to successfully obscure
the real relations between people simply by the act of exchange itself. Thus,

21 Gramsci 1967, p. 66.

22 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 23.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 199

Marx develops his initial theory of commodity fetishism by drawing uncritically

on the category of the bourgeois subject (the subject being a particular bête
noire for the Althusserian school). The theory of commodity fetishism is seen
as presupposing a subject whose essence exists prior to, and outside of, the
act of exchange, and, who is then ‘alienated’ in it. The political consequences
of this mistake on Marx’s part are not hard to see. Essentially, ‘exchange’
itself becomes a form of alienation and ideological confusion, which would
make any advanced postcapitalist society impossible, and require some sort
of regression back to self-sufficiency. This makes the theory of commodity
fetishism ‘makeshift and fanciful’.23 The section on commodity fetishism ought
to be read, Dimoulis and Milios suggest, following Balibar, as an ‘ironic
comment on the intellectual limitations of bourgeois thought’, namely, the
political economists who form Marx’s antagonists.24 It is hard to see why only
political economists would be susceptible to fetishism, but, if it is the case
that the first chapter of Capital is not sufficiently grounded historically, then
Balibar’s alternative explanation for the premature presence of the theory of
commodity fetishism would have to do.
However, did Marx open his most important work by making such an
elementary mistake as Dimoulis and Milios suggest? It does rather beggar
belief that Marx would have made such a fundamental error as to have blurred
what is historically specific about capitalism, especially when just such
a blurring or eternalisation of the capital relation by bourgeois political
economists was a key feature of his critique. There could well be problems
with Marx’s presentation, because Dimoulis and Milios are not the first
to suggest that the opening chapter is about ‘generalised simple commodity
production’ and ‘generalised commodity circulation’,25 not capitalist commodity
circulation and production.26 Thus, while accepting that the concept of value
is intrinsic to Marx’s definition of capitalist relations, Dimoulis and Milios
argue that Marx’s initial presentation of value in Chapter One is detached from
the capitalist mode of production. Value is further generalised (and made
ahistorical) by ‘its examination in correlation with a plethora of “commodity”

23 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 24.

24 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 29.
25 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 23.
26 This reading of the opening chapter of Capital derives from Engels but has been

increasingly subjected to critique in recent years. See Arthur 2004, pp. 17–37, and De
Angelis 1996, p. 10.
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200 • Mike Wayne

forms and modes of production’.27 Again, there is the suggestion that Marx
is conflating different commodity forms (capitalist and precapitalist) and modes
of production. The latter point is easily dealt with. Where Marx refers to the
feudal mode of production, to peasant self-sufficiency or to a postcapitalist
mode of production, it is always by way of contrast with commodity exchange
and production, not conflation.28 Elsewhere, Dimoulis and Milios applaud
Marx’s ‘comparative methodology’, but in ways which are (as we shall see
later) just as problematic as their apparent suspicion of it in the first chapter.
The key issue, though, is their misunderstanding of the role of the concept
of value in Marx’s method. They note that, in the course of Marx’s exposition
in Capital, there is a shift from ‘the commodity and . . . the value-form in
general . . . to the dual character of labour and the process of exchange’.29
Nevertheless, this shift does not mark a ‘break’ in Marx’s method, but the
dialectical analysis of capital from the abstract to the concrete.
There are a number of key lessons to learn in this dialectical exposition. Value
is the process of quantitative commensuration circulating through different forms
in search of endless expansion (although the feature of endless expansion is
not introduced until Chapter Four). Clearly, this is an abstract definition of
capital, but what we take with us, as Marx progresses towards more concrete
levels of the real, such as production, wage-labour, capital, and so on, is
precisely that capital is abstraction, materialised abstraction and the abstraction
of materiality. This ontological feature of capital is precisely what we are
likely to lose sight of in any positivistic rush to the ‘concrete stuff’ of production.
There is, in fact, an inextricable link between abstraction, abstract labour –
labour made abstract – and the forms of appearance of capitalist social relations.30
The opening five chapters of Capital (before the chapter on the buying and
selling of labour-power) reprise in an abbreviated form the entire structure
of the Grundrisse. There Marx made his methodological starting point clear:

To develop the concept of capital it is necessary to begin not with labour

but with value, and, precisely, with exchange-value in an already developed
movement of circulation. It is just as impossible to make the transition
directly from labour to capital as it is to go from the different human races
directly to the banker or from nature to the steam engine.31

27 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 23.

28 Marx 1983, pp. 82–3.
29 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 18.
30 De Angelis 1996, p. 6.
31 Marx 1993, p. 259.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 201

Marx starts Capital precisely with value in a developed movement of circulation,

that is capitalist circulation. The opening of Capital is not about ‘generalised’
(that is, historically undifferentiated) commodity circulation/production. Marx
tells us that he is concerned with the capitalist mode of production on the
first page. He tells us that its wealth ‘presents itself’ in a mass of commodities
and that, therefore, he wants to begin the investigation with this mass, whose
unit is the single commodity. But, in moving to the commodity, does Marx
lose his historical purchase? Marx’s first concern is to distinguish between
exchange-value and use-value, and he notes that ‘the exchange of commodities
is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction of use-value’.32 This
act of ‘total abstraction’ Marx does not associate with any other form in which
products were produced or exchanged. The tension or contradiction between
use-value and exchange-value is specific to capitalism and establishes one of
the fundamental dimensions of fetishism: a poorly mediated relation between
form (the value-form with its abstraction) and content (particular use-values).
At this very early point, Marx also introduces the notion that the labour-
power, which makes the commodity, is also subject to the self same act of
abstraction, because it is a definite quantity of labour that is measured in
exchange.33 A little later in the same chapter, he notes:

Every product of labour is, in all states of society, a use-value; but it is only
at a definite historical epoch in a society’s development that such a product
becomes a commodity, viz., at the epoch when the labour spent on the
production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective
qualities of that article, i.e., as its value.34

It is only under capitalism that the labour spent on the production of a useful
article is compulsively regulated by the average socially necessary labour time
it takes to make that article.35 The concept of socially average necessary labour
(introduced on the fourth page of the first chapter) is inconceivable in any
prior mode of production where ‘averages’ across space, encompassing large
numbers of people unbeknown to each other, was impossible. So, we have
already abstraction, compulsion and universality, all specific to capitalist
commodity exchange, in the opening pages of Capital.

32 Marx 1983, p. 45.

33 Marx 1983, p. 46.
34 Marx 1983, p. 67.
35 Marx 1983, p. 46.
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From here, Marx moves conceptually onto the necessity for the value-form
latently expressed in the universal exchangeability of the commodity to split
off from the commodity into ‘the dazzling money-form’.36 In exploring the
circuit of the value-forms commodity-money-commodity, or C-M-C, Marx is
analysing the first ‘layer’ of reality in the stratified ontology that is capital.
Marx refers to this vantage point as his ‘present standpoint of simple
circulation’.37 But what he means by ‘simple’ is emphatically not some ahistorical
or even embryonic capitalist process. He means ‘simple’ in the critical and
epistemological sense that, at this ‘level’ of reality, one is unable to comprehend
the full workings of the social order and that, indeed, at this level, reality has
characteristics which are confounded and contradicted by characteristics and
processes which can be revealed at ‘deeper’ (more determinant) levels of
reality conceived as a totality.
In the Grundrisse,38 Marx writes of ‘the simple exchange of exchange-values’
as an ‘infantile abstraction’,39 and it is precisely at this level of abstraction
and the everyday circulation of goods and money, that the generation of
ideology from below or fetishism, is to be found.
Thus, Marx wants us to learn an important lesson about the consequences
which capitalism has, as an object of knowledge, for consciousness. Since the
subject is part of the object with intrinsic dissembling powers, knowledge
has to be built up by exploring the movement of the object itself and by
exploring its contradictions.
Marx’s critique is much more sophisticated than a positivist rush to get to
capitalist production. Instead, Marx installs his critical thought into those
units of the object (commodities and money) which are historically determinate
(they internalise key features of the system), familiar from everyday life (to
aid comprehension), while being incomplete or inadequate vantage points

36 Marx 1983, p. 54. The forms that value takes are not, pace Althusser’s critique of

Hegel, an essence that remains unchanged by those forms and whose forms are merely
the unmediated expression of the essence. Marx’s analysis of the forms which value
takes (Marx 1983, pp. 54–75) through the simple, expanded, general and finally money
form, are real determinations on value, transforming it from an accidental and sporadic
form into a systematic engine for its own expansion/reproduction. These differences/
differentiations matter because matter matters: it is only the fantasy of value that
makes all matter the pliable/frictionless expression of itself.
37 Marx 1983, p. 115.
38 The Grundrisse has always been an embarrassment for Althusserians, for here is

Marx returning substantively to the language and method of Hegel after he had
supposedly made his epistemological rupture from him.
39 Marx 1993, p. 249.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 203

from which to know the object as a whole. Marx’s method is one of immanent
critique as Chris Arthur has brilliantly demonstrated:

in a dialectical argument successive stages are introduced because they are

demanded by the logic of the exposition, and they are so demanded because
the exposition itself conceptualises the internal relations and contradictions
essential to the totality.40

As Marx develops the chain of circulation, initially around commodities-

money-commodities (C-M-C), it is clear that circulation of value is a process
fraught with potential breakdowns between different moments of a process
characterised by its unity of differences.41 It is important to note, then, that
the economic relations which secrete fetishistic forms are not conceived as
seamless and unified but, instead, as having the built-in foundations for
contradiction and crisis. This has implications for thinking about the relative
coherence and unity (or its lack) of fetishistic forms. For example, if one of
the key tropes of fetishism is the independence which capitalism develops
for individuals and organisations, any serious breakdowns in the circuits
connecting C-M-C, forcibly remind one of their ‘intimate connexion’42 in the
shape of a crisis. In such circumstances, the foundations for the fetishistic
trope of independence, are themselves thrown into question.
But what further impels Marx’s analysis to transcend the circuit of
C-M-C and reveal the contradiction between quantitative commensuration,
on the one hand, and the expansion of value, on the other? It is the contradiction
between the abstraction implied in the universal exchange of commodities,
or between the abstract indifference to the use-value of commodities, and the
fact that C-M-C denotes circulation for use. It is this contradiction which
pushes Marx on to develop a second sphere of circulation which intermeshes
with C-M-C, and that, of course, is money-commodity-money, or M-C-M.
This is where value metamorphoses into its essence, capital.

The circuit C-M-C starts with one commodity, and finishes with another,
which falls out of circulation and into consumption. Consumption, the
satisfaction of wants, in one word, use value, is its end and aim. The
circuit M-C-M, on the contrary, commences with money and ends with

40 Arthur 2004, p. 26.

41 Marx 1983, pp. 114–15.
42 Marx 1983, p. 115.
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204 • Mike Wayne

money. Its leading motive, and the goal that attracts it, is therefore mere
exchange-value.43

Here, Marx establishes the economic conditions for one of the key tropes of
fetishism: inversion. A circuit whose fulcrum is consumption for use, depends
on, and is subordinated to, another antithetical circuit whose fulcrum is
accumulation for the sake of accumulation. It is worth underscoring the link
between the trope of inversion and the structures of capitalist reality – or,
perhaps, that should be, realities. For we have here a double fetishistic structure,
an inversion of an inversion. Firstly, we have the primary fetishism of
M-C-M, where ‘[i]nstead of man being the aim of production, production has
become the aim of man’.44 Then, within its imposition of a structural logic
that is utterly hostile to (collective) democratic control, there is a secondary
fetishism represented here by the C-M-C circuit, which inverts the inversion
and represses the exploitative social relations which are the necessary condition
for the primary fetishism. Here, we have to contest a familiar Althusserian
complaint. Dimoulis and Milios make very heavy weather of the trope of
inversion, finally dismissing its effectivity within the structure of fetishism
largely because they exclusively associate it with the dreaded subject-object
dialectic.45 However, what is being inverted in the primary fetishism of
M-C-M is not some ahistorical essence of ‘Man’. On the contrary, the inversion
is specific to the structure of capital. Never before in the history of humankind
has labour been the source of such productive powers (mediated by technology
and knowledge) and, yet, never before has the object world which human
labour-power produces been more powerful over and independent/
autonomous of human labour-power than in the era of capitalism.46 Whether
one could really talk of ‘inversion’ in precapitalist modes of production, is
debateable, but the content of the category would, in any case, be radically
incommensurate with our own epoch of bourgeois production. Because of
this inversion, one ought really to think in terms of the object-subject dialectic,
in order to stress where primacy ordinarily holds, to locate the subject as

43 Marx 1983, p. 148.

44 Taussig 1980, p. 32.
45 ‘. . . the question of fetishism cannot be posed in terms of an inversion’ (Dimoulis

and Milios 2004, p. 30).

46 As Geras comments, on the difference between the Economic Philosophical Manuscripts

and Capital: ‘In place of a concept of alienation founded on an essentialist anthropology

we have one tied to the historical specificity of forms of domination’ (Geras 1971,
p. 73).
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 205

constituted within the object and to avoid falling into the idealist and humanist
positions criticised by Althusser.47 Marx certainly uses the object (commodities)-
subject (labour) model in Section Four of Chapter One of Capital. However,
only if one abstracts Marx’s example from the overall movement of his critique
does one come up with the sort of self-positing Enlightenment bourgeois
subject which Dimoulis and Milios think Marx is working with in the first
chapter.
Only when Marx has derived from the immanent contradictions of capital
these two intermeshed modes of circulation which constitute the realisation
of value, does he then move on to consider the production of value. The
production of value, of course, is shot through with the fetishism of the sphere
of C-M-C, since production is a moment (the moment of valorisation) in the
circulation of capital. Although Marx does not mention the concept of fetishism
in relation to the theory of surplus-value, it is clearly implicit in the possibility
of its formulation.48 From the vantage point of C-M-C, the exchange between
capital and labour (wages for work) appears fair and equivalent (or a whole
trade-union politics is based on making it fair), but, from the vantage point
of M-C-M, capital has bought that special commodity that produces more
value than it requires for its own reproduction. The whole force of the theory
of surplus-value is that it once again reveals a mode of exchange invisibly
meshed with another mode of exchange, but highly antithetical to it. Thus,
the concept of commodity fetishism does not simply drop away once Marx
reaches the site of production and construction of wage-labour.49 I have
argued that Marx’s analysis in Chapter One is sufficiently historically
determinate to ground an analysis of commodity fetishism in the later more
concrete analysis of capitalist production and capital fetishism. There is no
epistemological break in Capital’s treatment of fetishism or in the transition
from analysing the value-form to capitalist production.

47 An object-subject dialectic is less likely to fall into the error of reducing fetishism
merely to ‘false consciousness’, that is to a purely mental state, as here: ‘To the
individuals concerned, this reality appears, paradoxically, to be a separate, even
autonomous power vis-à-vis its creators’ and ‘an inverted form of thinking creates
and expresses an inverted reality, an inverted man whom the products of consciousness
dominate’ (Balaban 1990, pp. 5 and 8, respectively).
48 Marx 1983, pp. 158–65.
49 See DeAngelis 1996, p. 21 and Geras 1971, p. 81, who make similar points.
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206 • Mike Wayne

The general ideological form of fetishism

Dimoulis and Milios explicitly dispute that fetishism is itself an ideological
practice, while the implicit thrust of their argument is that the ideological
productions of the superstructure are overwhelmingly more determinate than
the fetishism of capital. In this section, then, I want to ask: a) how does the
primary fetishism of the value-form lay the basis for the ‘metaphysical subtleties
and theological niceties’50 of secondary fetishism? b) How can we conceive
the relation between fetishism as ideology and the ideological productions
of the superstructure in a way that preserves creative agency for the latter,
while insisting on the on-going determining force of the former?
Fetishism generated out of the economic mode of production is certainly
a different kind of ideological production from the more systematic forms of
symbolic production elaborated within the superstructure by capital’s organic
intellectuals. But it is still a form of ideology, tacitly encoded in practices. Let
us return again to the concept of value and its constitutive essence: abstraction.
Marx uses the value-form, in its commodity manifestation, to reveal the
violence of its abstraction, its sheer power of homogenisation, its emptying
out of all particularity from commodities (whether labour or finished products),
its indifference to use-value and its modus operandi by quantification.
Quantification is not just an economic feature, but is the indispensable means
for articulating social power, namely, the social power of a minority class to
impose its interests onto the majority class. The social power of the minority
class requires the imposition of a quantitative logic on all exchanges, mediations
and comparisons within the mode of production. This necessarily means
excluding as far as possible qualitative judgements and processes. There is
an inextricable link (not often made by Marxists) between qualitative
considerations and expanding the realm of participation, co-operation,
democracy, collective judgements and assessments, in short, the fine-grained
honing of human capacities, powers and democratic communication, which
are systematically blocked and distorted by the one sided imposition and
crisis-prone mediations of a brute quantitative logic.
If the dominance of the logic of quantitivity is social power, how is it that
systemic and unequal social power is disguised by the projection of this
quantitative logic throughout society? Or, why does the abstraction of the
value-form lead to the ideological mystifications of secondary fetishism?

50 Marx 1983, p. 76.

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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 207

One-sided quantitivity erases the particularity of any individual thing and,

also, the qualitative differences between individual things that are gathered
together under the same category or institutional practice (‘voters’ or ‘citizens’
for example). Formal equality becomes the ideological semblance that erases
real particularities and differences (including substantive inequalities). This
homogenisation under the sign of a very partial ‘equality’ (equalisation) is
also inextricably connected to the process of erasing qualitative connections
between people and things gathered together within different categories or
in different parts or aspects of the social process. In the absence of qualitative
relations, the universe of commodities hangs together as a totality of atomised
fragments, the web of connections which make up that totality are only of
the ‘crude’ quantitative kind, which suits the minority class who as consumers,
have a greater quantity of money to spend (revenue), and as capitalists,
personify a system driven by the pure expansion of quantity (money as
capital).51
Money conceived in its ‘simple form’, that is, as a means of measure and
exchange between exchangers, presents those exchangers as formally equal,
engaged in non-coercive relations and the exercise of ‘choice’. The starkest
relations of inequality can be radically muted by the formal equivalence that
the act of exchange with money grants all exchangers:

A worker who buys a loaf of bread and a millionaire who does the same
appear in this act only as simple buyers, just as, in respect to them, the
grocer appears only as seller.52

This ‘scene’ of secondary fetishism is ideological because the qualitative

relations which have made and are making the worker a worker, the millionaire
a rich man, and the grocer a petty bourgeois, are dissolved in the abstraction
of simple exchange. In the Grundrisse, Marx calls such a scene of exchange
an appearance-form. The term designates critique of those appearance-forms
and inadequacy on their part, not because they are unreal or false in themselves.

51 Rhetorically, in both theory and popular culture, abstraction has been figured in

the image of the ghost, as in the ghostly quality of our sociality, the ghostly disembodied
spectral remainder after concrete materiality has been evacuated by exchange, the
residue of something once human (such as labour) now ‘dead’, and haunting its living
counterpart, the repression of social crimes (the ghost crying for vengeance), the
possession of the body and object world by some powerful force indifferent to its
materiality, the ghostly animation of the inanimate, and so on. See Arthur 2004, Keenan
1993, Miéville 1998, and Wayne 2005.
52 Marx 1993, p. 251.
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208 • Mike Wayne

On the contrary, the circuit of C-M-C does give individuals a real sphere of
‘independent’ activity – no matter how limited by financial considerations.
There is a truth to these forms of experience, a truth to ideology, a truth to
the subject. As Marx noted in the Grundrisse, using, interestingly enough, the
mirror metaphor that has been so influential via Lacan:

Out of the act of exchange itself, the individual . . . is reflected in himself as

its exclusive and dominant (determinant) subject. With that, then, the complete
freedom of the individual is posited: voluntary transaction; no force on
either side, positing the self . . . as dominant and primary.53

But, of course, there are systemic limits to that truth which it cannot recognise.54
The independence of the sphere of C-M-C is also characterised by a (disguised
or repressed) dependence on (or mediation by) the totality of social
relations which are their determining condition of existence (namely the
primary fetishism of the value-form, M-C-M, accumulation for the sake of
accumulation, and so on).
There is a clear line of continuity, then, in the category of appearance-forms
and the category of fetishism in Section Four of Chapter One in Capital,
Volume I, despite their different genealogies in Hegelian philosophy and
anthropology.55 There is, however, a difference in the way Marx ‘spun’ the
meaning of fetishistic ‘independence’ in the two works. In Capital, Marx
sought to comment on a process whereby the products of the labour of human
beings come to acquire an independence from the producers. The sense of
semblance, or inadequacy, or incompleteness about such commodity fetishism
is the extent to which this independence has its ultimate dependent foundations
in the social relations and is not some fact intrinsic to the products themselves
(naturalisation being one of the tacit ideological secretions of fetishism). But,
in this usage of the term, the category of independence is imbued with an
explicit negativity, giving horrific animation and power to those things that
the producers themselves have made. In the Grundrisse, by contrast, the
appearance-forms of independence are the basis, not for the independence
of commodities, but the independence of the owners of commodities (or

53 Marx 1993, p. 244.

54 ‘The reality of capitalism is its own utterly partial justification’. Miéville 1998,
p. 23.
55 Once we contextualise the section in Capital on fetishism in relation to the term

Marx used in the Grundrisse, we can give a definitive answer to Dimoulis’s and Milios’s
complaint that Marx gives ‘no explanation of the status of fetishism (Illusion? Symbol?
Truth?)’ (Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 34).
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 209

money), an altogether happier bourgeois fantasy. As Amariglio and Callari

suggest, the theory of commodity fetishism thus provides not only an account
of the constitution of the subject but also a way into the great lacuna within
Marxist theory, an account of the subjectivity, ‘psychology’, experiential world
and consciousness ‘involved in the ”exchange of equivalents” under conditions
of generalized commodity trade’.56 And that subjectivity is very much fissured
along the lines of the positive and negative poles of fetishism encompassed
by the Grundrisse and Capital.57
The fetishistic act of exchange itself provides the essential spontaneous
ideological basis on which the systematic production and elaboration of
political, juridical and cultural ideologies can flourish. Without the act of
exchange, such ideologies would have little correlation with the real-life
experience of the subject and hence have far less ‘sticking power’ than they,
in fact, do have. Without the superstructural production of ideologies, the
act of exchange would find its tacit modes of consciousness unable to provide
the systematic modes of explanation that it requires in, for example, times
of crisis. However, the ‘base’ has the greater role of determination here
because the fetishistic form and its various tropes (equalisation, fragmentation,
inversion, repression) is internalised within the superstructure. The state,
for example, is, of course, a key means for producing ideologies and policies
and it does so in response to a multiplicity of conjunctural factors, many of
them having only a highly mediated relationship to the class struggle. But
the form in which the state deals with subjects is structurally determined by
the fetishism of the value-form. The state fragments the concrete social
individual into a series of categories such as citizen, tenant, welfare claimant,
voter, motorist, pedestrian, producer, consumer and taxpayer.58 The fetishised
being is one conceived, as here, in categories whose content is emptied of
their qualitative internal differences (within the category ‘consumers’ or
‘producers’ for example), while the relations between the categories can only
be one of sealed blocs of homogeneity bumping into one another, rather than
as potentially interpenetrating, with reciprocal interaction and interests.

56 Amariglio and Callari 1996, p. 190.

57 See Wayne 2003, pp. 183–219 on the contradictions of the subject constituted
within fetishism.
58 Clarke 1991, p. 64.
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210 • Mike Wayne

Reading Lukács and Pashukanis

Dimoulis and Milios come close to accepting this theory of deriving the
ideological form of the superstructural production of ideology from the
fetishistic value form of capital, in their discussion of the work of the Soviet
jurist Evgeny Pashukanis. They give a largely approving summary of
Pashukanis’s work, which finds a ‘structural similarity of a causal type’59
between the material foundations of commodity exchange and capitalist law.
As we have seen, in commodity exchange, the subject is tacitly constructed
as an isolated subject freely entering (without visible violence) into contact
and contracts with other independent subjects in order to exchange ‘property’
(money, labour-power) in the pursuit of their own interests (conceived as
independent). Similarly, capitalist law treats the subject as a sovereign subject
exercising free will and all being equal or equivalent before the law. Those
institutions play a crucial role in developing and elaborating a content (the
ideology of the individual) out of an economic practice that is already their
essential precondition (the subject as ‘exclusive’, ‘dominant’ and ‘determinant’).
Dimoulis and Milios reject any charge that Pashukanis’s analysis is
economistic:

. . . the charge is not well founded. Pashukanis does not assert that the legal
system lacks autonomy, nor that the base determines what is to become law
(statutes, court decisions, doctrines). His analysis aims at demonstrating in
what way the structure of a society (the operating principles which comprise
the semantic core of a mode of production) makes it necessary for there to
be a system of rules for social regulation, adopting certain assumptions and
forcibly imposing them as generally applicable (free and equal subjects,
contract, structuring of public law on the basis of private, free will).60

We can see here how notions around the law, morality, personal responsibility,
and so forth, constitute a normative content in contradiction to, as well as
congruent with, the quantiative indifference of the value-form to any real
norms. The contradiction between form (abstractly equal) and content (equality
as an ideal) is precisely what makes the content ideological, but, at the
same time, it can form the basis of ideological critique by revealing the
impossibility of authentically realising the normative ideals within the fetishistic
(value-)form. Again, this points to the fact that a theory of fetishism is very

59 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, pp. 12–13.

60 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 13.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 211

far from being a monolithic, seamless, automatically secured production of

ideology.
Two things have to happen for the authors to diminish the implications of
their approving analysis of how fetishism influences the ideological form (but
not the content) within which superstructural agencies produce ideology.
Firstly, they have to sharply divide Pashukanis’s analysis off from Lukács’s
analysis of the commodity-form and its more general implications for the
superstructure. This they do in rather unpersuasive terms. While noting that
both Lukács and Pashukanis have a key role for the theory of commodity
fetishism, they differentiate them by categorising Lukács’s approach as ‘extensive-
universalising’ while Pashukanis’s is ‘extensive-comparative’.61 What they mean
by this is that Pashukanis offers a more specific analysis of the structural
similarity between commodity fetishism and a precise region of the
superstructure, the law, and one which is closely tied to state imperatives to
regulate and protect through specific ‘contents’, the realm of production.
Lukács offers a rather less precise analysis by comparison, since his target is
not a specific region of the superstructure (or, at least, not one which has such
directly traceable interactions with the mode of production) but, firstly, formal
rationality itself and, secondly, bourgeois philosophy and its various reactions
to the problem posed by the spread of formal rationality. For Lukács, the
indifference of formal rationality ‘towards what is qualitatively unique, towards
the content and the material substratum of the object concerned’62 constitutes
what Althusserians used to call, the ‘problematic’ of bourgeois philosophy.
As with Pashukanis vis-à-vis the law, Lukács finds a structural causality
between formal rationality and the abstraction of the value-form. Thus the
difference in method, at least, is less than categorical. Pashukanis can be read
as offering a specific case-study of a more general problem. In their assessment
of Pashukanis, Dimoulis and Milios argue that:

This kind of law [bourgeois law] is of a historically unique character because

of its form and – we might add – because of the universal character of its
implementation, in contrast with previous social norms.63

If one replaces ‘law’, in this sentence, with Lukács’s main target, formal
rationality, the similarities in the methods of Lukács and Pashukanis are fairly
striking.
61 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 16.
62 Lukács 1971, p. 126.
63 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 13.
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212 • Mike Wayne

The second thing which the authors do with their approving summary of
Pashukanis is to, then, ‘forget’ the implications of their agreement with him,
after their introduction of Althusser and Balibar and their critique of Marx’s
deployment of the term fetishism. The centrality of the state, for Althusser
and Balibar, prompts Dimoulis and Milios to later comment on Pashukanis’s
‘mistake of designating the economic as the source of the legal structure’,64
even though their earlier summary offered a much more nuanced account of
the nature of economic determination, and one that is potentially compatible
with what they require: a suitably sophisticated understanding of the mutual
interdependence of base and superstructure, or, as they put it,

simultaneous formation of the interacting elements of the CMP [capitalist

mode of production], comprising, among other things, the formation of the
(bourgeois) law and the ideology/philosophy which accompanies it.65

Yet, the ‘simultaneous formation’ formulation is, I would argue, a regression

from their earlier exposition. By radically diminishing the force of the argument
about how fetishism generates the ideological form within which the
superstructure operates to secure the long-term reproduction of the mode of
production, they are in danger of sliding into the impasse of the Althusserian
problematic. As Gregory Elliott asks: is the Althusserian totality ‘a bona
fide totality or a congeries of discrete interacting elements?’.66 Conflating
the philosophical enemy (Hegel) with the political enemy (Stalin), Althusser
argued that the economic ‘essence’ ‘is never active in the pure state’, 67
but, instead, fuses with a multiplicity of superstructural factors which are
irreducible to, and not the mere causal expression of, the economic. Against
accusations that Althusser had collapsed into liberal pluralism, he coupled
his notion of multiple factors (overdetermination) with the concept of ‘a
structure articulated in dominance’.68 The overdetermination/structure in
dominance couplet, however, designates two concepts forever flying apart
because they have no internal principle able to bind them together into a unity
of differences. Indeed, the emphasis is very much on the overdetermination
pole. Importing terms derived from Freudian dream analysis, such as
condensation (the principle of fusion), and displacement (the swapping of

64 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 36.

65 Ibid.
66 Elliott 1987, p. 155.
67 Althusser 1982, p. 113.
68 Althusser 1982, p. 202.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 213

what constitutes primary and secondary contradictions), only further reinforces

a receding picture of the determinant and systematic dominant structures
within the general structure. In short, because Althusser rejected any sense
of identifying internal principles operating (with their own specificity)
within different parts of the social totality, his totality is, indeed, ultimately
a congeries of parts. At least, this is the case when his system leans on the
‘conjuncture’ side of the structure/conjuncture antinomy. Elsewhere, as we
shall see, when it comes to the question of ideology, Althusser collapses into
a raging ‘structural’ functionalism.

Ideology and knowledge

I have argued that the Althusser/Balibar lens, through which Dimoulis and
Milios read Marx, means that they never really grasp the nature of Marx’s
method. This, as we have seen, is to proceed through an immanent critique
of the fetishistic appearance-forms of capital whose inadequacy provides the
spur for critical knowledge to ground those forms in their more determining
real relations that together constitute the stratified totality of the object that
is to be known. Dimoulis and Milios, however, have a rather different sense
of the social totality and how critical purchase on it can be achieved when
that totality is systematically dissembling. Noting that the term fetishism
derives from the discourse of colonial anthropologists looking at ‘primitive’
communities, Dimoulis and Milios suggest that Marx’s appropriation:

transferred by analogy from the observation of an indigenous community

to the community of the observer . . . retains an external reference, which
enables the internal observer to carry out a distanced analysis of the elements
of illusion which the members of her own community experience in their
social relations.69

Analogy, however, seems to be a remarkably weak basis on which to establish

an epistemology capable of producing a critique of capitalism, especially
when the analogy is rooted in a discourse thoroughly imbued with the ideology
of the bourgeois sciences, where objectivity (‘distanced analysis’) and
transcendence of social interests are assumed.
They also suggest that the second string to Marx’s epistemological bow is
that of the comparative method. This allows exteriority to the object one is

69 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 5.

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214 • Mike Wayne

a part of but seeking critical purchase on by counterpoising ‘capitalism to

other communities, both real and imaginary’.70 Marx certainly does this at
various points, but this strategy of comparison works to illustrate what has
already been argued and cannot be regarded as the fulcrum of Marx’s analysis
of capitalism. Only when they are discussing the work of Pashukanis do their
notions of ‘exteriority’ and ‘interiority’ come close to a Marxist sense of the
totality. Here, it is argued that the terms capital fetishism and legal ideology
cannot be conceived in their ‘interiority’ but have to be related to their exterior
conditions of existence, which are, in fact, each other.71 But, as I have argued,
the full implications of their agreement with Pashukanis vis-à-vis the ideology
of fetishism are never developed but are, instead, thwarted by their alignment
with Althusser and Balibar. This is true too as they develop their theory of
ideological production emanating from the superstructure.
Here, we see a shift away from flirting with objectivity and towards a
headlong plunge into its opposite – relativism. Relativism achieves critical
purchase by pluralisation and comparison: a paradigm is allowed its own
internal validity but any claims to timeless and universal relevance is criticised
by reference to other paradigms whose own claims are, in turn, relativised
by other paradigms. Certainly, pluralisation and comparison are important
critical tools, but, on their own, they cannot be the basis for historical-materialist
critique. It should be clear, for example, that any sense of progress, from, say,
the ‘paradigm’ of the feudal mode of production, to capitalism, or from
capitalism to socialism, cannot be grounded in relativism. The comparison is
ontological only, identifying ‘difference’ but not allowing for evaluation (different
and better, or worse). These contradictions are very evident when Dimoulis
and Milios attempt to recruit Marx to this relativistic constructivism:

Marx adopts the constructivist viewpoint on the question of fetishism. He

refuses to distinguish between truth and falsehood, ideology and truth, and
asserts that, on the bases of certain facts concerning the structure of social
production, individuals construct a conception of reality which – without
being true – corresponds to that structure, that is it is the only possible way
of conceiving reality . . . [I]t is also asserted that it [the conception of
individuals] can be replaced in a different historical context by a representation
which will be subject to different criteria of truth and may be politically

70 Ibid.
71 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 36.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 215

desirable but, in any case, will be equally artificial as that of the present
day (for example, the transparency prevailing in human relations in a
communist society will not constitute the ‘truth’ of those relations . . . or a
conception of ‘actual reality’ freed from ideology, but a different way for
human subjects to conceive data).72

However, Marx’s theory of the ideology of fetishism is not remotely one that
refuses to distinguish between truth and falsehood. There is a correspondence
between ideology and reality, but only at the level of the appearance-forms
of capitalist reality. The judgement of adequacy (‘truth’ is a little absolute
perhaps) is made by grounding the appearance-forms in relation to the totality
that they must contradictorily disavow. What happens in Dimoulis’s and
Milios’s critique is that the stratified ontology has no substantive methodological
place (despite the odd allusion to it) and, thus, the totality is flattened out,
with the effect that ideology is totalised so that there is, indeed, no other way
of conceiving reality. Critique is achieved by relativistic comparison, another
paradigm or historical context is invoked but quite how one could develop
criterion for assessing its desirability is hard to see, when it too will require
ideology. We can see here how the term ideology is transmuting under the
pressure of its relativistic framework and becoming something more neutral,
merely designating the discursive processing of social data. But, in that case,
it loses its unique ability to track the distortions of representation and
consciousness back to historically specific class contradictions.
Curiously, although Dimoulis and Milios write of exposing the ‘ontologised
discourse’ of constructivism to ‘fundamental criticism’73 it is precisely this
definition of ideology which they align themselves with a few pages later, as
they try to account for the effectivity of ideology:

[T]he only way its persistence can be comprehensible is for it to be regarded

as ‘truth’, as the truth which is both necessary and self evident in a given society.74

Again, this fails to make the distinction that the truth of ideology lies in its
correspondence with the appearance-forms of capitalism. Ideology is totalised
rather than relativised by the social totality that ideology conceals but cannot
explain. Dimoulis’s and Milios’s slide towards relativism is facilitated by their
dependence on the débris of Althusser’s theory of ideology. When they argue

72 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 33.

73 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 34.
74 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, pp. 38–9.
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216 • Mike Wayne

that ideology is ‘a necessary relation between subjects and the conditions of their
lives’,75 they are explicitly invoking Althusser’s theory of ideology in general.
Now, I have been arguing that the theory of fetishism offers an historically
grounded and determinate explanation of the general form of ideology. Like
the value-form, the general form of ideology has numerous forms or tropes.
In his famous essay on ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, Althusser, by contrast,
offers us an account of the general form of ideology, its ‘structure and function’,
that is transhistorical. If Althusser was proposing only that, so long as there
are classes, there must always be ideology to explain away class division,
one could hardly disagree. But Althusser’s argument is, of course, much more
contentious, namely that, ideology is:

not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omni-present, transhistorical

and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history.76

Thus, Althusser’s general form loses its anchorage in the mode of production
and the historical specificity of the value-form which the theory of fetishism
provides. In effect, Althusser blows up the bourgeois subject – monadic and
(in its misrecognition of its real relations to the real) self-determining – into
an ahistorical universal. Althusser glosses over the fact that the very concept
of the freely self-determined subject posited as the key feature of the
transhistorical form of ideology in general is the product of the bourgeois
epoch.77 Had Althusser properly grounded his monadic ideological subject
in the fetishism of the mode of production and the value-form, instead of an
eternal ontology realised and contested in the sphere of the superstructure,
his theory of ideology would not have so readily collapsed into ahistorical
functionalism (because nothing can escape this general form – it lacks
contradiction for a start) and relativism (because evaluation of class ideologies
is subordinated to the general form which constitutes the necessary relation,
irrespective of social relations, between subjects and the real relations of
production).
Sensing that the trap of relativism is about to spring shut on them, Dimoulis
and Milios declare:

this does not mean that it is impossible for the ideological distortion of
certain view[s] to be demonstrated, through suitable methods of criticism

75 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 39.

76 Althusser 2001, p. 109, my emphasis.
77 Althusser 2001, p. 115.
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Fetishism and Ideology: A Reply to Dimoulis and Milios • 217

and comparison, as a distortion corresponding to a truth useful for the

reproduction of a system with immediate consequences for individuals’
behaviour.78

Their methods of criticism however are certainly not suitable, while the priority
given to comparison pushes them towards relativism. How strong or Marxist
can a critique of ideology be on the basis that it is functional for a system?
The vagueness of the language here (‘consequences for individuals’ behaviour’)
is a symptom of the way relativism undermines the epistemological basis
with which to make judgements about class interests from within the system
itself (as immanent critique allows us to do). In trying to establish the ‘relative
autonomy of the political level’,79 they have reproduced the seamless and functional
unity of ideological practices that they ascribe to the theory of commodity
fetishism.
Discussing Georg Lukács’s claim that all problems of consciousness and
ideology can be traced back to the commodity-form, Terry Eagleton finds

the claim a trifle overweening. In what important sense, for instance, can
the doctrine that men are superior to women, or whites to blacks, be traced
back to some secret source in commodity production?80

I have argued that under capitalism, there is a general form to ideology which
can indeed be derived from the fetishism of the value-form. The general form
of ideology has multiple dimensions (equalisation, fragmentation, repression,
inversion and autonomy – although this is by no means an exhaustive list).
Althusser was right to try and formulate a theory of ideology in general and
right to insist that ideology is inscribed into material practices. He failed to
give that inscription a sufficiently deep materialist basis – stopping at the
level of the superstructure. The general form of ideology derived from fetishism
cannot explain the specific content and development of, for example, sexist
and racist ideologies, but it may well be able to offer an account of the unity
of ideologies at the level of form.
The theory of fetishism provides a far better basis for a Marxist understanding
of ideology as it is generated from ‘below’ and ‘above’ than Dimoulis and
Milios have presented.

78 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 39.

79 Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 41.
80 Eagleton 1991, p. 87.
HIMA 13,3_f8_193-218 8/23/05 3:33 PM Page 218

218 • Mike Wayne

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