Very busy, and so not online much (apologies if this comment has been sitting here for a bit…), but otherwise good. I’ll see what I can do with your question…

The short answer is that Marx wants categories that are as “deflationary” as possible – that presuppose as little as possible about the qualities of the objects or relations being theorised.

Each time political economy explicitly or tacitly attributes a quality to “human nature” or “material nature” or “the essential character of economic life” or any similar “essential” category, Marx wants us to ask whether the quality attributed to nature or essence, can instead be understood as something that has been actively produced – and that requires, for its continued existence, certain forms of human action be carried out.

Hypothetically, certain things of course could really be “essential” – humans might really have some sort of unchanging nature, or there might be certain intrinsic properties of the material world – but, Marx believes, if it’s possible to show how something is produced, when other people treat that something as “given”, intrinsic, or essential, then you have demonstrated those other people to hold metaphysical or theological beliefs about that thing. You can explain the production of something they just take for granted – therefore you can show that they are forced to treat as a magical “given”, something whose production you can explain.

This is important because, when you have to take something as a “given”, it’s very difficult to conceptualise how that thing could be overcome. If you can explain how something is produced, you are in a much better position to analyse how it could be overcome or transformed into something else.

So the metaphysical and theological properties of the commodity, are all those things political economy treats as “given” – not just about “commodities” in the narrow sense, but about human nature and the nature of economic life more generally. What identifies these “givens” as metaphysical and theological, is that Marx shows that he doesn’t have to treat them as given: he can explain how they are produced, through what sorts of collective practices. It is this theory of practice that provides the standpoint from which Marx can assert that political economy is, by contrast, engaging in metaphysics or theology. Marx’s theory is intended to provide a performative demonstration that it is not necessary to treat so much as “given” – and, in the process, convict political economy of adopting a naive, unquestioning, accepting relationship to what should instead be the targets of its analysis.

So that’s the second part of your question – what is it about the properties that identifies them as metaphysical: it’s not so much that Marx has a checklist of what qualities something has to have, to be labelled metaphysical – it’s that, if someone else just accepts that something is “given”, and Marx can instead show how that thing is being made, Marx has demonstrated that the position that just accepted the various constitutive moments of its subject matter as “given”, has adopted what he calls a metaphysical or theological attitude toward that subject matter.

The first part of the question – what are those properties – is much much harder to answer, because this is (on my reading at least) a sort of fractal dimension of Marx’s argument. He keeps exploring this issue all the way through the text – exposing different sorts of assumptions and givens in different forms of theory, and then carrying out lots of small-scale demonstrations of the production of what has been assumed. Often, the “same” phenomena are produced in different ways – to use more contemporary language, the production of some phenomena is “overdetermined” – so the full argument – all the evidence Marx has that something is produced, rather than given, is often not apparent in any specific point in the text. Often (to my eyes at least) the initial discussion of how something is produced is not completely convincing – it’s only as the text moves forward and stacks on additional evidence in progressive “passes”, as Marx examines the problem from different angles, that it becomes convincing to claim that Marx has an account of the production of things that are generally taken to be intrinsic to human nature or material life.

The scope of his argument is much wider than it’s often read as being (in my reading). So categories like “material life” – that there is a “material world” – and categories like “society” and “history” – are also, in Marx’s account, categories that are usually presupposed by other approaches – and therefore treated metaphysically. One of the most complex arguments presented in Capital is that even these very foundational categories are being actively produced – that there is a reason categories like “history” or “society” or the “material world” suddenly become intuitive at a particular moment in time. Where other sociological theories might simply assert that we now know that “society” is an important determinant of human behavior, Marx treats this as a metaphysical stance: simply asserting this would be theological – Marx has to show how “society” is produced (and is therefore something more historically specific than it’s taken to be when it is simply presupposed).

Once we understand the production of these various phenomena – the differentia specifica that makes them specific to our time – we can then trundle around in history and look for signs of “society”, or “history”, or a “material world” in other contexts – as long as we realise that we are looking out from the distinctive anthropological perspective of our own time, examining the past or nonhuman worlds with sensibilities primed by our own practical experiences…

The argument quickly becomes almost impenetrably complex, when you try to trace out what Marx thinks he is doing, and how. So I can answer your first question generically: the metaphysical and theological properties are anything assumed to be given, whose production Marx can explain. But the “givens” include things like the assumption that there is a material world stripped of anthropological determination, the assumption that there is something like “history”, the assumption that there is something like “society” – as well as a whole series of much more specific assumptions about economic life in general, markets, states, cooperative, contracts, machines, etc.

So… not sure if it helps… I should also note that this is a specific reading of what Marx is up to – some of it is highly idiosyncratic to my work – so you’ll run into very different answers elsewhere… But this is (a bit of) mine…

Take care…

What are the “metaphysical and theological properties” of the commmodity and what is it about these properties which identify them as “metaphysical and theological”?

Best wishes