A Companion to Marx's Capital. David Harvey
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because the surface appearance, while fetishistic, always indicates an objective reality. I recall, for example, when the students at Johns Hopkins put on a fashion show, featuring clothing from Liz Claiborne and the Gap, with a side commentary on both the items of clothing and the conditions of labor associated with their production. This was an effective way to talk about the fetishism and raise awareness with respect to global conditions, while suggesting the importance of doing something about it.
Marx’s mission in Capital, though, is to define a science beyond the immediate fetishism without denying its reality. He has already laid a lot of the groundwork for this in the critique of bourgeois political economy. He has also already revealed the extent to which we are governed in what we do by the abstract forces of the market and how we are perpetually at risk of being ruled by fetishistic constructs that blind us to what is actually happening. To what degree can you say that this is a free society characterized by true individual liberty? The illusions of a liberal utopian order, in Marx’s view, have to be debunked for what they are: a replication of that fetishism that displaces social relations between people into material relations between people and social relations between things.
CHAPTER 2: THE PROCESS OF EXCHANGE
Chapter 2 is not only shorter but easier to follow. Marx’s purpose is to define the socially necessary conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and to create a firmer foundation for the consideration of the money-form that is to follow in chapter 3.
Since commodities do not themselves go to market, we need first to define the operative relationship between commodities and those who take them there. Marx imagines a society in which “the guardians” of commodities “recognize each other as owners of private property. This juridical relation, whose form is the contract, whether as part of a developed legal system or not, is a mirror between two wills which mirrors the economic relation … Here the persons exist for one another”—note the echo of the fetishism argument—not as people, but “as representatives and hence owners, of commodities.” This leads him to make a broader point. Throughout Capital, “the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations,” and it is “as the bearers”—please note the recurrence of this term—“of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other” (178–9). Marx is concerned with the economic roles that people play, rather than with the individuals who play them. So he will examine relations between buyers and sellers, debtors and creditors, capitalists and laborers. Throughout Capital, in fact, the focus will be on roles rather than persons, recognizing that individuals can and do often occupy several different roles, even deeply contradictory positions (as when, in our time, a worker has a pension fund invested in the stock market). This focus on roles rather than individuals is as perfectly legitimate as if we were analyzing the relations between drivers and pedestrians in the streets of Manhattan: most of us have taken on both roles and adapt our behaviors accordingly.
The roles in a capitalist mode of production are strictly defined. Individuals are juridical subjects who have private-property ownership of the commodity they wield, and they trade it under non-coercive, contractual conditions. There is reciprocal respect for the juridical rights of others; the principled equivalence of market exchanges that Aristotle noted is an honored virtue. What Marx describes here is the conventional political and legal framework for properly functioning markets as envisaged in liberal theory. In this world, a commodity is “a born leveller and cynic,” because it “is always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity.” The owner is willing to dispose of it, and the buyer wants to take it: “All commodities are non-use-values for their owners and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands,” but “only the act of exchange can prove whether that labour is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others” (179–80).
This argument as to the socially necessary institutional and legal structure required for capitalism to work is historically specific. Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers, in a lengthy footnote, a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon,
who creates his idea of justice, of ‘justice éternelle’, from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: he thereby proves, to the consolation of all good petty bourgeois, that the production of commodities is a form as eternal as justice. Then he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, and the corresponding legal system, in accordance with this ideal. (178, n. 2)
Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx’s standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon’s ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx’s critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx’s view, a serious error.
What follows is a recapitulation—and Marx frequently reiterates earlier arguments in somewhat different language—of the way in which money “crystallizes out of the process of exchange” in an institutional environment of this sort. He echoes this theme when he describes money as “the historical broadening and deepening of the phenomenon of exchange” that “develops the opposition between use-value and value which is latent in the nature of the commodity”:
The need to give an external expression to this opposition for the purposes of commercial intercourse produces the drive towards an independent form of value, which finds neither rest nor peace until an independent form has been achieved by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money. At the same rate, then, as the transformation of the products of labour into commodities is accomplished, one particular commodity is transformed into money. (181)
There is nothing here that we have not already seen in earlier sections, but now Marx expounds on what this economic relation between things implies for relations between people. This economy of market exchange, he says, implies that we are dealing with “the private owners” of “alienable things,” and this in turn implies that we have “persons who are independent of each other.” “Alienable” refers to the fact that “things are in themselves external to man,” i.e., freely exchangeable. This means that the exchangers are free of any personal attachment or other bond to the things they own. It also implies social relationships “of reciprocal isolation and foreignness” that are unique to capitalism and a concomitant of juridical ownership of commodities (182).
Such conditions did not prevail in the “patriarchal family, an ancient Indian commune or an Inca State”; exchange processes had to break down these preceding social structures. This happens gradually, he suggests, as occasional trade between communities evolves to the point where “the constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social process” (182):
In the same proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds [note the implication of geographical expansion], and the value of commodities accordingly expands more and more into the material embodiments of human labour as such, in that proportion does the money-form become transferred to commodities which are by nature fitted to perform the social function of a universal equivalent. These commodities are the precious metals. (183)
This is, as I have already pointed out, a somewhat dubious historical argument about the dissolution of preexisting social forms in the face of increasing exchange relations and the rise of money-forms. But its logical content is important for demonstrating that what is socially necessary