 Religious consciousness, on this Feuerbachian account, looks to be a case where alienation takes the form of fetishism. That is, there is both a problematic separation here between subject and object (individuals and their own human nature), and it takes the form of a human creation (the idea of the species embodied in God) escaping our control, achieving the appearance of independence, and coming to enslave and dominate us. The same looks to be true, on Marx’s account, of production in contemporary capitalist societies. Capital takes on the appearance of an independent social power which determines what is produced, how it is produced, and the economic (and other) relations between producers. Marx himself was struck by the parallel, and in the first volume of Capital, offers the following analogy: ‘As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx 1996: 616). However, rather than equating alienation and fetishism, fetishism is better thought of as a particular form that alienation might take. (To be clear, there looks to be no reason to think that Marx would, or should, disagree with this claim.)