VII
Many commentators have recognized the importance of the concept of fetishism in Marx's writings. Indeed Cohen himself offers an account of fetishism which is in many ways outstanding.18 The relevance of Marx's critique of fetishism to what we understand by productive forces, however, has received much less attention. Fortunately, Marx himself provides explicit criticism of fetishized views of productive forces - their identification with the material objects in which they are embodied - and he does so throughout his work. In The German Ideology, for instance, he argues that under capitalist conditions:
The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour, appears to these individuals .. . not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they cannot thus control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent of their will, nay even being the prime governor of these. (1846a: 46)
It is not without irony that although Cohen quotes this passage, it could have been written as an exact critique of his own formulation of Marx's so-called 'development thesis'. Both the independence of material’ productive forces from social relations, their character as things', and their supposedly inherent tendency to develop, such development being the prime governor’ of history, emerge as precisely forms of appearance, arising out of specifically capitalist production relations.
We might note in passing the (important) converse that for Marx neither such development, nor its apparent spontaneity, were in fact universal. Closely following Hegel, he characterized the Asiatic' mode of production, for instance, in terms of its 'millenial stagnation'. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history' (1853b: 217); life there is undignified, stagnant and vegetative' (1853a: 132). 'English interference' alone produced 'the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia' (ibid.: 131). This stasis is explained by the peculiar social relations of the self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form' (1867a: 358), which provide the economic foundation of 'Oriental despotism'.19 Again, the empirical validity of this picture of Asiatic society – a picture whose roots in European (and Eurocentric) thought have been admirably traced by Krader (1975) – is more than dubious. But the illustration none the less suffices to clarify Marx's position.
Another passage from The German Ideology is equally clear on the fetishism entailed in identifying productive forces with their material embodiments, and says more about the specific sociàl relations - the form of division of labour characteristic of generalized commodity production, one very different from that which prevails in Marx's portrayal of Indian communities (see 1867a: 257-9) - which grounds this reification. In capitalism, Marx writes:
the productive forces appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals; the reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand, these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and association of these individuals. Thus .. . we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property. (1846a: 83-4, emphasis added)
Marx goes on to argue that ‘the history of the evolving forces' is in reality therefore, the history of the development of the forces of the individuals themselves' (ibid.: 90). The Grundrisse similarly describes forces of production and social relations' as but two different sides of the development of the social individual' (1858a: 706).
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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