The invisible forms of the visible: fetishism and phantasmagoria in Marx and Benjamin

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to understand how capitalism “hides”, deliberately and depending on its historical and class interests, the layers that separate the reality experienced by capital from that reality experienced by work. This is about the mechanisms that capital finds, over time, to perpetuate itself not only as an economic system, but also as an ideological and religious model. In particular, a reflection was carried out on the mechanisms of construction of social invisibilities in capitalism based on Marxian and Benjaminian works. With regard to Marxian thought, the focus was given, especially, to section IV of chapter I of ‘Capital’ (‘The fetishistic character of merchandise and its secret’) (Marx, 1988). Regarding Benjamin's work, two fundamental works of the author were used, namely, the fragment ‘Capitalism as religion’ (Benjamin, 2013) and the book of ‘Passages’ (Benjamim, 2019) (Das Passagen-Werk).