A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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because the price—the “how much”—is socially determined, and the price is a monetary representation of value. Hidden within this market exchange of things is a relation between you, the consumer, and the direct producers—those who labored to produce the lettuce. Not only do you not have to know anything about that labor or the laborers who congealed value in the lettuce in order to buy it; in highly complicated systems of exchange it is impossible to know anything about the labor or the laborers, which is why fetishism is inevitable in the world market. The end result is that our social relation to the laboring activities of others is disguised in the relationships between things. You cannot, for example, figure out in the supermarket whether the lettuce has been produced by happy laborers, miserable laborers, slave laborers, wage laborers or some self-employed peasant. The lettuces are mute, as it were, as to how they were produced and who produced them.
Why is this important? When I taught introductory geography classes at Johns Hopkins, I always started off by asking students where their breakfast came from. And they’d say, “Oh, I bought stuff at the deli.” But when I asked them to think back further than that, they found themselves consider a whole incredible world of laboring in radically different geographical environments and under radically different social conditions that they knew nothing about and could know nothing about from staring at their breakfast ingredients or going into the deli. The bread, the sugar, the coffee, the milk; the cups, knives and forks, toasters and plastic plates—to say nothing of the machinery and equipment needed to produce all these things—linked them to millions of people laboring away all around the world. One of the tasks of geographical education is to impart something about the variety of socio-environmental conditions, spatial linkages and labor practices involved in every aspect of daily life, down to putting breakfast on the table every day.
The students did sometimes seem to think I was trying to guilt-trip them for not paying more mind to those poor sugar-cane cutters in the Dominican Republic who earned next to nothing. When it got to that stage they would sometimes declare “Sir, I didn’t have breakfast this morning!” To that I would characteristically reply that they might want to do without lunch, dinner, and supper too for a week or so just to learn the truth of the basic Marxian maxim that we have to eat in order to live.
Issues of this kind do raise moral questions. There are those who, for various reasons, propose all manner of codes of moral conduct in interpersonal relations, but who then face the dilemma of whether or how to extend that moral code into the world of commodity exchanges in the world market. It is all very well to insist on “good” face-to-face relations and to be helpful to one’s neighbor, but what is the point of that if we are totally indifferent to all those whom we do not know and can never know, but who play a vital role in providing us with our daily bread? These issues are sometime brought to our attention: by the “fair trade” movement, for example, which tries to articulate a moral standard for the world of commodity exchange, and the anti-poverty movement, which seeks to mobilize charitable contributions for distant others. But even these usually fail to challenge the social relations that produce and sustain the conditions of global inequality: wealth for the charitable donors and poverty for everyone else.
Marx’s point is not, however, about the moral implications. His concern is to show how the market system and the money-forms disguise real social relations through the exchange of things. He is not saying that this disguise, which he calls “fetishism” (165) (and please note that Marx’s use of this term is technical and quite different from other common usages), is a mere illusion, that it is a made-up construction that can be dismantled if only we care to try. No, in fact, what you see is the lettuce, what you see is your money, you see how much, and you make tangible decisions based on that information. This is the significance of the phrase “appear as what they are”: it really is this way in the supermarket, and we can observe it so, even as it masks social relations.
This fetishism is an unavoidable condition of a capitalistic mode of production, and it has many implications. For example, people do not “bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour” (166). Once again, we see that values arise out of exchange processes even as exchange relations increasingly converge to express value as socially necessary labor-time. But the producers
do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is their language. (166–7)
The dialectical relation between value formation and exchange and the immaterial, “phantom” qualities of value as a social relation could not be more starkly portrayed.
But how is this dialectic to be replicated in thought? Many of the political economists got it (and still get it) wrong, says Marx, because they look at prices in the supermarkets and think that’s all there is, and that is the only material evidence they need to construct their theories. They simply examine the relationship between supply and demand and associated price movements. Others, more perceptive, came to “the belated scientific discovery that the products of labor, in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labor expended to produce them.” This “marks an epoch in the history of mankind’s development” (167). Classical political economy did gradually converge on some idea of value that lay behind the fluctuations of the market (often referred to as “natural prices”) and it recognized that human labor had something to do with it.
But classical political economy failed to understand the gap between the immateriality of values as “congealed” socially necessary labor-time and their representation as money and therefore also failed to understand the role that the proliferation of exchange played in consolidating the value form as something historically specific to capitalism. It assumed that values were a self-evident and universal truth, failing to see that
the value character of the products of labour becomes firmly established only when they act as magnitudes of value. These magnitudes vary continually, independently of the will, foreknowledge and actions of the exchangers. Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them. (167–8)
Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.
This then leads Marx directly into a critique of how bourgeois modes of thought have evolved in relationship to the proliferation of exchange relations and the rise of the money-form:
Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development … Consequently, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of