Importantly, for Marx fetishism is not simply an intellectual faux pas, a category error. Consistently with his general denial of the independence of ideas from people's materialistic connection', of consciousness from experience - which I shall discuss further in chapter 4 - he seeks to root fetishism in the forms in which, under capitalism, individuals actually experience their social relations (Sayer, 1983, ch. 1; Godelier, 1964; Mepham, 1972). To use the hackneyed but none the less useful analogy, the mechanism of fetishism is akin to that of a mirage rather than an hallucination. It is not that people mistake what they see, what they see misleads them, for thoroughly objective reasons to do with how it presents itself to their consciousness. Marx makes this point against the Ricardian socialist, Thomas Hodgskin:
Hodgskin says that the effects of a certain social form of labour are ascribed to objects, to the products of labour; the relationship itself is imagined to exist in material form . . . Hodgskin regards this as a pure subjective illusion which conceals the deceit and the interests of the exploiting classes. He does not see that the way of looking at things arises out of the relationship itself; the latter is not an expression of the former, but vice versa. (1863c: 295–6)
A corollary of this is that fetishism is not equally characteristic of all social formations (any more than, for Marx, ideology was an invariant feature of social life¹6), and its explanation must accordingly be empirically specific. He argues, for instance, that exploitation was much more transparent in feudal societies, because it was not concealed by the material forms of the labour process itself as in capitalism. Work for oneself and work for one's lord were palpably separate in a way they are not within the wage-relation, where all of one's labour-time appears to be paid for.17 Empirically this is perhaps debatable, since feudal relations involved norms of reciprocity; crudely, protection, both earthly and divine, in exchange for services. But Marx's intent is clear.
For Marx, fetishism reaches its zenith in capitalism, and this is explained by the singularity of the social relations on which that mode of production rests. Fundamental to capitalism is a spontaneous social division of labour between private producers, which is not subject to any conscious overall social regulation. This ‘same division of labour that turns [people] into private producers', he argues, also frees the social process of production . . . from all dependence on the wills of those producers.’ Hence, their relations to each other . .. assume a material character independent of their control and conscious individual action.’ What ensues is ‘a whole network of social relations spontaneous in their growth and entirely beyond the control of the actors' (1867a: 108, 92-3, 112). This is epitomized in Adam Smith's hidden hand' of the market, governing the movements and prices of commodities apparently by laws entirely of its own. Indeed under capitalist conditions this appearance of autonomy on the part of market forces' is real, for it is only in the form of relative prices of goods that the social relations between independent producers are actually expressed, and only through the price-mechanism that equilibriation of inputs and outputs of labour between different branches of production is regulated.
The Grundrisse summarizes this key dimension of the sociology of capitalism:
As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. The social relation of individuals to one another as a power over the individuals which has become autonomous, whether conceived as a natural force, as chance or in whatever other form, is a necessary result of the fact that the point of departure is not the free social individual. (1858a: 196-7)
The Hegelian language of this passage prompts one final observation. In this respect, at least, Marx's analysis of the 'bewitching phenomenology of capitalism was remarkably consistent over time. In the early writings he was more inclined to use the concept of alienation than that of fetishism, though the former figures in his later works to a far greater extent than some commentators have acknowledged (and the latter, which comes from Feuerbach, is by no means entirely absent from the young Marx'). But the heart of the analysis – that, within capitalism, people's social relations take on the ‘alien' form of objects, and are accordingly fetishized in their consciousness - remains the same. So does the explanation of this fetishism as being consequent upon a particular social form of division of labour. This was, in short, an enduring and central theme of Marx's historical sociology.
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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