Abstract
The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion that constitutes the ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other.
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Notes
- 1.
‘The ossification of relations, their presentation as the relation of men to things having a definite social character is here [the character and form of capital as complete] likewise brought out in a quite different manner from that of the simple mystification of commodities and the more complicated mystification of money. The transubstantiation, the fetishism, is complete’ (Marx 1975, p. 494, cf. 1981, pp. 965–966).
- 2.
MacGregor (1984/1990) has undertaken an exhaustive comparison of the two thinkers, illuminating their similarities but sometimes overstretching his interpretation, verging on total subsumption of Marx under Hegel’s auspices.
- 3.
For an argument in support of ‘capital as pre-supposition of the commodity forms and of simple circulation’ which also reprimands the rival viewpoint (of Meek, Engels, et al.) for exhibiting a ‘most shallow and hasty reading of Marx’s Capital’, see Banaji (1979, pp. 29–30).
- 4.
In children, it is the transition from ‘let us play exchanging cards’ to the inverse form of ‘let us exchange cards and play’ by which exchange subordinates the activity of playing.
- 5.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978, pp. 28, 56, 67). The historical generality of his argument compels Sohn-Rethel to paper over fundamental distinctions of the commodity form grounded in their social source, like that between the independent commodity producer and wage labour commodity production.
- 6.
For instance, the protracted social and legal struggle of local American pharmacists and shop owners in the 1930s against corporate chain stores which destroyed their businesses and thus their independent livelihoods, turning them into ‘drug clerks’ and wage labourers while undermining the civic spirit of local communities (Sandel 1996, pp. 227–231). Small-scale independent commodity producers and providers form the backbone of the petite bourgeoisie and currently face a renewed attack on their conditions of existence—the shrinking of the ‘middle classes’, defined in income terms, in most European Union countries (Eurofound 2017, p. 52) under reigning neoliberal capitalism.
- 7.
Faccarello (1998, p. 38) argues that the defect of the ‘expanded value form’ rests on a fallacy Hegel calls ‘infinite progress’ (misidentified by Faccarello as ‘endless regression’, ignoring the condition that the ‘endlessness’ is oriented towards the future).
- 8.
I develop an analysis of ‘money fetishism’ in Marx’s early writings in The Concept of Political Representation from Hobbes to Marx (2011, pp. 142–173).
- 9.
The completed value form with its money form warrants the exchangeability of anything and everything that enters its circulation sphere, and encompasses the commodification of labour power whenever wage labour makes its historical appearance as commodity.
- 10.
In advanced capitalism, the income stratification scale and wage differentials constitute the social norm of the evaluation of an individual’s personal ‘worth’ and establish standards of ‘success’. At the same time, they trigger competitive individualism, hypocrisy (via self-promotion) and mistrust of others in the pursuit of higher positions in the pecking order.
- 11.
‘Correctness’ refers to the agreement of a representation to its object; ‘truth’ concerns the correspondence of an object to its concept (see Prokopczyk 1980, p. 75).
- 12.
‘[E]xchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the “ form of appearance”, of a content distinguishable from it’ (Marx 1976a, p. 127).
- 13.
If exchange constitutes value and exchange means to express the commodity’s ‘value’ in money form, then it follows that money constitutes the value of the commodity. But as shown above, this money fetishism assigns to the equivalent form (which is a ‘passive agent’, a value reflector) the power of determination of the value of the relative value form that, as the active agent, should have determined/posited its reflection onto the body/ use value of the equivalent form.
- 14.
The same condition applies to use values. As material entities, ‘[u]se-values are only realized [verwirklicht] in use or in consumption’ (Marx 1976a, p. 126). This clearly shows that ‘use-value’ is a social relation grounded on the material qualities of the objects in tandem with the social needs they satisfy. Left unused, an object does not become a ‘use-value’, but it does not follow that it loses its material existence and the possibility of becoming a ‘use-value’ in another social context or framework of social needs (for example, recycling waste).
- 15.
Beyond the fact that, in the mass production system, ‘the purchaser is from the outset an object of calculation’ (Adorno 1982, 78) and the ‘ average profit added onto the cost prices’, the transformation of values into prices of production precedes exchange, and if exchange defined value, the distinction between individual commodity value and market value would be nonsensical (Marx 1981, pp. 274, 279 respectively).
- 16.
His account seeks to reconcile both conditions of ‘prevalidation’ and of ultimate ‘validation’ by exchange through the dual function of money as ‘money capital’ and ‘general equivalent’ (Bellofiore 1998, p. xiv).
- 17.
‘[T]he value of a commodity represents human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general’ (Marx 1976a, p. 135). He continues with a contrast drawn from Hegel (1991, § 190R, p. 228), who juxtaposes the bourgeois to the human being as mere creature of needs, and Marx stresses that in ‘bourgeois society’ ‘man as such plays a very mean part’ (ibid., emphasis added). The reduction of the labourer to ‘labour pure and simple’, to ‘man as such’ within bourgeois society is a form of depersonalisation, the fetishistic inversion of a person into a ‘labouring’ instrument. Capital’s drive seeks equalisation as levelling down and dehumanises labour in the name of man as such.
- 18.
The widespread introduction of artificial intelligence and robotisation in the capitalist production process will soon simplify ‘complex labour’ itself, as we can already observe in artificial voice systems, translation services and driving practices.
- 19.
Braverman, in his effort to prove the ‘degradation of work’ under capitalism—although he acknowledges the generalisation of literacy and the handling of numbers—is led to hail illiteracy on the pretext that ‘reading and figuring are […] the elementary attributes of a manageable population’ and thus pliant to manipulation at will (1974, p. 436). He completely misses the dialectical aspect of this historical upgrading of the ‘general intellect’.
- 20.
‘Originally, we considered the individual commodity in isolation, as the result and the direct product of a specific quantity of labour. Now, as the result, the product of capital, the commodity changes in form […containing] a quantity of labour equal to the value of the constant capital [transferred to the product…] + the value of the quantity of labour exchanged for variable capital […] and the remainder constitutes the surplus-value’ (Marx 1976b, p. 969; Robles-Bàez 2015, p. 302).
- 21.
Hegel theorised the necessity of rendering all citizens’ services to the state in monetary form (excepting military service) on the basis that money is the universal measure of all things (hence succumbing to money fetishism) and thus establishing an ‘equitable’ quantification of services (1991, § 299R, p. 338).
- 22.
In Hegel, essential and inessential appearances are both identical (as appearances) and different (as essential/inessential). The (essential) appearance that reflects its law-like essence within itself emerges as ‘a world, which reveals itself as a world in and for itself above the world of Appearance’. The world of ‘value’ lurks ‘above’ its distinct manifestations as exchange values. ‘This world in and for itself is also called the supersensuous world’ (Hegel 1999, p. 507). Commodities as ‘sensuous things’ inscribed with value ‘are at the same time suprasensible or social’ (Marx 1976a, p. 165).
- 23.
A dual teleological objectivity, one within the other, where in the first ‘mechanical objectivity’ there is an inversion of the means-end connection, sublated by the second ‘objectivity’ in which ‘the return of the end into itself’ is realised and both ‘objectivities’ are sublated in the Notion’s self-determination, is analysed in Hegel’s Logic (1999, pp. 748–752).
- 24.
‘Given back’ because variable capital is ‘exchange of objectified labour for living labour’ (Marx 1976b, p. 1003) and wages are nothing but a portion of value, through which social labour ‘buys back’ the ‘means of subsistence’ it itself has produced. This is a culmination point of capital fetishism where the wage contract exchange is just ‘the deceptive illusion of transaction’ (Marx 1976b, p. 1064).
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Daremas, G. (2018). The Social Constitution of Commodity Fetishism, Money Fetishism and Capital Fetishism. In: Dellheim, J., Wolf, F. (eds) The Unfinished System of Karl Marx. Luxemburg International Studies in Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70347-3_7
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