“Unconscious labour and abstract labour both lack concrete personification and embodiment, since their materiality consists in labour-power, which the discursive apparatus isolates in the living body and which the signifier or value represents independently from the relation to the signified. Because of this lack of concrete embodiment, Marx and Freud produced two ‘fetishisations’, that is, they forced two social personifications of abstract and unconscious labour. Marx could only invent the social symptom by fetishising the proletariat and the industrial reserve army as the point where the contradictions of the capitalist structure become empirical. This, of course, entails the misunderstanding that Marx’s critique descends from the realm of metaphysical abstractions to the concrete analysis of social conditions and to concrete men and women. The fetishisation in question maybe repeats the very same operation as commodity fetishism, but it articulates something that one might call Marx’s hypothesis: the individual who is affected by capitalism is the same as the one who constitutes the subject of value. This clearly inverts the fetishist hypothesis, according to which the subject of capitalism is capital itself. The sameness of the industrial proletariat and of the subject of value implies that the industrial labourer, in a given historic moment, the industrial revolution, embodies the split in the subject of labour and the alienation introduced by the capitalist organisation of production. Their hypothetical sameness does not contradict the fact that the subject of value designates the radical alienation of the individual that embodies it.”
— The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan by Samo Tomsic
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If, as Tomšič claims, Marx fetishizes the industrial proletariat, then he reproduces the distinction he is eager to overcome. But, the truth is nearly the opposite. In its Freudian-Lacanian form, focus is placed on the subject and subject formation as human subject. Restoring integrity to that subject is central to that project. This meant, for the young Marx, discovering how the capitalist social formation distorted and displaced species being. In this case, the industrial proletariat, the self-creating subject that creates its own value, can only become this subject by recovering the value alienated from it by the ruling capitalist class. But, by 1858 Marx was already uncomfortable with this approach. Marx recognized that its subject remained the subject of capitalism even should capitalism be superseded. That is to say, Marx realized that the industrial proletariat, since it was among capitalism’s most illustrious products, cannot also be the subject of a non-capitalist social formation. In capital, Marx dispenses with the fetish for which Tomšič faults him, identifying the subject of capitalism instead with the abstract value form of capital. At best Marx displays agnosticism over whether or what the subject of a non-capitalist social formation would be. Positively stated, Marx identifies the industrial proletariat as a commodity — an individuated or particularized form of appearance of the abstract value form of the commodity and that abstract form of value — that lends itself to being fetishized: it displays a power that has no body; its body is not equal to the value invested in it. Which is to say, the mature Marx criticizes the young Marx’s fetishizing of the industrial proletariat. Moreover, in that critique, Marx also implicitly finds fault with anthropologies, such as Freud’s, that take the two-fold character of the human being to be ontologically fundamental rather than, as Marx feels, an expression of their commodification. But the human being emancipated from commodification is neither a use-value and value recombined (Marx’s definition of the commodity) nor a use-value without value. Rather would the human beings emancipated from capitalism be shaped by other social forms, generating their own pathologies, and, perhaps, like subjects prior to the emergence of capitalism, still tormented by their contingent relationships to themselves, to others, and to the world.