A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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This attribute of equality within the market system is terribly important; Marx understands it as being fundamental to how capitalism theoretically works. Aristotle, too, understood the need for commensurability and equality in exchange relations, but he couldn’t figure out what lay behind it. Why not? Marx’s answer is that “Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers” (152). In a slave-holding society there can be no value theory of the sort that we are going to find under capitalism. Again, note the historical specificity of the value theory to capitalism.
This then brings Marx back to expand on the three peculiarities of the money-form in order to identify an emergent opposition:
The internal opposition between use-value and value, hidden within the commodity, is therefore represented on the surface by an external opposition, i.e. by a relation between two commodities such that the one commodity, whose own value is supposed to be expressed, counts directly only as a use-value, whereas the other commodity, in which that value is to be expressed, counts directly only as exchange-value. (153)
This opposition between the expression of value and the world of commodities, an opposition that results in an “antinomy” between commodities and money, has to be interpreted as an externalization of something that is internalized within the commodity itself. Once externalized, the opposition becomes explicit. The relationship between commodities and money is a product of that dichotomy between use-value and exchange-value which we spotted as internal to the commodity at the very beginning.
So, what do we take from this? First, socially necessary labor-time cannot operate as a regulator of what is happening directly, because it is a social relation. Indirectly, it will do so through the medium of the money-form. Furthermore, the rise of the money-form is what permits value to start to crystallize out as the guiding principle of how a capitalist economy will work. And, always remember, value is immaterial but objective. Now, this creates quite a lot of problems for commonsense logic that assumes value can actually be measured; even some Marxist economists spend a lot of time explaining how they can do so. My argument would be: you can’t do it. If it is immaterial, you cannot measure it directly. To find value in a commodity by just looking at a commodity is like trying to find gravity in a stone. It only exists in relations between commodities and only gets expressed materially in the contradictory and problematic form of the money commodity.
Let me now take a moment to reflect further on the status of the three fundamental concepts of use-value, exchange-value and value that Marx sets out. In doing so, I will impose some of my own reflections that arise out of my specific interests, which you may accept or reject as you like. These three different concepts internalize fundamentally different spatiotemporal referents. Use-values exist in the physical material world of things that can be described in Newtonian and Cartesian terms of absolute space and time. Exchange-values lie in the relative space-time of motion and exchange of commodities, while values can be understood only in terms of the relational space-time of the world market. (The immaterial relational value of socially necessary labor times comes into being within the evolving space-time of capitalist global development.) But as Marx has already convincingly shown, values cannot exist without exchange-values, and exchange cannot exist without use-values. The three concepts are dialectically integrated with one another.
In the same way, the three forms of absolute, relative and relational space-time are dialectically related within the historical-geographical dynamics of capitalist development. This is my argument as a geographer. One of the major consequences is that the space-time of capitalism is not constant but variable (as happens with speed-up and what Marx elsewhere calls “the annihilation of space by time”2 wrought through perpetual revolutions in transport and communications). I cannot refrain from injecting this into the discussion for your consideration! If you want to follow up on the question of spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism, though, you will have to look elsewhere.3
Section 4: The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret
This section is written in a completely different, rather literary, style—evocative and metaphoric, imaginative, playful and emotive, full of allusions and references to magic, mysteries and necromancies. There is a marked contrast with the dull accountancy style of the previous section. This is rather typical of Marx’s tactics throughout Capital; he often shifts linguistic styles according to the subject under consideration. In this case, the switch can create some confusion as to the relevance of the fetishism concept in Marx’s overall argument (a confusion exacerbated by the fact that this section was moved from an appendix in the first edition of Capital to its current position—along with section 3—only in the second, definitive edition). Those interested in developing a rigorous political-economic theory out of Marx, for example, sometimes seem to view the fetishism concept as extraneous, not to be taken too seriously. On the other hand, those of a more philosophical or literary persuasion often treat it as the golden nugget, the foundational moment to Marx’s understanding of the world. So one of the questions we have to ask is: how does this section stand in relation to Marx’s overall argument?
The fetishism concept was already signaled in his discussion of the ways in which important characteristics of the political economic system get “concealed” or confused through the “antinomies” and “contradictions” between, for example, the particularities of the money commodity on the one hand and the universality of phantom-like values on the other. Tensions, oppositions and contradictions that have already been opened up in the text now come in for detailed scrutiny under the heading “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” (163). Throughout the rest of Capital, as we will see, the concept of fetishism emerges again and again (more often tacitly rather than explicitly) as a essential tool for unraveling the mysteries of capitalist political economy. I consider the concept of fetishism, therefore, as fundamental to the political economy as well as to Marx’s wider argument. In effect, it conjoins the two at the hip.
The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, he identifies how fetishism arises and works as a fundamental and inevitable aspect of political-economic life under capitalism. Second, he examines how this fetishism is misleadingly represented in bourgeois thought in general and classical political economy in particular.
Commodities, he begins by observing, “abound in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”:
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists … simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. (164–5)
The problem is that “the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material … relations arising out of this.” Our sensuous experience of the commodity as use-value has nothing to do with its value. Commodities are, therefore, “sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible or social.” The result is that a “definite social relation between men themselves … assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” And it is this condition that defines “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities.” This fetishism is “inseparable from the production of commodities” (165).
This is so, he says, because “the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour,” so that they only come to know “the specific social characteristics of their private labour” in the act of market exchange. In other words, they don’t and can’t know what the value of their commodity is until they take it to the market and successfully exchange it. “To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are”—note please especially the important phrase, appear as what they are—“i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material … relations between persons and social relations between things” (165–6).
So what’s going on here? You go into a supermarket and you want to buy a head of lettuce. In order to buy the lettuce, you have to put down a certain