In capitalism, for instance, the labour process is also a process of production of surplus-value, and the product, in addition to having use-value, assumes the specific value-form'of the commodity. The latter term in each pair is a distinctively social characteristic, and the specific object of Marx's analysis. Thus, clarifying the methodological starting-point of Capital in his 1880 Notes on Adolf Wagner, he makes it clear that, 'I do not start from"concepts" .. . What I start from is the simplest social form in which the labour product is represented in contemporary society, and this is "the commodity" (1880a: 50; cf. 1858a: 881).
Fetishism confuses, or indeed inverts, these two sets of attributes, material and formal or natural and social. Properties which things acquire entirely as a consequence of their standing in a specific set of social relations are mistakenly seen as inhering in, and explained by, the material qualities of those objects themselves. In Marx's own words, fetishism consists in regarding economic categories, such as being a commodity or productive labour, as qualities inherent in the material incarnations of these formal determinations or categories' (1866: 1046). To fetishize economic phenomena is to metamorphose the social, economic character impressed on things in the process of production into a natural character stemming from the material nature of those things' (1878: 229).
So commodity fetishism, to take Marx's best-known example, consists in seeing the value of commodities as something intrinsic to them as things, and therefore explicable by their material features, their scarcity, durability, utility or whatever. But these material features, for Marx, pertain only to the use-values of commodities, something the goods in question would continue to have even if they did not assume the commodity-form, and - as for instance when immediately consumed by their producers – accordingly had no value as such. The commodity as an exchange-value differs from itself as a natural, material thing' (1858a: 188). Exchange-value is ‘a cipher for a relation of production' (ibid.: 141). It is a material mode of expression of a social relation, the respective amounts of labour necessary under given conditions to the production of different commodities, and it is the social relations specific to commodity production which wholly explain why the labour-product should assume this specific (and somewhat mystifying) value-form: 'No scientist has yet discovered what natural properties make definite proportions of snuff tobacco and paintings “equivalents" for one another'(1863c: 130). Rather:
Where labour is communal, the relations of men in their social production do not manifest themselves as values' of things'. Exchange of products as commodities is a method of exchanging labour, [it demonstrates] the dependence of the labour of each upon the labour of the others [and corresponds to] a certain mode of social labour or social production. (ibid.: 129, interpolations from editorial collation of Marx's ms.)
In money, the universal symbol of value, the fetish reaches its apotheosis: a social relation, a definite relation between individuals, appears as a metal, a stone, as a purely physical, external thing' (ibid.: 239). This kind of transubstantiation is, for Marx, wholly analogous with what goes on in the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world', and explains his use of the term fetishism (which he took originally from Feuerbach's critique of religion): 'In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands' (1867a: 72).
This first fetishistic confusion, of material and social, entails a second. To comprehend social properties of objects as deriving from their material attributes is at the same time implicitly to universalize them, to deny their specific historical character. Thus value, in this example, becomes a property products possess transhistorically, irrespective of their particular modes of production. It is no longer, as for Marx, ‘a historic relation' (1858a: 252), a property things acquire only within a definite historical mode of production - commodity production, which rests on particular relations between people, a specific form of social division of labour, not found in all forms of human society. Capitalist conditions are thereby covertly taken as premisses of any and all human sociation. The connection between this critique of fetishism, and the argument developed earlier in this chapter concerning the necessarily historical character of Marx's substantive categories will, I hope, be evident. For him, ‘it is precisely these forms that are alone of importance when the question is the specific character of a mode of social production' (1863a: 296, emphasis added).
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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