Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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this perspective ideology was made to resemble religion, because—like religion—it mystified the real capacity of humans to change nature through active material practice and because it accentuated human dependence upon forces beyond their control. For Marx and Engels such mystification was due not to human nature or human weakness but to the connection of ideology with the contradictions posed by class society. Class society fostered illusions precisely because it was riven by the social polarization into the many who labor and the few who dominate the productive process. To deny or veil the resulting tensions, such a society produced ideology as “a particular, distorted kind of consciousness which conceals contradictions” (Larrain 1979, 50). Marx and Engels thus hoped that reason and political action based upon it could lift the veils of misrepresentation and allow knowledge to go forward unhampered by figments of the mind.
This phrasing of ideology as “the ruling ideas of the ruling class” is useful for its grasp of social realities, but its authors did not specify how it was to be understood. Do managers of the ruling class hire intellectual agents to produce ideas that exemplify their interests, or did they mean that the asymmetrical structure of society determines the conditions under which ideas are produced and propagated? Did their notion of ideology imply that the ruling ideas “reflect” or “mirror” the real power of the ruling class? Marx and Engels used these metaphors frequently. Alternatively, they spoke of ideas as “corresponding” to certain conditions “most appropriate” to them, as when Marx says that Protestantism, “with its cult of abstract man,” is the most “suitable” (entsprechendste) form of religion for simple commodity producers exchanging equivalents of abstract labor (1923, 42). These terms resemble Max Weber’s later concept of “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandschaft) between ideas and group interests, but Marx and Engels did not lay out how social relations were connected with particular ideational representations. Their language suggests a field of force, undergirded by productive relations, setting the terms for how people are to comprehend their world; but they left open the question of how particular forms of ideation arise and how some kinds of representation achieve precedence and power over others. The search for an adequate answer to that question continues in the present.
Soon after Marx and Engels advanced the notion of a link between ruling ideas and ruling classes, this theme vanished from their writings (Balibar 1988). It was replaced in 1867, in Kapital, by a new mode of analysis focused on “the fetishism of commodities.” This phrasing appeared in the context of the notion that things produced for the market—commodities—embodied human labor deployed and allocated under the auspices of capitalist social relations. In this mode of production, human labor power, purchased by the capitalist in labor “markets,” is incorporated into commodities. The workers then lose any connection with what they have produced, which belongs to the capitalist who paid them wages for their labor power. The goods are placed upon “commodity markets,” and the proceeds from their sale belong to the capitalist. Thus animate human labor, which is a physical and cognitive attribute of people, and inanimate commodities produced by that labor are treated as if they belonged to the same category.
The merging of these qualitatively different entities, according to Marx, masks the real social relations that govern the way people are harnessed to the production process. Moreover, when worker-producers of commodities and buyers of commodities are equated, the social relations among workers, employers, and buyers are all made to look like relations among the commodities themselves. “It is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Just as in “the misty realm of religion . . . the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own. . . . So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands” (Marx 1976, 165). This notion does not rely on a model of ideology as distortions and errors promulgated by a ruling class; rather, it traces the source of deception to a particular kind of social reality, that of capitalism. That reality mixes what is real with fictions; as a result, the participants in the transactions are deceived about the reality of capitalist social relations.
Marx drew the concept of fetishism from studies of religion. The term came from the French scholar Charles De Brosses, who described in his book on the Culte des Dieux fétiches (1760) the behavior of West African carvers who supposedly first sculpted wooden images (“a thing made,” feitiço in Portuguese), to then treat them as if they were divine beings. De Brosses, like others after him, saw in this “fetishism” evidence of primitive, nonlogical modes of thought. Marx, however, applied it to the structural effects of a particular mode of mobilizing social labor—that of capitalism.
Marx applied a similar logic to characterize the structure of non-capitalist social formations, where—as he understood it—a chief or despot, standing above individuals or communities, embodied the sway of an encompassing community or state, thus making that wider entity “appear as a person.” This interpretation has been revived in modern Marxian anthropology. For example, Jonathan Friedman used it to characterize the role of the chief in Southeast Asian tribal groups as representative of the higher unity, exemplified in sacrifices to the territorial spirits (1979). Pierre Bonte applied it to the “cattle complex” in African pastoralist societies, where cattle constitute the subsistence base, wealth that underwrites descent marriage, and offerings to the supernaturals: “cattle fetishism is thought of and justified as reproducing the supernatural order” (1981, 38–39).
In the end, Marx’s efforts left open the question of just what it may be in “human nature” that prompts the recurrent emergence in human doings of “phantasmagoric forms.” Since Marx and Engels both saw human consciousness as determined primarily by the historically installed mode of production, they would have been loath to trace fetishism to any proclivities of human minds or to the neuropsychological architecture of the human organism. Yet it has been plausibly argued that humans share general tendencies to engage objects in the world as if they were human and to endow them with human desires, will, and capacities (Godelier 1977, 169–85; Guthrie 1993). These tendencies were abetted by the human possession of language, which postulates abstractions that can then be treated as animate beings and analogically endowed with humanlike capabilities. From this perspective, fetishism represents an escalation of animism, in which entities are treated as animate and superior to humans yet amenable to human entreaties to engage in transactions (Ellen 1988). Therefore, one might rephrase the issue of fetishism in cultural terms and ask which entities come to be selected for this process, under what circumstances, and why. Of special interest would be to ascertain how fetishes, already raised to a position of superiority, model relations of asymmetrical power in society. It may be possible, therefore, to combine Marx’s suggestion that the crucial nexus of structural power governing social labor will produce characteristic representations or misrepresentations in thought with an anthropological analysis of ideational complexes such as fetishism.
Reactions against Metaphysics and Teleology
While the opposing parties of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment disputed the political and intellectual terrain between them under the flags of Reason, Revolution, and Science against Faith, Tradition, and Poetic Subjectivity, a cohort of new protagonists, pursuing a different interest, would alter the terms of the debate. One way they did so was by attacking as “metaphysics” all efforts to subsume human behavior under general laws. Metaphysics was said to pile abstract theory upon abstract theory, until theorizing itself seemed to impede any connections with “real life.” These critics were especially opposed to “grand” theories that they accused—sometimes mistakenly—of trying to tie human fate to a central teleological dynamic. Among the teleologies thus denounced, favorite targets were Hegel’s unfolding of the workings of a world spirit; Marxism, treated as a form of economic determinism; and Darwinism, interpreted as an evolutionary teleology that favored the victors in the “struggle for existence.” The antidote to such universal scenarios was thought to lie in sound, practical, and down-to-earth methodology, without recourse to metaphysics of any kind.
This apotheosis of methodology above theory first took the name of “pragmatism” (Charles Peirce, William James), although a proliferation of intellectual currents added “empirio-criticism” (Ernst Mach) and “logical positivism” (G. E. Moore, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper)