forms, a different way of relating. Whether that is practical or not is a key question for any reader of Marx to consider; but here is one of the rare moments in Capital where we glimpse Marx’s vision of a socialist future.
The fetishism of the market generates a good deal of ideological baggage around it. Marx comments, for example, on the way in which Protestantism is the most fitting form of religion for capitalism. He argues that our forms of thought—not just those of the political economists—reflect the fetish of their times; but this is a general tendency. His remarks on religion and its relation to political economic life are significant:
Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. These formulas, which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to political economists’ bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself. (173–5)
To this, Marx adds a lengthy and important footnote:
The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc. (174, n. 34)
You will err, he is suggesting, if you naturalize the value-form under capitalism, because it is then difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of alternatives.
This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it.
Capitalism has no way of registering intrinsic, “natural” values in its calculus. “Since exchange-value is a definite social manner of expressing the labour bestowed on a thing, it can have no more natural content than has, for example, the rate of exchange”; it is illusory to believe, for example, that “ground rents grow out of the soil, not out of society” (176).
Bourgeois political economy looks at the surface appearance. Insofar as it had a labor theory of value, it never probed deeply into its meaning or the historical circumstances of its emergence. This leaves us with the task of getting beyond the fetishism, not by treating it as an illusion, but by addressing its objective reality (164–5, 176–7). One response is to take the “fair trade” path. Another is to devise a scientific path, a critical theory: a mode of investigation and inquiry that can uncover the deep structure of capitalism and suggest alternative value systems based on radically different kinds of social and material relations.
The two options are not mutually exclusive. A politics that deals with the conditions of labor on a global basis, developing into, say, an anti-sweatshop movement, can easily lead into the much deeper theoretical territory that Marx charts in Capital precisely because the surface appearance, while fetishistic, always indicates an objective reality. I recall, for example, when the students at Johns Hopkins put on a fashion show, featuring clothing from Liz Claiborne and the Gap, with a side commentary on both the items of clothing and the conditions of labor associated with their production. This was an effective way to talk about the fetishism and raise awareness with respect to global conditions, while suggesting the importance of doing something about it.
Marx’s mission in Capital, though, is to define a science beyond the immediate fetishism without denying its reality. He has already laid a lot of the groundwork for this in the critique of bourgeois political economy. He has also already revealed the extent to which we are governed in what we do by the abstract forces of the market and how we are perpetually at risk of being ruled by fetishistic constructs that blind us to what is actually happening. To what degree can you say that this is a free society characterized by true individual liberty? The illusions of a liberal utopian order, in Marx’s view, have to be debunked for what they are: a replication of that fetishism that displaces social relations between people into material relations between people and social relations between things.
CHAPTER 2: THE PROCESS OF EXCHANGE
Chapter 2 is not only shorter but easier to follow. Marx’s purpose is to define the socially necessary conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and to create a firmer foundation for the consideration of the money-form that is to follow in chapter 3.
Since commodities do not themselves go to market, we need first to define the operative relationship between commodities and those who take them there. Marx imagines a society in which “the guardians” of commodities “recognize each other as owners of private property. This juridical relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system or not, is a mirror between two wills which mirrors the economic relation … Here the persons exist for one another”—note the echo of the fetishism argument—not as people, but “as representatives and hence owners, of commodities.” This leads him to make a broader point. Throughout Capital, “the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations,” and it is “as the bearers”—please note the recurrence of this term—“of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other” (178–9). Marx is concerned with the economic roles that people play, rather than with the individuals who play them. So he will examine relations between buyers and sellers, debtors and creditors, capitalists and laborers. Throughout Capital, in fact, the focus will be on roles rather than persons, recognizing that individuals can and do often occupy several different roles, even deeply contradictory positions (as when, in our time, a worker has a pension fund invested in the stock market). This focus on roles rather than individuals is as perfectly legitimate as if we were analyzing the relations between drivers and pedestrians in the streets of Manhattan: most of us have taken on both roles and adapt our behaviors accordingly.
The roles in a capitalist mode of production are strictly defined. Individuals are juridical subjects who have private-property ownership of the commodity they wield, and they trade it under non-coercive, contractual conditions. There is reciprocal respect for the juridical rights of others; the principled equivalence of market exchanges that Aristotle noted is an honored virtue. What Marx describes here is the conventional political and legal framework for properly functioning markets as envisaged in liberal theory. In this world, a commodity is “a born leveller and cynic,” because it “is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity.” The owner is willing to dispose of it, and the buyer wants to take it: “All commodities are non-use-values for their owners and use-values for their non-owners.
