Freedom as Fetish

Recent Marxist political theory has foregrounded freedom as normative commitment. This paper re-stages the break between slavery and capitalism through which slavery's natural bondage is supposedly superseded by the compulsions of market dependency. Capitalist social practices depend upon our freedom whilst inculcating a system in which domination and freedom are interdependent. But this interdependence leads to a double-bind: if freedom is reducible to social practices, we acquiesce to unfreedom; if not, we appeal to an ahistorical essence. I consider whether the double-bind can be diffused by exploring freedom's fetish character as a real phenomenon enacted in practice because we are implicated in the commodity as both free and passive object to be exchanged. But I suggest that slavery is not then excisable but remains as fetish character internal to the freedom of the worker as presupposition: freedom for the worker is guaranteed by the practical enaction of slavery's impossible negation.