The Fetish of Labour and its Dominion: The Critique of Economy as Critique of the Value-Form

Abstract

The problems of labour are at the heart of Marx’s opus, from his youth to his maturity. That is why it may seem tempting to make of this theme the unifying principle in a diverse and voluminous body of thought. Of course, there are many differences between the analyses of alienated labour in the 1844 Manuscripts and those of exploitation of labour in Capital, but one might ask whether these do not boil down to a single set of questions about the centrality of labour in contemporary society — or labour’s significance or lack of it. From this perspective, Marx appears much more dependent than he himself imagined on the classical political economy of his time, which reflected the ever more crucial role of production within the broad range of social activity of the bourgeois era. Marx, in this framework, is perceived as having remained a prisoner, throughout all his works, of Hegelian conceptions in which labour is interpreted as the externalisation of the subject, of consciousness, in a context in which the latter constantly threatens to become alienation and loss of control over action. Marx’s theorisation is thus seen as marked by ‘economism’, that is, a primacy of the relations of production over other social relations and by a simplified model of action which favours the transforming action of the material world, to the detriment of communications and the various forms of human interaction.