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Commodity Fetishism*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Arthur Ripstein
Arthur Ripstein*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, CanadaMSS 1A1
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Extract

Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ But instead of going on to reveal the nature of commodites-the task that occupies him for the preceding 30 and subsequent 700 pages-Marx takes the opportunity to explore their ‘mystical’ character. The passage repays careful consideration. It is one of the few places in his mature writings in which Marx returns to the tone of his youthful works. It is also the passage in which commentators have claimed to find grounds for attributing a doctrine of ‘false consciousness’ to Marx.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 733 - 748
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Peter King for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Without his help, it too was in danger of becoming an institution independent of my will.

References

1 Marx, Karl Capital, Vol. I, trans. Moore, and Aveling, (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1954), 78Google Scholar. All quotations cited only by page number are from this text.

2 Marx takes this account from Feuerbach. See Feuerbach, Ludwig The Essence of Christianity, trans. Eliot, George (New York: Harper and Row 1957)Google Scholar.

3 For example: Cohen, G.A. Karl Marx's Theory of History: a Defense (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978)Google Scholar; Kolakowski, Lezek Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978)Google Scholar; Gould, Carol Marx's Social Ontology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1980)Google Scholar; and Elster, Jon Making Sense Of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)Google Scholar. Lukacs’;, Georg History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1971)Google Scholar may be a notable exception to the dominant reading, but poses many of the same problems of interpretation that Marx does.

4 Cohen, 116-17

5 Cohen 119 (italics removed)

6 For a sample of such reasons, including Cohen's own, see Steedman, Ianet al., The Value Controversy (London: Verso/New Left Books 1981), as well as Elster, 127–41Google Scholar.

7 Marx, Karl ‘Estranged Labor,’ in Karl Marx: Early Writings, Hoare, Quinton ed. (London: Penguin and New Left Books 1975)Google Scholar

8 Cohen acknowledges that it is hard to imagine anyone seriously believeing that commodities have their exchange value intrinsically (127 n.1).

9 Marx, Karl ‘Eleven Theses on Feuerbach’ in Hoare, Quinton ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings,422Google Scholar

10 That requires that I explain away Marx's use of terms like ‘appears’ and ‘in their eyes’ in the text. Marx's use of visual metaphors must be recognized as just that – metaphorical. He certainly does not mean to suggest that commodities look like they have value, whatever that would be. (Price tags, perhaps?) If ‘in their eyes’ is not to be construed visually, there is no reason to suppose that it must be construed perceptually at all.

11 Perhaps the labor theory of value is supposed to make a similar point about workers not getting their fair share. I am inclined to be skeptical about this, considering Marx repeated emphasis of the fact that labor, like any other commodity, is exchanged at its value, and his attacks on the utopian socialists who protest that capitalism is unfair. If the labor theory of value does make such appeals, it is appealing to class interest inasmuch as it is to the advantage of workers to get a larger share of the social product.

12 There has been a wealth of literature recently on the question of whether Marx's criticisms of capitalism can properly be described as moral criticisms. Both sides have mustered persuasive arguments, but the issue should not be blown out of proportion. Most of those who are unwilling to attribute moral arguments to Marx are willing to concede that he did appeal to human aspirations and ideals, though he made no pretensions, and indeed could make no pretensions, to the eternal status of those aspirations and ideals. I call appeals to what seems unacceptable ‘very much like moral criticism’ in order to avoid embroiling myself in those debates.

13 Steven Lukes has drawn out the implications of this intuition in his analysis of political power. See Power: a Radical View (London: Macmillan 1974).

14 Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ 421Google Scholar

15 For example, in the Grundrisse (the rough draft of Capital, trans. Martin Nicolous [London: Penguin and New Left Books 1973]) 490.

16 Marx, Karl Wage Labor And Capital (New York: International Publishers 1933) 28Google Scholar

17 Language may also involve differentiated roles. Hilary Putnam has argued that linguistic roles are not always equal, and has even chosen the phrase ‘Linguistic division of labor’ to characterize the manner of the inequality. See ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’ in Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1975).

18 This difference must not be confused with a different distinction: language is to the advantage of all of its speakers, but other relations between people need not be. Under normal circumstances, any way of organizing production is advantageous when contrasted with the alternative of no production at all, just as any language at all is advantageous when contrasted with silence. But the advantage of language per se does not entail that all languages are interchangeable in their expressive resources. By the same token – and this is Marx's point-not all ways of organizing production are alike. The difference that concerns us is that linguistic interaction does not typically depend on strongly differentiated roles.

19 Marx, Grundrisse, 157Google Scholar

20 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York: International Publishers 1948) 12Google Scholar

21 Rousseau, Jean Jacques Emile, trans. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books 1979) 85Google Scholar

22 Smith, Adam ‘An Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations,’ in Scott, William ed., Adam Smith as Student and Professor (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press 1937) 340Google Scholar

23 Because the epistemic problem of fetishism is derivative of the practical fetish, Marx avoides the charge that his attribution of ‘false consciousness’ (a term Marx himself does not employ) is self-refuting because he lacks a privileged perspective to issue it from. If capitalist society mysteriously produced illusions about its workings, Marx would have no grounds for claiming he was not likewise deluded. But Marx does not claim that class society necessarily generates error; indeed he praises David Ricardo for working conscientiously and very nearly figuring out capitalism's workings. Those who mistake capitalism for a natural system are not blinded by their situation; Marx presumes that his explanation of its working will be accepted on empirical grounds. The fact that nobody had developed Marx's analysis of capitalism before Marx did is not an indictment of capitalism. The indictment is that capitalism works the way Marx says it does.

24 Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick Manifesto of the Communist Party, 13Google Scholar