Marxist Dialectic of Fetishization (contra Negri)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 141-142:

What we find here is the standard post-Hegelian matrix of the productive flux which is always in excess with regard to the structural totality which tries to subdue and control it ... But what if, in a parallax shift, we perceive the capitalist network itself as the true excess over the flow of the productive multitude? What if, while the contemporary production of the multitude directly produces life, it continues to produce an excess (which is even functionally superfluous), the excess of capital? Why do immediately produced relations still need the mediating role of capitalist relations? What if the true enigma is why continuous nomadic "molecular" movement needs a parasitic "molar" structure which (deceptively) appears as an obstacle to its unleashed productivity? Why, the moment we abolish this obstacle/excess, do we lose the productive flux constrained by the parasitic excess? And this also means that we should invert the topic of fetishism, or "relations between people appearing as relations between things": what if the direct "production of life" celebrated by Hardt and Negri is falsely transparent? What if, in it, the invisible "relations between [immaterial] things [of Capital] appears as direct relations between people"?

Here, more than ever, it is crucial to remember the lesson of the Marxist dialectic of fetishization: the "reification" of relations between people (the fact that they assume the form of phantasmagorical "relations between things") is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false "personalization" ("psychologization") of what are effectively objective social processes. Already in the 1930's, the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how--at the very moment when global market relations began to exert their full domination, making the individual producer's success or failure dependent on market cycles totally beyond his control--the notion of a charismatic "business genius" reasserted itself in the "spontaneous capitalist ideology," attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quoi he possessed. And does not the same hold true even more so today, as the abstraction of the market relations that govern our lives is pushed to an extreme point? The bookshops are overflowing with psychological manuals advising us on how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor--in short, treating success as being dependent on the proper "attitude." So, in a way, one is tempted to turn Marx's formula on its head: under contemporary capitalism, the objective market "relations between things" tend to assume the phantasmagorical form of pseudo-personalized "relations between people." And Hardt and Negri seem to fall into this trap: what they celebrate as the direct "production of life" is a structural illusion of this type.

However, before we succumb to bemoaning the "alienating" effect of the fact that "relations between persons" are replaced by "relations between things" we should nonetheless keep in mind the opposite, liberating, effect: the displacement of the fetishism onto "relations between things" de-fetishizes "relations between persons," allowing them to acquire "formal" freedom and autonomy.