ABSTRACT
In his important book Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, I.I. Rubin draws attention to the fact that ‘Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has not occupied the place which is proper to it in the Marxist economic system’ (1972, p. 5).1 As he observes, many writers have failed to grasp the relationship of this notion to Marx’s critique of political economy-it has, he says, often been regarded as a ‘brilliant sociological generalization, a theory and critique of all contemporary culture based on the reification of human relations’. Rubin was surely right to oppose such a view and also that which seeks to separate out Marx’s notion of fetishism as some independent entity, having hardly any connection to Capital as a whole. Rubin’s book was first published over fifty years ago, but in the light of the many distortions of this aspect of Marx’s work which have appeared in recent years, what he said then carries even more force today. In fact we shall seek to show that for Marx his notion of fetishism is no mere literary digression, something ancillary to the main text. On the contrary, as Rubin, I think, has adequately shown, it provides one of the key elements in the foundation of Marx’s entire theory and is in particular directly bound up with his conception of economic crisis. We know that a separate treatment of fetishism did not appear in the first edition of Capital, even though the concept is implicitly present. Only with the second and third editions (the basis for the English translations) did a separate section ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’ appear at the end of Chapter One. We know that it was the first chapter which gave Marx the greatest difficulty. He wrote and re-wrote the sections dealing with the value-form, seeking to present in the clearest way possible the contradictory nature of the commodity-form and reveal the results of these contradictions. It is no accident that the section on fetishism appears after those dealing with the value-form and no accident that this section was added as part of Marx’s struggle to present the value-form in the most adequate manner. But although there is a separate section dealing with fetishism, it is not as though Marx deals with this matter and then drops it. It is a notion which is present throughout the entire three volumes, and one which he develops and concretizes in these volumes as well as in the Theories of Surplus Value. (See also Kemp, 1978, where Marx’s conception of fetishism is discussed.)
Fetishism and social being Let us start by recalling that Marx took the political economists severely to task for having accepted the reified, alienated forms of bourgeois economy at face value, for having failed
to inquire into the historical and social basis of these forms. In this critique of the work of his predecessors, Marx rejected all notions which sought to ‘derive’ value (a social relation) from use-value (a material phenomenon). (The mystical character of commodities does not originate in their use-value’, I, p. 71). In similar fashion,, Marx opposed all those views which explained the nature of money in terms of the material-technical properties of gold, just as he poured scorn on all those who sought to understand capital from the technical nature of the means of production. What all these ‘errors’ had in common for Marx was this: they failed to distinguish between the technical role of the instruments of labour on the one hand, and their social form on the other. For Marx the essence of fetishism was this: under commodity production, relations between men take the form of relations between ‘things’. The social relations are indirect relations, relations mediated through these things, and men simply ‘represent’ or ‘personify’ these things in the market place. Now Marx chastised the political economists for taking these forms ‘as given’ (by Nature) and not as social forms arising under definite historical conditions, forms which would therefore disappear under new social conditions. Those who accept the social relations of capital ‘uncritically’ in effect attribute to things in their immediate manifestation properties which, in point of fact, have nothing in common with this immediate material manifestation as such. The attention of Ricardo was directed almost exclusively to discovering the material base of definite social forms. These forms of social being were taken as read and therefore lying outside the scope of further analysis. It was Marx’s aim to discover the origin and development of these social forms assumed by the material-technical production process at a definite stage in the development of the productive forces. Here, incidentally, is a further clue to the distinction between classical political economy and its later degenerate form in vulgar economy. In the latter case, vulgar political economy, certain properties materially inherent in things are assigned to the social form of these things. Hence the power inherent in the means of production to raise labour productivity-that is the power to increase the production of use-values for a given expenditure of labour-timeascribed falsely to capital, and by extension, to the owner of capital. From this notion comes the apologetic theory of the ‘productivity’ of capital. Classical economy, on the other hand, ascribed economic forms to the specific property of things. It attempted to derive social phenomena directly from material-technical phenomena. Hence capital was ‘stored-up labour’, rent arose from the soil, etc. Now whatever the inadequacies of the notion that ‘capital is stored-up labour’, it at least had the merit over vulgar economy that the connection between ‘labour’ and ‘capital’ was kept in sight, even if this connection was misunderstood. In the case of vulgar economy, its apologetic nature reaches its high point with the formula: land-rent, capital-interest, labour-wages. For as we have already noted, in this formula the categories of capitalist production do not face each other as alien, hostile forms, but rather as heterogeneous and different forms. The different revenues are derived from different sources, one from land, one from labour and the other from capital. All notions of any inner connections are obliterated. The three categories work together harmoniously in the cause of production as do the plough and the land. In so far as any contradiction is admitted by the vulgar school, it is one merely concerned with distribution-one about the distribution of the value jointly created by the three agents. As we have seen, it was John Stuart Mill, with his division between conditions of production (fixed by nature and therefore immutable) and conditions of distribution (fixed socially
and therefore within limits amenable to modification) who elaborated this aspect of vulgar economy into a system which was taken over by Fabianism and various other brands of reformism. Before turning to look at Marx’s notion of fetishism in more detail, we should say a little about the origin of this idea and its connection with the development of Marx’s work. The notion of fetishism, sketched out in the Critique and more fully in Capital, is the product of a long line of development, going back to The Holy Family (in Marx and Engels, 1975b), with its contrast between ‘social’ relations and materialized forms. We find Marx, in this early work, saying that property, capital, money, wage labour and similar categories, do not, in themselves, represent phantoms of the imagination, but very practical, very concrete products of the self-alienation of the worker. The material element, dominating all economic relations, is contrasted with an ideal, with a view of the world as it should be. In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx says that ‘Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions, of the social relations of production’. Marx, in opposition to Proudhon, now grasped that social relations of production stand behind the material categories of the economy. But he did not yet ask why this relationship was a necessary one under commodity production. It was only with the Critique and Capital that this problem is thoroughly examined and made the basis of the criticism of political economy as a whole. Now it is explained-and this is the essential point in the notion of fetishism-that the:
It is especially important to stress this last point-that fetishism is not mere illusion, that Fetishism is not only a phenomenon of social consciousness, but of social being’ as Rubin (p. 59) correctly puts it. For fetishism is often wrongly equated with mystification, merely an ideological category. (We shall return to this point.) It would of course be quite wrong to see a fully worked-out theory of fetishism in Marx’s early writings, but it would be equally one-sided to draw a rigid distinction between Marx’s early formulation of this question and its rounded out version in Capital, a position in general adopted by the Althusserian school. For one element found in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Paris Manuscripts, in Marx, 1975a) is returned to throughout all Marx’s later work-namely that under capitalist relations, the products of the workers’ labour confront him as something coercive and this is a real coercion, with a definite material base. This we find in this early work:
We shall see how this theme, far from being dropped, is enriched and developed in Capital.
