The consequences are serious. Not only does this mystify the productive forces of capitalism itself, at least as Marx conceived them, in ways evidently conducive to capitalist apologetics. Once capital is perceived as a thing, whose contribution to social productivity is independent of that of labour, profit can be understood as its equally independent and thoroughly deserved reward (see Sayer, 1983: ch. 3). The fetishizing of Marx's concept also denies us access to what actually were the productive forces of previous epochs, if by that we understand those things (and ideas, and relations) which actually did enhance the productivity of labour, and thereby give humanity a history which is, despite everything, meaningfully a progress. Marx numbers here such phenomena as 'the power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, Etruscan theocrats, &c.' in relation to the colossal effects of simple co-operation’ evident in such gigantic structures' as the pyramids (1867a: 333-4; see also the Iong quote there from Richard Jones).
But, as a famous passage in Capital remarks – à propos commodity fetishism, but the point applies equally to other fetishes as well:
Man's reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities ... have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning . . . The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, as soon as we come to other forms of production. (1867a: 75–6)
It seems that ‘traditional historical materialism' has yet to learn this lesson, and is no more immune than bourgeois economics to the fetishistic seduction of ‘natural, self-understood forms of social life' (1867a: 75), in which, for Marx, our social forms of consciousness are embedded. One might say of the traditional conception of productive forces, as Marx himself said of political economists' notions of value, that these formulae ... bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him' (1867a: 81). One might also take seriously, sixth and lastly perhaps, his cautionary invocation of Shakespeare's Dogberry, for whom ‘To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and writing comes by nature' (Much Ado About Nothing, III. iii, as quoted in Marx, ibid.).
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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