Marx began the chapter by analyzing exchange value as a form of appearance of a property that all commodities share, namely their property of being "congealed quantities of homogeneous human labor" (128), that is, their general or abstract property of representing or embodying their producers' participation in the social division of labor. The substance of value is human labor. Its form is exchange value. The "social character" of the producing activities of commodity producers--i.e., their character as "human labor" or part of society's labor--appears as the exchangeability of their products. So far we have dealt with relatively primitive expressions of exchange value, in terms of a commodity's exchangeability with an arbitrarily selected commodity to serve as its equivalent. For example, we have said things like the exchange value of linen is manifested or by the fact that 20 yards of linen are exchangeable for one coat. But in the everyday intercourse of commodity exchange, exchange value is not expressed in this elementary way, but rather in terms of a commodity's price, its exchange ratio with money. The main point of this section is to show that this mode of expression is not an arbitrary, accidental or purely conventional, but deeply rooted in commodity production considered as a specific social form of production. Marx wants to show that money is an expression of the social relationships that define commodity production.
Why must value take the form of exchange value, and why must exchange value be expressed in terms of price? Marx constructs an answer by looking at what is needed for value to fulfill its function as certifier of the social character of commodity-producing labor. He looks at several "forms" or "modes of expression" of value--the simple, expanded, general and money forms--and argues that only the last expresses value adequately, i.e. only the last enables value to represent the social character of the laboring activities of commodity producers.
In this form the value of one commodity is expressed in terms of some other arbitrary commodity, for example:
20 yards of linen are worth one coat
Important features of this form are the following:
The value of the linen is expressed relatively, in terms of some other commodity asserted to be its equivalent, in this case in terms of coats. Some form of relative expression is necessary, for since value is a social rather than a natural property, the character of the linen as a bearer of value is not made apparent by any of its natural properties. The value form of the linen must be different from its natural form.
The simple form expresses value, but inadequately. The activity of the linen producer must be expressed as human labor in the abstract, and hence as qualitatively identical to the activity of every other commodity producer. In equating the linen with the coat, the elementary form equates weaving with tailoring, thereby giving the value of the linen an objective form different from its natural form, but it does not equate weaving with all other commodity-producing activies.
The role of the equivalent (the coat in this example) has certain notable peculiarities:
Use value becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, value. The natural form of one commodity becomes the form (of manifestation) of the value of the another commodity. Since the linen's own natural properties do not distinguish it as a bearer of value, the linen's value must find some other natural properties to represent its value. (Note the analogy with the expression of weight on pp. 148-9).
Concrete labor becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract labor, manifests itself. "In order to express the fact that, for instance, weaving creates the value of linen through its general property of being human labour rather than in its concrete form as weaving, we contrast it with the concrete labour which produces the equivalent of the linen, namely tailoring" (C1 150).
In an appendix to the first edition of Capital, Marx makes an instructive comment about this peculiarity:
"Within the value relation and the expression of value included in it, the abstract universal does not count as a property of the concrete, of the sensibly real, but on the contrary the sensibly concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or determinate form of realization of the abstract universal. The tailoring, which for example goes into the equivalent coat, does not possess, within the value-expression of the linen, the general property of also being human labor. Quite the reverse. Being human labor counts as its essence [Wesen], being tailoring only as the form of appearance or determinate form of realization of this its essence. . . . This inversion, by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstract universal and not, on the contrary, the abstract universal as property of the concrete, characterizes the expression of value. At the same time, it makes understanding it difficult. If I say: Roman Law and German Law are both laws, that is obvious. But if I say: Law [Das Recht], this abstraction, realizes itself in Roman Law and in German Law, in these concrete laws, the interconnection becomes mystical."
Hegel treats existing legal systems as in their very essence concrete manifestations of the "Idea" of law, and to that extent treats the "concrete" as a form of appearance of the "abstract." The expression of value does something similar: it treats a concrete form of labor (tailoring) as nothing but the form of manifestation of the abstract character of linen producing labor.
Labor of private individuals ranks as labor which is directly social in character. Just as in the iron-sugar loaf example (148-9), the pieces of iron could not express the weight of the sugar loaf unless they themselves had weight, so the tailoring can only express the character of weaving as social or human labor if itself counts as social labor, and it is taken as given that it does in the value expression. But tailoring is the labor of private individuals. (This peculiarity is best appreciated in the money form, to be discussed below.)
In this form, several commodities each take on the role of equivalent, for example:
20 yds linen = 1 coat or 10 lbs cotton or 40 lbs coffee or. . . .
This form has advantages over the simple form:
Every other commodity now serves as a mirror of the linen's value, and consequently weaving is equated with tailoring, tea growing, coffee growing, etc.
This removes the accidental appearance of exchange value (the value of linen remains unaltered in magnitude whether expressed in coats, coffee, iron, etc.).
On the other hand, it also has defects (see pp. 156-7 for a complete list):
The expression of value is incomplete because the series representing it is interminable.
Each commodity has a different equivalent, obscuring qualitative identity and quantitative comparability.
Here is an example:
1 coat
10 lbs tea
40 lbs coffee = 20 yds lenin
1/2 ton iron
etc.
This is the simple form again, with the difference that it is the same for all commodities, and therefore general. Important features:
We now have easy quantitative comparability.
The form results from joint action.
Now all commodity-producing activities, in jointly being equated to weaving, are equated to each other.
We now have a "visible incarnation" (159) of all human labor, and the labor objectified in the value of commodities is "not just presented negatively, as the labour in which abstraction is made from all the concrete forms of actual work. Its own positive nature is explicitly brought out" (159).
This is just the general form with a stable, socially recognized universal equivalent:
1 coat
10 lbs tea
40 lbs coffee = 2 oz gold
1/2 ton iron
etc.
The title of this section is apt to mislead. Commodity fetishism is often thought of as a kind of "materialistic" attitude, or the idea that a person's worth is determined by his possessions. But this is not what Marx is getting at. On one meaning of fetish, to turn something into a fetish is to invest it with powers it does not have on its own. It is this meaning of "fetishism" that Marx is concerned with.
Perhaps the simplest way to define commodity fetishism is as the view that value is something natural or transsocial rather than the socially specific property it is. It is not an accident that some hold this view, because the view is rooted in a certain misleading appearance thrown up by the system of commodity production itself. Thus Marx speaks of commodities themselves as having a fetish character. He says that this character originates in the peculiar social form of labor in commodity production. Since the producers do not come into contact until the exchange process, the social character of their labor is expressed as a property of their products. The labor of the individual producer is established as part of the labor of society through its product's establishing itself as a member of the world of mutually exchangeable commodities. It does this by finding an expression of its value in terms of money, the universal equivalent. Since this amounts to finding an expression of its value in terms of natural properties (recall the "first peculiarity" of the equivalent form, C1, p. 148), value takes on the appearance of something natural.
This process establishes the individual producer's labor as part of the labor of society by equating the individual's labor to everyone else's labor and thereby "reducing" it to human labor in the abstract. This is a form of labor certification peculiar to commodity production. In other social forms of production, an individual's labor gets certified in its concrete form; it does not have to be reduced to human labor in the abstract (pp. 169-173). To understand the difference here, recall that in commodity production there is no antecedent social orientation to use value, whether in the form of authoritative tradition or a freely adopted social plan. This is why the establishment of an individual's labor as activity of this or that concrete sort will not establish its social character. Its social character can only be established through its reduction to human labor in the abstract. This reduction is at the root of the fetish character of commodities.
This reduction is a real social process, effected by the economic institutions of commodity production. This social process has its own dynamic, that is, a dynamic outside the scope of economic agents' control; that is why there can be such things as economic laws or tendencies that can be the subject of a social science like economics. In Marx's view, agents in commodity production become "the plaything of alien powers" (as he describes the members of civil society in the early essay "On the Jewish Question"). But it is also important to see that on Marx's view, it is the economic agents themselves that (unwittingly) turn themselves into such playthings. The alien powers exist and work their effects only in virtue of the specific way that individuals exercise their powers of agency in relation to one another. In making their economic decisions, producers cannot decide the state of the market; rather, they have to anticipate it and react to it. But nonetheless the passage of the market through its various states is a function of the economic actions they take and are willing to take. It is they, therefore, who turn their own powers of agency over to the world of commodities, which takes the form of a "second nature" with its own laws. In sum, Marx understands commodity production as a system in which agents' own actions take the form of "objects controlling them instead of being controlled by them" (see C1: pp. 167-8; I have modified the translation).
This "reification" or social "inversion," in which products rule the producers, gets reflected in corresponding "doctrinal inversions" that take the fetish character of commodities at face value and actually represent value as something products have by nature rather than a property they are invested with under certain social conditions. Marx therefore intends the critique of fetishism to be part of a critique of ideology, in particular a critique of political economy for its ideological aspects (pp. 169, 173-177). There are varying degrees to which different economic theories succumb to commodity fetishism. "Vulgar economy" gets fully taken in by appearances and treats value as intrinsic to things. Classical political economy (say, Smith to Ricardo) sees the connection with labor, but it treats the representation of labor by value as an eternal, nature-imposed necessity.
The standard by which Marx criticizes the social inversion underlying commodity fetishism is that of rationality, understood as deliberative control of action. Unlike an economy of "free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community" (171-172), portions of the agency of commodity producers gets split off from their deliberative control and takes on a dynamic independent of rational deliberation.
SENSAT HOME / PHILOSOPHY DEPT / UWM / Revised February 1, 2003
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