The critique of financial fetishism : Marx and Machiavelli.

Jérémie Barthas (Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton)

In 1897, Benedetto Croce named Karl Marx 'the most notable successor' of Machiavelli. He expressed his surprise that no one had ever thought of calling Marx the 'Machiavelli of the labour movement'.  For Croce, Marx and Machiavelli had in common that they taught us 'to penetrate to what society is in its actual truth', without moral prejudice, and that they both started 'from the establishment of a fact: the condition of struggle in which society found itself'. Such a remark has been the starting point of many reflections comparing Machiavelli's and Marx's realism. But there still hasn’t been much attention paid to the actual penetration of Machiavelli’s ideas in Marx’s thought. Maybe because direct references are very limited in number. But this might also prove very little. The ways an author can access the ideas of an other can be direct but also indirect, through other authors. And the silence he keeps on them, while we have sufficient evidences to be sure that he knew them, might be significant, or can be at least an object of interrogation.

Now, my aim in this work in progress is to examine a connection of this nature: there is an indirect tie between Marx and Machiavelli that might also represent a blind spot in Marx's thought, a scotomization or a denial. I will prove then that there is an extremely interesting connection between Marx and Machiavelli, through, at least, one major figure of the Italian Enlightenment:  the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani (1728-1887). It puts together one conceptual pillar of Marx's Capital, book one, with one of the most controversial proposition of Machiavelli's Discourses on Titus Livy, namely that 'money is not the nerve of war, as it is commonly supposed to be'.  My key task for this paper is to point to the textual evidence that establishes a connection between Machiavelli’s critique of interest-bearing capital fetishism and Marx’s section on commodity fetishism – two fundamental aspects of their theories. I will try to indicate some consequences and to build a couple of hypothesis from this fact.