Fiction without Fantasy: Capital Fetishism as Objective Forgetting

In my paper I briefly examine three popular mystifications of the concept of capital, before I further argue that the concept of fetishism should be conceived of as a process of social forgetting. I argue that we are living in a fetishistic society insofar as fetishism is not only collective but also objective. However, I am not opening up totally new territory here, since, for example, Zizek argued that commodity fetishism is “the unconscious of the commodity form,” and Jameson expanded the idea of the objective quality of commodity fetishism towards what he calls the “historical amnesia” of consumer societies. However, I hope that my reflections can be seen as an extension of these positions in two important respects: first, they go beyond the concept of commodity and tie the concept of fetishism back to the concept of capital, and, second, they tie the problem of amnesia and fetishism back to Marx’s method