Fetishisation and power of labor: a critical view

GHIGLIANI, PABLO

París

Congreso; Congrès Marx International III; 2001

Actuel Marx

This paper is a critical analysis of the main theses of John Holloway on the "power of labor". The critic addresses three issues. First, the concept of capital as "alienated work" is too synthetic and simplistic. Besides a short formal recognition, his actual consideration overlooks and disregards private property of means of production as a central and determinant relationship. Second, I discuss his idea of the relationship between subject and object. In his first works he reduced this duality to the concept of class struggle and later he merged it in the dynamic of the antagonic processes of fetichism and anti-fetichism. Even though in both cases it transcends economicist determinism, it does not elude subjective reductionism. Third, I criticize his understanding of fetichism as a "process of fetichization" for he denaturalizes Marx's original formulation, due to his lack of interest in linking apparent and material structures of capitalist social relationships.