Germany would first have to go through a period of decadence before entering a stage of political emancipation. This would result, in Marx’s opinion, in a painful historical experience, just “like a fetish-worshipper suffering from the diseases of Christianity.”5
Finally, in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx employed the term for the first time in the context of political economy. Building an analogy between theology and economy, Marx likened the Protestant degradation of “Catholic paganism” to the inferior mercantile-monetary system from the perspective of “enlightened political economy.” Completely unaware of the “subjective essence of private property” (labor), the proponents of the mercantile system have taken “private property as a purely objective being for man,” hence appearing to later political economists as “fetish-worshippers.” Marx believed that “fetishism” applied to the mercantilist view of private property, as it took wealth to exist “only as an object” and “reduced” it “to a very simple element of nature.”6
Elsewhere in the same manuscript, Marx returned to the fetish theme, this time defining it in William Shakespeare’s aesthetic terms (found in Timon of Athens), from the perspective of the contemporary political economy:
Those nations which are still dazzled by the sensuous glitter of precious metals and therefore make a fetish of metal money are not yet fully developed money nations. The extent to which the solution of theoretical problems is a function of practice and is mediated through practice, and the extent to which true practice is the condition of a real and positive theory is shown, for example, in the case of fetish-worship. The sense perception of a fetish-worshipper is different from that of a Greek because his sensuous existence is different. The abstract hostility between sense and intellect is inevitable so long as the human sense for nature, the human significance of nature and hence the natural sense of man, has not yet been produced by man’s own labor.7
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