Follow the Thing: Money

In an attempt to resist and surmount the mystifications of commodity fetishism, scholars have gone to great lengths to trace the social and spatial pathways of various physical, consumable commodities. By contrast, there have been relatively limited efforts to similarly defetishise what Marx called the “god of commodities”—money—and there has been no systematic, theoretically informed consideration of what the defetishisation of money might actually entail. From an explicitly Marxian perspective this paper aims to make a modest contribution in such a direction. It has two central objectives: To demonstrate why money merits defetishisation and to explore, at a largely theoretical level, how such an exercise might proceed, what primary challenges it would confront, and where the main opportunities for progress are likely to lie.