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Since Plato, philosophy and then science have assumed first, that there is often a difference between appearance and reality; and, then, that it is sometimes possible to grasp what really is the case by investigating how things appear. Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, a crucial step in his account of the capitalist mode of production, implements these assumptions explicitly. It describes how exchange relations appear to economic agents, where the appearance belies the reality at the same time that it provides cognitive access to it.

Market exchanges occur in all modes of production capable of sustaining an economic surplus. In capitalism, the process is generalized – not just in the sense that markets structure economic life but also, more importantly, because everything is commodified that can be. Universal commodification is the result of a protracted process that is definitively launched once labour – or, more precisely, labour power (labour time, adjusted for differences in intensity) – is commodified. The commodification of labour power is pivotal because this commodity is the sole source of value and therefore, ultimately, of wages, profits and rents. The generation and distribution of surplus value, of what is produced in excess of what is needed to reproduce the labour power expended in production processes, is the invisible underlying reality upon which perceptions of exchange relations depend. To persons engaged in buying and selling labour power, what appears is just that, as in any other exchange, individuals aim to do as well for themselves as they can, given their resources, their preferences, and the production technologies available to them. But what is really going on is a struggle over the distribution of the economic surplus at the point of production. That reality is opaque. Economic agents are therefore governed by the appearance of rational economic agents maximizing payoffs to themselves. In his account of commodity fetishism, Marx shows how this inevitable misperception helps to reproduce and sustain the underlying reality.

When Marx expressly addresses this phenomenon at the conclusion of the opening chapter of the first volume of Capital (1867), the economic agents he describes are property-holding individuals. Thus it is not exactly capitalism that he aims to model, but ‘simple commodity production’, an ahistorical idealization. However, the cogency of his account is unaffected as his analysis becomes more historical and concrete – to the point that the direct producers are, as in full-fledged capitalism, a property less proletariat with nothing to exchange except, of course, their own labour power. Commodity fetishism is therefore a general and pervasive fact wherever capitalist social relations hold sway. Thus the term denotes a systemic opacity at the level of appearance that helps to hold economic agents in thrall by masking the exploitation of labour. Because this misperception sustains the exploitation that engenders it, revolutionaries intent on overthrowing capitalism must tear away the veil of illusion by revealing the exploitation of workers that exchange relations conceal.

Marx does not directly address how commodity fetishism comes into being or how it is sustained. But he does provide fragments of an explanation when he focuses on the atomizing effects of market relations. All resource allocation mechanisms are social in the sense that they bring together a host of disparate and heterogeneous economic activities. However, where the commodity form prevails, the social character of market transactions is apparent only after goods and services are produced. The workers know that the corn they consume is produced by farmers, and the farmers know that the tools they use in growing corn are made by workers. Everyone also knows that, without food, workers would not be able to make the tools farmers use; and that, without tools, farmers would not be able to grow food for the workers. It is therefore evident in retrospect that workers and farmers are engaged in a collective endeavour. But it is not similarly evident prospectively. From that vantage point, it seems only that farmers and workers – and also the capitalists who provide them with means of production – are making individual choices aimed at bringing about the best outcomes for themselves, given the constraints they face. Even if they believe that these essentially egoistic activities are somehow socially beneficial, they can justify this belief by appealing to the workings of an ‘invisible hand’. Because there is no visible hand that directs the process, the terms of interaction appear as if they are forces of nature to which individuals must accommodate. Thus market relations appear as infrangible constraints that human beings are obliged to operate within, not as social constructions that human beings can change. In terms that Kant introduced and that Marx, following Hegel, effectively assumed, freedom (autonomy) is then forfeit. Wills are heteronomously determined, governed by laws of an (apparently) impersonal other (the market system itself). To be free, we must therefore take control of the aggregation mechanism we have concocted. We do so by putting reason in command – not just at the individual level of the rational economic agent, but at the societal level as well.

What Marx says about commodity fetishism is concise and intriguing. For these reasons, and because it summarizes the very abstract analysis of the commodity form with which Capital begins, his account of the phenomenon has always been well known. ‘Commodity fetishism’ is one of those terms that everyone associates with Marx. But, even in what remains of Marxist circles, the basic tenets of Marx’s account have faded from ongoing discussions. A number of factors have contributed to this turn of events: among them, the legacy of the so-called ‘value controversy’ of the 1970s; the efforts of mathematical economists in the 1970s and 1980s to put the categories of Marxist economic analysis on a sound, analytical footing; and attempts by analytical philosophers, working on Marxist themes, to reconstruct and, when possible, defend core Marxist positions. The conclusion that has emerged is that, pace Marx, there is nothing special about the commodification of labour power and therefore that the theory of surplus value cannot be sustained in the way that Marx believed. Nowadays, it is only the most doctrinaire Marxists who uphold the labour theory of value, the basis for Marx’s account of commodity fetishism. This fact along with the decline of political movements that identify with the Marxist tradition and, its inevitable consequence, waning interest in Marx’s work itself, has, for the time being, made commodity fetishism a matter of concern mainly to historians of economic thought.

Not long ago, the situation was quite the opposite. From roughly the 1950s through the 1970s, commodity fetishism played a central role in the two most important and innovative tendencies in Marxist theory: Marxist humanism and structuralist Marxism. These were opposing tendencies, politically and substantively. But they converged on according commodity fetishism centre stage.

Marxist humanists sought to de-Stalinize Marxism by recovering its Left Hegelian roots. This meant reading Marx’s work through the prism of his early writings, before he broke with his ‘erstwhile philosophical conscience’, as he proclaimed in 1845 in The German Ideology. For the Left Hegelians, Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology, elaborated in The Essence of Christianity (1841), was fundamental. There Feuerbach ‘inverted’ the theological dogma that ‘God makes Man’ by showing how the God idea is an ‘objectification’ of essential human traits. Lacking materiality, God is purely an objectification, an ‘alienated’ expression of the human essence. In taking consciousness of this fact, one recovers essential humanity and becomes emancipated from the thrall of its systemic misrepresentation. In the Paris Manuscripts (1844), Marx applied the Feuerbachian programme to objects of labour; ‘objectifications’ too of essential humanity, but also material things and therefore not objectifications only. Feuerbach arrived at his conclusions by ‘interpreting’ the theology of Right Hegelian theologians. His working hypothesis was that they had gotten the concept of God right, but that they radically misconstrued what the concept means. In the Paris Manuscripts Marx treated (Smithian) political economy the same way. He assumed that it correctly describes ‘economic facts’. The task, then, was to interpret those facts – in order to reveal the alienation they express and, in so doing, to advance the emancipatory project of Left Hegelianism. How successful Marx was in implementing this programme is subject to debate. What is clear is that, as the focus of his theoretical work turned away from Hegelian philosophy towards political economy, history and politics, he became disabused of the idea that Adam Smith or any other classical economist had gotten political economy descriptively right. His life’s project, thereafter, was to rework the conceptual apparatus of classical economics – more usually in its Ricardian, not Smithian, form – with a view to revealing the real ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production. In this endeavour, Feuerbachian philosophical anthropology seemed to play no role. But, following the lead of Georg Lukacs (1923) several decades earlier, the Marxist humanists pointed out that there was, in Capital, an explicit point of connection – in the text on commodity fetishism. It was there that Marx brought his analysis of the commodity form to completion. But it was also there that, in modelling the commodity form, Marx identified the objectification of essential human traits in the process of capital accumulation. In consequence, capital, becomes a ‘fetish’, a god in Feuerbach’s sense – one who controls economic behaviour by force of (illusory) power.

Structuralist Marxists, like Louis Althusser, were intent on reading Left Hegelianism out of the Marxist canon. They therefore treated Marx’s references to fetishes and gods as ironic figures of speech, even as they attempted to enlist the text on commodity fetishism in the service of opposition to Marxist humanism. Borrowing a concept from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), Althusser (1965) disparaged Marx’s early work by asserting the existence of an ‘epistemological break’ within the Marxist corpus. What he had in mind was roughly a ‘paradigm shift’ – not, however, within an ongoing scientific practice but between pre-scientific modes of thought and the inception of a new science. In Althusser’s account, two previously monumental epistemological breaks had occurred – one that established mathematics in ancient Greece, and one that established the sciences of nature in 17th-century Europe. Marx’s achievement was supposedly on a par with these; he opened up a science of history. He did so by anticipating the structuralist turn the ‘human sciences’ (in France mainly) would later take – first in linguistics and psychology, later in anthropology and psychoanalysis. Specifically, in Capital and other writings of his maturity, Marx explained a range of diverse ‘surface’ phenomena by construing them as effects of the workings of a relatively small number of underlying, generally invariant ‘deep’ structures. The text on commodity fetishism lent itself to this construal of Marx’s explanatory practice in as much as it depicted the perceptions of economic agents as effects of the unseen but causally efficacious process of surplus value extraction. Thus Marx’s account can be seen as a theory of necessary (systemically induced) misperception – consonant with notions of explanation that contemporaneous structuralists endorsed. Perhaps the most innovative use Althusser made of commodity fetishism was in his theory of ideology, according to which modes of production constitute experiential subjectivity by ‘interpellating’ the human subjects who support or ‘bear’ them.

We now inhabit a different intellectual universe. In the past several decades, it has come to be widely believed, by erstwhile Marxists as much as by ‘bourgeois economists’, that Marx’s focus on production rather than exchange inhibited the development of analytical economic tools. In so far as this belief is sound, the emphasis Marxists placed on commodity fetishism is partly to blame. The explanatory strategies of Marxist humanists and of structuralists have fallen into disrepute, too – largely because, in both cases, though for different reasons, the alleged connections between appearance and reality were never satisfactorily explained. No sustainable account was given either of how interpretation should proceed in the Marxist humanist case or, in the structuralist case, of how deep structures can be discerned in surface phenomena. Thus, commodity fetishism has fallen on hard times. However, we should not conclude that there is nothing viable in the concept or in the theoretical traditions that, until recently, magnified its importance. Hegelianism certainly, and structuralism possibly, still have much to teach us. The last word may not yet have been said on the theory of surplus value, either. If and when interest in Marx resumes, it will certainly be useful to revisit these issues. The notion of commodity fetishism played a key role in mid- and late 20th-century Marxism. The core idea it articulates – that necessary misperceptions sustain the capitalist order – can again provide useful insights. The concept may not be forever doomed to be of historical interest only.

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