of exchange processes even as exchange relations increasingly converge to express value as socially necessary labor-time. But the producers
do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language. (166–7)
The dialectical relation between value formation and exchange and the immaterial, “phantom” qualities of value as a social relation could not be more starkly portrayed.
But how is this dialectic to be replicated in thought? Many of the political economists got it (and still get it) wrong, says Marx, because they look at prices in the supermarkets and think that’s all there is, and that is the only material evidence they need to construct their theories. They simply examine the relationship between supply and demand and associated price movements. Others, more perceptive, came to “the belated scientific discovery that the products of labor, in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labor expended to produce them.” This “marks an epoch in the history of mankind’s development” (167). Classical political economy did gradually converge on some idea of value that lay behind the fluctuations of the market (often referred to as “natural prices”) and it recognized that human labor had something to do with it.
But classical political economy failed to understand the gap between the immateriality of values as “congealed” socially necessary labor-time and their representation as money and therefore also failed to understand the role that the proliferation of exchange played in consolidating the value form as something historically specific to capitalism. It assumed that values were a self-evident and universal truth, failing to see that
the value character of the products of labour becomes firmly established only when they act as magnitudes of value. These magnitudes vary continually, independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them. (167–8)
Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.
This then leads Marx directly into a critique of how bourgeois modes of thought have evolved in relationship to the proliferation of exchange relations and the rise of the money-form:
Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development … Consequently, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values. It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly. (168–9)
This failure of vision on the part of the classical political economists is epitomized in the way so many of them embraced Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as a model for a perfect market economy arising out of a state of nature: Robinson, all on his own, marooned on an island, logically constructs a way of life appropriate to dwelling in a state of nature and step by step reconstitutes the logic of a market economy. But as Marx amusedly points out, Robinson, besides supposedly learning from experience, had also conveniently “saved a watch, ledger, ink and pen from the shipwreck,” and immediately began, “like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books” (169–70). In other words, Robinson carried with him to the island the mental conceptions of the world appropriate to a market economy and then went on to construct a relation to nature in that image. The political economists perversely used the story to naturalize the practices of an emergent bourgeoisie.
I have long thought that the political economists selected the wrong Defoe story. Moll Flanders is a far better model for how commodity production and circulation work. Moll behaves like the quintessential commodity for sale. She is constantly speculating on the desires of others, and others are constantly speculating on her desires (the great moment occurs when, effectively broke, she spends every last penny on hiring a grand outfit including coach and horses and appropriate jewelry to go to a ball where she enamors a young nobleman and elopes with him that night, only to find out the next morning that he is broke too, at which point they both see the humor of it all and amicably part ways). She travels the world (even goes to colonial Virginia), spends time in debtors’ prison; her fortune fluctuates up and down. She circulates like a monetary object in a sea of commodity exchanges. Moll Flanders is a much better analogy for the way capitalism, particularly the speculative Wall Street variety, really works.
Plainly, the classical political economists preferred the Robinson Crusoe myth because it naturalized capitalism. But as Marx insists, capitalism is a historical construct, not a natural object. “The categories of bourgeois economics” are merely “forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production.” A look at this history indicates the limitations of the supposed universal truths of bourgeois theory. “Let us now transport ourselves from Robinson’s island, bathed in light, to medieval Europe, shrouded in darkness.” While it may be “shrouded in darkness” the social relations are obvious. Under the corvée system, Marx points out, “every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord is a specific quantity of his own personal labour-power”; feudal subjects were very aware that “the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between things, between the products of labour” (169–70). The same is true of a patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family: the social relations are transparent, you can see who is doing what and for whom.
Such historical comparisons, along with the analysis of fetishism, allow us to see the contingent, as opposed to the universal, nature of the truths laid out in bourgeois political economy. “The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production” (169). We can even finally imagine social relations organized as “an association of free men,” i.e., a socialist world in which “the social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are … transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution” (171–2). By invoking the idea of association, Marx echoes much of French utopian socialist thought in the 1830s and 1840s (Proudhon, in particular, though Marx refrains from acknowledging so). His hope is that we might
