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 advance beyond the fetishism of commodities and try to establish, through associative 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