determined by their egoistic interest; every one of them proceeds as a good utilitarian; the other person is for him wholly delivered of all mystical aura; all he sees in his partner is another subject who follows his interest and interests him only in so far as he possesses something -a commodity -- that could satisfy some of his needs.

The two forms of fetishism are thus incompatible: in societies in which commodity fetishism reigns, the 'relations between men' are totally de-fetishized, while in societies in which there is fetishism in 'relations between men' -- in pre-capitalist societies -- commodity fetishism is not yet developed, because it is 'natural' production, not production for the market, which predominates. This fetishism in relations between men has to be called by its proper name: what we have here are, as Marx points out, 'relations of domination and servitude' -- that is to say, precisely the relation of Lordship and Bondage in a Hegelian sense; ¹⁷ and it is as if the retreat of the Master in capitalism was only a displacement: as if the de-fetishization in the 'relations between men' was paid for by the emergence of fetishism in the 'relations between things' -- by commodity fetishism. The place of fetishism has just shifted from intersubjective relations to relations 'between things': the crucial social relations, those of production, are no longer immediately transparent in the form of the interpersonal relations of domination and servitude (of the Lord and his serfs, and so on); they disguise themselves -- to use Marx's accurate formula -- 'under the shape of social relations between things, between the products of labour'.

This is why one has to look for the discovery of the symptom in the way Marx conceived the passage from feudalism to capitalism. With the establishment of bourgeois society, the relations of domination and servitude are repressed: formally, we are apparently concerned with free subjects whose interpersonal relations are discharged of all fetishism; the repressed truth -- that of the persistence of domination and servitude -- emerges in a symptom which subverts the ideological appearance of equality, freedom, and so on. This symptom, the point of emergence of the truth about social relations, is precisely the 'social relations between things'. 'Instead of appearing at all events as their own mutual relations, the social relations between individuals are disguised under the shape of social relations between things' -- here we have a precise definition of the hysterical symptom, of the 'hysteria of conversion' proper to capitalism.

Here Marx is more subversive than the majority of his contemporary critics who discard the dialectics of commodity fetishism as outdated:

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