Marx’s interest in aesthetic categories stems from their analogy to capitalist economic contradictions

Evidence

This attitude on the part of Marx toward aesthetic values is clearly related to his discovery of commodity fetishism, as well as to his solution of the problem of the subjective and the objective in economic life…. While working on Capital Marx was interested in categories and forms bordering on the aesthetic because of their analogy to the contradictory vicissitudes of the categories of capitalist economy. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 668

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the aesthetic to commodity fetishism and the subjective/objective problem — the base of Jameson’s and Adorno’s later aesthetics of reification. — connects to: The form-content dialectic succeeds for Marx precisely because it is aesthetic in origin — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 671

Broader Connections

• The form-content dialectic succeeds for Marx precisely because it is aesthetic in origin #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 671