Marx’Thoughts On Fetishism And Human Liberation

The Marxist thoughts on fetishism experiences a long process of development, and the ideology of fetishism in the first chapter of "Das Kapital" is expressed maturely. Marx notes the role and effect of money in Jewish life as early as his "On the Jewish Question", and the alienation of the people in the secular world has been realized profoundly in his "the1844Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts". According to Marx, the most severe alienation is the alienation of labor, thinking on how to get rid of alienation. Later, in German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, Marx expresses his opinion on the perversive world and theoretically explores how to reverse the perversive world. Marx holds that under some certain conditions, only by means of the communist movement can laborers take their own essence. With the maturity of the Marxist economics thought, he was increasingly aware of the importance of the empirical analysis on political economics. It can be said that in "Economic Manuscripts (1857-1858)" and "Economic Manuscripts (1861-1863)" Marx reviewed the materialized social reality systematically, and made a new interpretation on how to access to human liberation. The classic documents predating "Das Kapital" serve as the benchmarking literature for researchers to trace Marx’ thoughts on fetishism, in other words, those materials are the theoretical preparation for the formation of the ideas on fetishism in "Das Kapital". We can regard the fetishism in "Das Kapital" as a critical conclusion of the ideologies before "Das Kapital", where he put forward the thought of commodity fetishism, money fetishism and capital fetishism comprehensively. Marx dialectically surveys the impact of "materials" such as commodity, currency and capital on the social production mode and human ideological awareness, affirming the shaping effect from them to the subjective and objective world and pointing out critically the negative impact the "materials" bring about to the secular world. This thesis focuses on and attempts to elaborate the criticism on the "material" world, the grasp of human nature, and the inspiration of the pursuit of liberation to the people who indulge themselves in the "material" world.By grasping those issues mentioned above, a response to fetishism is made in this thesis. It is held that fetishism is an obstacle to the liberation of the human being and Marx’s thoughts on fetishism give us the theoretical enlightenment on how to occupy the nature of human being and how to achieve the human liberation. In order to do this, we have to re-occupy the labour and abandon the "materials" such as commodity, currency and capital.