The Personification of Things and The Transformation of Persons Into Things

A Review of Chris O’Kane’s Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre

Samuel Fisher

October 27, 2026

doi.org/10.63478/JNP1TNBU

Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre

by Chris O'Kane

Brill

2026

Within the received common sense of Marxian critical theory “commodity fetishism” has often remained uninterrogated, seeping into the lingua franca as if both speaker and receiver have a shared understanding of the concept. When the concept is interrogated, commentary has often spiraled out in a wide array of directions: from etymological genealogies and protoanthropological theories of fetish worship to various blends of Freud and Marx found in psychoanalytic Marxism, sexual fetishes, gender fetishes, racial fetishes, or generalized indictments of the “fetishization of X” (wherein X can stand for any number of things from bodies, consumer goods, ideological mystifications, celebrity culture, media representations, pet ownership, or whatever else happens to exist in capitalist society).¹ Even in its more Marxist variant, analysis often swerves into the metaphorics of “the fetish” as a process of masking real social relations that take place behind the curtain of the hidden abode (culminating in David Harvey’s rather unfortunate phrase, the “fetish mask”).² In these renderings, fetishism often comes with an implicit value judgment, wherein the accusation of “fetishism” is considered a dangerous, if not slightly embarrassing, fixation. At best you’re an idiot that’s been duped by a party mask.

Against the background din of variegated usages of the concept we find Chris O’Kane’s first book, Social Constitution and Fetishistic Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre. This study joins a number of recent publications—like Beverley Best’s, The Automatic Fetish and Clara Ramas San Miguel’s, Inverted World: Fetish and Mystification in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy—that force us to revaluate taken for granted theoretical terrain while turning over something new in the process.³ Best’s book takes us through a step by step conceptual exploration of Capital, Volume Three, foregrounding a perceptual physics that arises from the seeming automaticity of capital’s valorization. Ramas San Miguel’s incisive study is more philosophical in orientation: considering Marx in the lineage of Hegel and Kant, Ramas San Miguel draws a fine distinction between fetishism as a mode of inversion and mystification as a process that obscures social relations all together.⁴ In this reconstruction, fetishism and mystification describe two types of the necessary form of appearance that map the systematic misrecognition of capital’s processes by bourgeois political economy. O’Kane’s text, on the other hand, does something very different. It has two major arguments. The first inhabits a similar problem space as Best and Ramas Sam Miguel, providing us with a reinterpretation of Marx’s concept of fetishism in the context of “value form theory” and reinscribing the concept into the very constitution of capitalist society.⁵ Second, it reinterprets a lineage running through Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Henri Lefebvre to show the metamorphoses of Marx’s theory of fetishistic domination as it travels through the traditions of critical theory.

What is crucial to understand is that the autonomization of society and the domination of people by things is the product of labor. Although society seems to determine social life behind our backs, we nevertheless reproduce it through our laboring activity, although we do so only impersonally.

According to O’Kane, so much of critical theory has developed a confused concept of commodity fetishism because it uses it synonymously with ideology, false consciousness, alienation, or reification. Rather than simply a problem for comprehension, O’Kane maintains that the commodity fetish is implicated in the very constitution of capitalist society; dominating us in its very organizational form. This leads O’Kane to propose a terminological shift from simply commodity fetishism to fetishistic domination. Early in the text, O’Kane establishes what he means by the latter, characterizing it as “a theory of how capitalistic social relations create an autonomous, supraindividual, and inverted type of domination that transforms individuals in these relations into bearers of domination, compelling the reproduction of these relations.”⁶

This definition perhaps feels quite difficult to grasp given our background Marx-ish commonsense understanding of fetishism. It is autonomous and supraindividual, meaning that there is no single individual or class of people who directly coerce us to reproduce capitalist social relations. It is inverted, meaning that it prioritizes its own systemic inertia over our intentionality; rather, abstract relations compel social action as capital’s value form shapes its concrete expression in determined directions. Abstraction takes precedence over concrete social activity and our sensuous experience of the world is undergirded, shaped, and formed by capital’s suprasensuous abstract relations.⁷ Finally, it transforms individuals into bearers of domination, this means that we become vectors of capital’s domination acting behind our backs, forcing us to work and consume in such a way as to reproduce the value relation.

What is crucial to understand is that the autonomization of society and the domination of people by things is the product of labor. Although society seems to determine social life behind our backs, we nevertheless reproduce it through our laboring activity, although we do so only impersonally. Here, O’Kane situates his thinking in contradistinction to people like Søren Mau, William Clare Roberts, and Nancy Fraser—all of whose important recent interventions into theorizing domination neglect the subjective side of capital’s grasp on our shared lifeworld. For O’Kane, fetishistic domination is far more all devouring, embedded into the very fibers of society’s reproduction. Like some kind of upside-down horror, it animates things, giving them a life of their own, making them move of their own accord, whilst simultaneously twisting people into mere appendages of the objects of labor that crush us under the wheels of a machine with no apparent operator.

The book is split into four parts, each of which provides excursions through the development of the concept of fetishistic domination. Part one unearths the conceptual development of the problematic of domination in Marx’s work. The next three parts trace how Lukács, Adorno and Lefebvre interpret the place of the commodity fetish in Marx’s thinking and how their respective works develop and sometimes deviate from Marx’s understanding. In each instance, O’Kane shows how the concept of fetishistic domination is augmented into new areas of social life unexplored by Marx, carving out an underappreciated problem space within the tradition of critical theory as the text moves forward.

Rereading Social Constitution and Fetishistic Domination in Marx

The largest section of the book develops a rereading of Marx that is indebted to a set of Adorno’s students—Helmut Reichelt, Hans-Georg Backhaus, and Alfred Schmidt—who have come to be known as the Neue Marx-Lektüre. From the 1960s onwards, these thinkers proposed a rereading of Marx against the Marxist traditions of their era, paying close attention to Marx’s method of presentation in the first chapters of Capital. These thinkers maintained that, in these chapters, Marx was trying to expose the various metamorphoses of value’s form, rather than a historical account of capital’s genesis. This focus on the questions of method and form allowed them to foreground value as a social relation rather than a substance found in commodities, conceptualizing value as a formal process that shapes laboring activity for the purpose of capitalism’s own self perpetuation. There is no space here to further explicate the Neue Marx-Lektüre’s reevaluation of Marx; what is important for O’Kane in these works is how they reorient us toward Marx’s method, refocusing on value and the role of money in Marx’s Capital.⁸ This reorientation around method, value, and money allows O’Kane to make two broadly interrelated arguments about Marx’s construction of a theory of fetishistic domination. The first concerns the method of how we read Marx’s conceptual development. The second is an elucidation of Marx’s development of a concept of fetishistic domination that is assembled within the context of value’s development and concomitant subsumption of the social world.

O’Kane begins his exposition of Marx’s theory of social domination by tracing how Marx conceives of domination throughout his pre-Capital oeuvre in order to avoid the pitfalls associated with the infamous Althusserian epistemological break.⁹ Rather than posit a “young” and “mature” Marx, O’Kane follows Schmidt’s critical genetic method, wherein a conceptual reconstruction of Marx’s work requires us to read his development backwards, in a similar way to Marx’s claim that the anatomy of the human “contains the anatomy of the ape.”¹⁰ This means we understand the earlier work in light of Capital, instead of trying to find the seeds of Capital’s conceptual material in earlier theories of “alienation.” In so doing, O’Kane shows how a nascent theory of social domination develops through Marx’s early work that becomes a sort of conceptual blueprint for fetishistic domination. In The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx argues the state and private property relations become supraindividual forms of domination while alienated labor and class division become forms of domination in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology. For Marx this means ‘‘the labourer produces capital and capital produces him, which means that he produces himself; man as a labourer, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle.”¹¹ This crucial maneuver from the state to political economy is where Marx begins to conceptualize the subjective side of domination, showing how our labor actively produces the objects that form our domination. Finally, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx begins to develop a theory of economic abstraction as a form of supraindividual domination, thus moving toward the “mature” conceptualization of fetishism that he will develop in Capital. Rather than a “young” and “mature” period, what becomes apparent in O’Kane’s reconstruction is a conceptual architecture that runs through a series of metamorphoses, gradually forming the groundwork for what will become the critique of political economy along the way.”

In this inverted world—where abstract labor and exchange take precedence over concrete activity, pushing us forward behind our backs—people are reduced to the status of a thing: that is, to objects amongst other objects in a system that seemingly makes objects come alive.

O’Kane then turns to Capital to explicate Marx’s full theory of fetishistic domination. He begins by locating the discussion of the fetish character of commodities as the fourth chapter of a conceptual whole that makes up the first part of Capital. It is a small and barely noticeable move, but a linchpin for O’Kane’s interpretation of the rest of the thinkers in this study. Rather than some free floating cultural condition that accompanies capitalism, the fetish is an objective social process that fastens itself to the commodity in a society subsumed by the self-valorization of value.¹² According to Marx, fetishism attaches itself to commodities by virtue of their being produced within an abstract social web of relations.¹³

Immanent in the commodity there is an antithesis between use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract general labour, between the personification of things and the transformation of persons into things.¹⁴

Concrete private labors only become social as abstract labor and social relations are only manifested through commodities through the act of exchange. Consequently, our private labors spin a web of asocial sociality through acts of exchange, endowing capital with a peculiar doubled nature—both concrete and abstract, as sensuous suprasensuous.¹⁵ This process (whereby people relate to people via products of labor through exchange) forms the basis of fetishistic domination (wherein social relations between people are replaced with social relations between things). Here, however, O’Kane’s analysis is informed by the argument that Marx’s theory of value is a monetary theory of value. Crucially, money mediates these relations between. As Marx says, money is a crystallized form that is “a necessary product of the exchange process, in which different products of labour are in fact equated with each other, and thus are in fact converted into commodities.”¹⁶ This is what Marx means when he says money is the “real community…it is the general substance of survival for all, and at the same time the social product of all.”¹⁷ Money’s “magic” arises from its acting as a universal equivalent: that which everything else is measured against and which connects everyone to everything else, making the whole system move forward as it does so.¹⁸ In this inverted world—where abstract labor and exchange take precedence over concrete activity, pushing us forward behind our backs—people are reduced to the status of a thing: that is, to objects amongst other objects in a system that seemingly makes objects come alive. In this process, real people are rendered mere personifications and forced to become the bearers of economic character masks that mark our position in a system.

Lukács: Thingification and Reification

The book’s second part explores Georg Lukács reconfiguration of some of Marx’s conceptual material to develop his own accounts of fetishistic domination in his theory of reification. For Lukács, the commodity fetish was the key to understanding Marx’s whole theoretical apparatus: “It might be claimed…that the chapter dealing with the fetish character of commodities contains within itself the whole of historical materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletarian seen as the knowledge of capitalist society.”¹⁹ O’Kane walks the reader through exactly how Lukács theorizes the centrality of commodity fetishism and reworks the concept: first, as a development of Lukács earlier pre-Marxist neo-Kantian thought and then within the architecture of his own History and Class Consciousness. Lukács’s pre-Marxist Kulturkritik work presents us with social subjects estranged by the complexity of modern society from the organic wholeness from which we have fallen.²⁰ O’Kane argues this basic notion of subject/object estrangement is carried over when Lukács encounters Hegelian Marxism. In his theory of reification, the social world is recast as estranged by capital’s commodity fetish and social life is now dominated by “thingification.” The worker is confronted with the products of their own labor as a thing dominating them, reducing the world to a system of fragmentation, rationalization, calculation, quantification, and control. This reification is reflected in bourgeois philosophies and science, whereby social totality is mystified and misrecognized as an object disconnected from human production.²¹

In collapsing reification and commodity fetishism into the same theory, O’Kane argues that Lukács’s conceptualization of reification becomes a theory of externalization. Reification separates workers from the commodities they produce, fragments the social world, and estranges individuals from their collective life.²² For O’Kane, Lukács inherits a pre-Marxist Neo-Kantian epistemology that leads him to conceive of reification as mystification. Consequently, for Lukács, commodity fetishism is essentially an incorrect apprehension of the world. This problematic notion of reification as a form of mystification becomes most apparent in Lukács’s revolutionary theory, which conceptualizes revolution as the dethingification of the standpoint of the proletariat. Once the proletariat becomes aware of its position in society—not simply as an object of commodified labor power, but as the subject of society—reified forms of appearance begin to thaw, class consciousness develops, and the prospect of revolutionary praxis emerges.²³ In the last instance, reification, commodity fetishism, and domination are all problems for consciousness. As O’Kane writes:

Lukács’s theory of reification is therefore a theory of dominating social mystification, which, as premised on his unique conception of fetishism as reification, explains the subjugation and dehumanisation of individuals to the dominating mystified properties of the externalised false objectivity of the illusory thingified appearance of social totality.²⁴

The Lukács section is where O’Kane argues most forcefully that the thinker under investigation is theoretically inconsistent. Nonetheless, it is a testament to Lukács’s originality and gravitational pull on the generation of thinkers that follow him that any text that wants to uncover the theoretical lineage of fetishistic domination necessarily has to pass through Lukács’s work.

Adorno: Class, Character Masks and Maimed Subjectivity

Part three develops an account of Adorno’s thinking as anchored in a theory of fetishistic domination. Adorno’s legacy has been tarred with accusations of intense pessimism that oversteps Marx’s critique of capitalism into a kind of fatalistic Weberianism. Even more sympathetic interpreters like Gillian Rose have argued that Adorno had an omnipresent theory of reification “with minimal reference to the actual productive relations between men, and without any identification of a social subject.”²⁵ Here, however, O’Kane wishes to reestablish Adorno’s Marxist credibility.²⁶ Contra Rose, O’Kane turns to Adorno’s 1962 seminar on Marx and his sociological writings, showing that the basis of Adorno’s critique of bourgeois society was the contradiction between classes.

It is in the Adorno section that O’Kane more fully develops the subjective side of his theory of social domination, with the introduction of the figure of the maimed subject.…[C]apital’s automatic compulsion renders people objects who merely become “personifications,” forced to bear the “character masks” of their economic position and concomitant domination

O’Kane begins by outlining Adorno’s understanding of capitalism as a commodity society based on the abstraction of concrete labors through the aggregation of socially necessary labor time. For Adorno this is where commodity fetishism instantiates itself and thus constitutes society as an objective totality.²⁷ In this process of abstraction, exchange value becomes the dominant social relation, constituting social life through the exchange of the market. For Adorno, the exchange principle is crucial; it organizes society into classes. As Adorno states: “the exchange-relation is, in reality, preformed by class relations: that there is an unequal control of the means of production: that is the heart of the theory.”²⁸ Likewise, the fetishized exchange abstraction cannot be reducible to misrecognition for Adorno: “reification [Verdinglichung] is not only false consciousness but simultaneously also reality, insofar as commodities really are alienated from human beings. We really are dependent on the world of commodities.”²⁹ Adorno is therefore critical of the conceptual confusions found in Lukács. Capitalist society doesn’t simply mystify social relations via the subject/object split. Instead, the exchange abstraction constitutes every facet of society’s totality, constituting people as things between its different objective and subjective moments.³⁰ Unlike Lukács, who conceives of a possible “outside” via the standpoint of the proletariat, for Adorno twentieth century capitalism was capable of entirely subsuming the working class within its reproductive apparatus.

It is in the Adorno section that O’Kane more fully develops the subjective side of his theory of social domination, with the introduction of the figure of the maimed subject. O’Kane has already touched on this aspect of domination in the chapter on Marx, where he shows how capital’s automatic compulsion renders people objects who merely become “personifications,” forced to bear the “character masks” of their economic position and concomitant domination.³¹ In Adorno, the concept of “character mask” pinpoints where the objective structures of capitalist domination are imposed upon our subjective experience.³² The absolute domination of social production over and above any individual’s control makes any clear distinction between individual and supraindividual questionable:

They are not merely character-masks, agents of value, in some presumed special sphere of the economy. Even where they think they have escaped the primacy of the economy, all the way down to their psychology, the maison tolère, [French: universal home] of what is unknowably individual, they react under the compulsion of the generality.³³

In the very core of our individual selves, our constitution as subjects forces us to become bearers of character masks, forming us as maimed subjects whose very social life is reliant on the same antagonistic social relations that dominate us.³⁴

Lefebvre and The Spatialization of Fetishistic Concrete Abstractions

At first glance, Lefebvre’s inclusion seems idiosyncratic in a book largely steeped in the Frankfurt School tradition. Lefebvre is usually recognized as emerging from France’s May 1968 tradition, theorizing social space, urban alienation and the constitution of everyday life. Perhaps more than any other thinker in the book, he was prone to bouts of revolutionary optimism. In particular, his demand to the “right to the city” encompassed an everyday transfiguration of social relations that displayed a romantic optimism anathema to Adorno and others.

However, as O’Kane has consistently argued, Lefebvre is also a thinker of real abstraction and fetishized social relations.³⁵ Whilst most commentators have focused on Lefebvre’s reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of alienation found in the 1844 Manuscripts, O’Kane shows how Lefebvre’s thinking is indebted to Marx’s Capital via his concept of fetishistic concrete abstraction, wherein abstractions become real forces in the world through our social activity:

Fetishism properly so called only appeared when abstractions escaped the control of the thought and will of man. Thus commercial value and money are only in themselves quantitative abstractions: abstract expressions of social, human relations; but these abstractions materialise, intervene as entities in social life and in history, and end by dominating instead of being dominated.³⁶

Abstractions become alive, alien objects that actively intervene in our lives. What is unique in Lefebvre is how he conceives of urban form as a fetishistic concrete abstraction. The world is constituted through multiscalar space, where commodity exchange, the state, abstract space, bureaucracy and the urban environment shape the direction of social activity underneath everyday life.³⁷

While the Lefebvre O’Kane reconstructs may seem to share a similar problem space with Lukács, Lefebvre is critical of Lukács’ theoretical totalization insofar as it amounts to a “closed system” that cannot account for the proletariat’s immanent and resistant forms of praxis.³⁸ Although O’Kane places Lefebvre in his genealogy of the concept of fetishistic domination, he is nonetheless critical of Lefebvre’s dualistic thinking, arguing that Lefebvre counterposes capital’s quantifying logics to the qualitative social praxis that it cannot fully subsume. For example, while urban form is organized around capital’s abstract logic, “it is also where these ‘logics’ clash with resistant qualitative elements of the urban fabric, such as grass-roots collective self management.”³⁹ According to O’Kane, this dualistic thinking is evinced in Lefebvre’s descriptions of fetishistic domination as a “terrorist form” that expands out to include writing, logic, math, and language and its counterposition to forms of resistant social life that resist the totalizing drive to domination like holidays, LSD, debauchery, and madness.⁴⁰ For O’Kane, these oppositions morph into a static antinomy that opposes fetishistic domination with romantic humanism, leaving Lefebvre unable to theorize an adequate model of subjective domination.⁴¹

Theorizing Fetishistic Domination Today.

By emplotting the genealogy of a concept, O’Kane draws our attention to a palimpsest and a problematic field inaugurated by Marx that remains legible today. In the conclusion of the book, O’Kane reiterates the shortcomings of each thinker and rejects a prospective synthesis of the four to create a consistent model of fetishistic domination. The text ends by promising further studies that will trace the development of Marx’s critical theory through Adorno, Horkheimer, Schmidt, Backhaus, Reichelt, Postone, and Bonefeld, leading toward a study that would develop a theory of social constitution and fetishistic domination adequate to contemporary capitalism.⁴² From this vantage it becomes clear that Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination is the preparatory ground clearing for a study that this reviewer awaits with enthusiasm. While I’m sure O’Kane’s intervention will be controversial amongst those dedicated to interpreting the work of these authors, I do not want to waste too much space here defending this or that author. Instead, I want to briefly discuss the avenues O’Kane’s text opens for those interested in social domination within capitalism more broadly, and briefly touch upon the consequences of omitting some of Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre’s writings on culture.

…O’Kane's conceptual reconstruction gives us a set of building blocks for thinking through the production of racial fetishes and how they might relate to capitalism’s constitutional processes. In producing people as things, fetishistic domination also produces specific forms of people as character masks.

There is a tendency to disavow all previous generational interpretations with every new turn in interpreting Marx.⁴³ It is commendable that O’Kane refuses this gesture and provides us with an exemplary model for sympathetically rereading the Marxian archive to reorient our thinking about new problems with theory inherited from the past. Indeed, one can detect the subterranean influence of thinkers like Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre all through the twentieth century’s various reformulations of critical theory. Rather than simply bemoan the imprecision of the variegated uses of these concepts within the history of critical theory, the method of conceptual reconstruction made available with this book can help rearticulate disparate connections between culture, domination, and value to recast critical thought today. As capital flits from crisis to crisis and fascistic resurgence increasingly sharpens around questions of gender, disability, race, and sexuality, it is incumbent on critical theory to understand how these recursive modes of domination are rearticulated with valorization, crisis, and accumulation.

I want to explicate what I’m getting at here with a brief example: racialization. In a highly generative formulation, Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that race is a violent abstraction, stating that it “produces all kinds of fetishes: states, races, normative views of how people fit into and make places in the world.”⁴⁴ Although it is not immediately clear how these forms of fetishistic domination arise, O’Kane’s conceptual reconstruction gives us a set of building blocks for thinking through the production of racial fetishes and how they might relate to capitalism’s constitutional processes. In producing people as things, fetishistic domination also produces specific forms of people as character masks. Perhaps further investigation could show how proletarians are maimed by racialization in a society constituted through fetishistic relations. Thinking of race in terms of “things”—as character masks that express economic relations—allows us to make sense of the seemingly endless production of fungible crises around racial domination expressed in migration, Gastarbeiter, and the like. By refocusing the concept of fetish around value, perhaps we can rethink how these maimings emerge within capitalist society as social processes actively shaped by the valorization process.⁴⁵

The absence of any proper engagement with Lukács, Adorno or Lefebvre’s writing on culture, art, aesthetics, literature or music is glaring. Lefebvre’s work is replete with references to the culture of everyday life, Lukács never stopped writing about literature, and the fetish character of commodities remains an important concept for Adorno’s writing on music and aesthetics.⁴⁶ At one point in the text, O’Kane is seemingly quite dismissive of this sort of thinking: “Given the pervasiveness of the modern culture industry and the new spirit of capitalism, it is now almost silly – and certainly not critical – to conceive of creativity, leisure, holidays, music, drama, poetry, and sexual expression as such as humane resistance to the domination of fetishistic concrete abstractions.”⁴⁷

O’Kane is certainly correct that none of these areas of social life supposedly existing outside of the labor process can provide us with the resources to resist capital’s domination. Nevertheless, if we conceive of culture as some kind of political unconscious, then surely the examination of these silly things—like what people do for so called leisure, or how they consume the culture industry’s music twenty-four seven on headphones as they work, go to the gym to sculpt perfect bodies, or consume growing numbers of commodities geared toward social reproductive activity—could give us access to the most hidden recesses of capital’s subjective dimension of fetishistic domination.⁴⁸ Perhaps delving into these realms could deepen the book’s intended criticisms of Søren Mau, William Clare Roberts, and Nancy Fraser by showing how impersonal domination hollows out our very personalities. While this expansive scope is probably too much to ask of a single book, the absence of any deep engagement with the critical aspects of Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre’s works on culture means that crucial dimensions of fetishistic domination’s subjective side remain undeveloped. Nevertheless, O’Kane’s text provides important insights and methodological precepts for others working in these areas of culture and the arts to investigate.

Finally, given the failures of the past century to actualize communism, either in its optimistic revolutionary form of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness or the more romantic New Left form one could attribute to Lefebvre, it is no surprise to find O’Kane criticize these aspects of their respective works. Nonetheless, these thinkers attempt to register dimensions of social experience not entirely subsumed within capital’s domination. Lukács’ notion of the standpoint of the proletariat and dethingification, Adorno’s emphasis on negativity and nonidentity, and Lefebvre’s accounts of irruptions and the demand for the “right to the city” all try to attend to the forever unfinished project of capital’s complete subsumption and total administration. As Lefebvre’s claims; ”what is more likely is that human beings would be turned into animated abstractions, living, breathing, suffering fictions, did they not put up dramatic resistance to this process.”⁴⁹ Lefebvre in particular was always keen to affirm how resistant forms of social life can and do present themselves, both in the everyday and in larger moments of social unrest: urban space itself is never fully dominated, but in constant dynamic contradiction.⁵⁰ While it would be wrongheaded to critique O’Kane for failing to identify the proletariat as the subject of history and thus foreclosing the possibility of revolution, concepts like dethingification, the standpoint of the proletariat, nonidentity, negativity, and irruption act as necessary dialectical antagonisms to domination. This insight does not entail that every instance of “nonidentity” or “irruption” is ultimately liberatory; indeed, many of these moments are appropriated by capital, providing new material to be captured, subsumed and dominated by its process of self-valorization. Nonetheless, without addressing such antagonisms, historical contingencies, and resistant materials, it becomes difficult to configure social change and capital’s development, which always moves through both contradiction, crisis, social upheaval, and insurgency and revanches, reaction, and counterrevolutions.

Critical Theory, Georg Lukács, Marxist Theory, Value Theory

Samuel Fisher

Samuel Fisher is a PhD student studying at Kings College University. His work uses Samuel Delany’s novels to think about a set of intersecting problematics that arise in the fields of Marxism, racial capitalism, and Black studies.

The Personification of Things and The Transformation of Persons Into Things

A Review of Chris O’Kane’s Social Constitution and Fetishistic Social Domination in Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Lefebvre

Samuel Fisher

Rereading Social Constitution and Fetishistic Domination in Marx

Lukács: Thingification and Reification

Adorno: Class, Character Masks and Maimed Subjectivity

Lefebvre and The Spatialization of Fetishistic Concrete Abstractions

Theorizing Fetishistic Domination Today.

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