The Devil And Commodity Fetishism In South America

13 Pages 3233 Words

an inanimate man made devil that is predominantly malevolent. Before no such "devil" of this type existed for them. Taussig theorises the reason for this fetishised evil is caused by the alienation inherent with capitalist economies.


Simply put, market dominated societies are oppressive, anti-human relational, compared to market organized societies that operate on the principle of trust in human reciprocity. Or as Marx said, the difference is that in one society "man is seen as the aim of production", in the other "production is seen as the aim of man". And by fetishising the devil, Taussig believes these peasants are struggling against the forces of capatilism that are altering their societies.

In wanting the reader to look through the precapitalism eyes of these people, Taussig is hoping to proselytize the reader to a socialist (Marxist) perspective. As this paper will elaborate on later, he contrasts the use value based, precapitalist economies' structural harmony with the alienating effects of capitalist commodity driven economies and the struggle of the peasants not to reify the introduced capitalist system, to confront the reader with his own reified beliefs. Beliefs that fetishise money, giving it human qualities so that in our newspapers.......

"we read of treasury bills "backing up", of "runaway" and "galloping" inflation, of "climbing interest rates,"....of factories referred to as "plants,"
of money "growing" in accordance with investment...."(p.30)

Because the author stresses the importance of stripping away capitalist prejudices, having a self-effacing and reflective approach to his work, this paper will also examine some of the possible prejudices of solely Marxist interpretations that Taussig may have injected in his work.

He critiques the functionalists, Durkheim and "neo-Durkheimians" as having a "naive objective idealism"(p.9) saying that the way they interpr...