In Marx’s Capital, persons are personifications of social relations rather than economic agents
Evidence
Personification of things within the discourse of Capital presents the personification of things within capitalism, that is, the fetishism of commodities. But in addition to these two registers of personification, there remain another two, to which Marx’s Preface calls attention: the personification of persons, both textually and systematically. Capital personifies persons, so Capital personifies persons; the individuals whom bourgeois economics would take as economic agents are treated in the text as personifications of the “social relations whose creature (they) remain.” First and foremost of these categories is capital itself, and thus seldom is there a reference to “the capitalist” without the qualifying clause “i.e., capital personified”. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1980
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies Marx’s fourfold distinction of personification in Capital — fetishism of things and persons being the reader-facing pair.
- XREF: connects to: Bourgeois friendship is offered to a person’s social position, not the person; Marx’s organic composition of capital extends to the organic composition of individuals — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2313; For Marx, economic relations are objective conditions independent of men’s will (+6 more)
Broader Connections
- Humans are constituted by their social relations rather than an intrinsic essence
#corroborates(0.88) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2517 - Marx treated the bourgeois individual as a natural given, not a social product.
#contradicts(0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1256 - Bourgeois friendship is offered to a person’s social position, not the person
#exemplifies(0.82) - For Marx, economic relations are objective conditions independent of men’s will
#corroborates(0.80) - For Marx the commodity structures people’s actions, worldviews, and dispositions
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 782 - Capital is a social relation conferring extractive power, not just machinery
#corroborates(0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 792 - Capitalism in Marx is a process that reprograms peoples, not a stage
#expands(0.79) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 807 - Marx’s organic composition of capital extends to the organic composition of individuals
#expands(0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2313 - Marx compared self-recognition through others to the commodity’s need for another commodity.
#exemplifies(0.76) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1254