ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPT OF 1978 AS IT WERE PART II

II. A Meditation upon two passages in Capital

            1.  “Eine Ware scheint auf den ersten Blick ein selbstverständliches, triviales Ding.  Ihre Analyse ergibt, das sie ein sehr vertrachtes Ding ist, voll metaphysicher Spitzfindigkeit und theologischer Mucken.” [MEW, v. 23 p 85]

            “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”  [Fowkes translation. P. 163]

            2.  “Wenn ich sage, Rocke, Stiefel usw. beziehen sich auf Leinwand als die allgemeine Verkörperung abstrakter menschlicher Arbeit, so springt die Verrücktheit dieses Ausdrucks ins Auge.  Aber wenn die Produzenten von Rock, Steifel usw. diese Waren auf Leinwand – oder auf Gold und Silber, was nichts an der Sache ändert – als allgemeine Äquivalent beziehen, erscheint ihnen die Beziehung ihrer Privatarbeiten zu der gesellschaftlichen Gesamtarbeit in dieser verrückten Form.”  [MEW, v. 21, p. 90]

            “If I state that coasts or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labor, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident.  Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold and silver (and this makes no difference here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in exactly this absurd form.”  [Fowkes translation, p. 169]

[These two passages appear in the famous fourth section of the first chapter of Capital, the section entitled “the Fetishism of the commodity and its secret.”  The first passage opens the section’ the second appears slightly less than half way through.]  A commodity, Marx says, appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  But its analysis – to which the preceding three sections of the chapter have been devoted – reveals it to be a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  The opening statement is an assertion of the most enormous complexity, provocative in the extreme.  “For the utopian socialists require a sign, and the classical political economists seek after wisdom.  But Marx preaches the commodity mystified, [which is] unto the utopian socialists a stumbling block and unto the neo-classicals foolishness. [Corinthians 1: 22-23, with slight emendations.]  To the Enlightenment, religion is superstition.  Écrasez l’infame!  To believe is to be mistaken, misled, in error.  To be enlightened is to be disabused of one’s belief, to be relieved of it, to put it aside as one of the things of humanity’s childhood.  In place of religion, we offer the history of religion, the sociology of religion, the psychology of religion.  Does Malinowski believe the superstitions of the Trobrianders?  As well ask whether Bullfinch sacrifices to Apollo!

            A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  A coat is a piece of woolen goods, cut, shaped, and sewn so as to serve as a protection against the elements – or as a proclamation of majesty.  It is, or so it appears, a physical object, coming to be and passing away in time, occupying for a time a succession of regions of space, and having such a configuration of its material elements as to produce a particular array of physico-chemical responses in the sense-organs of normal human bodies.  And yet, Marx assures us, its analysis reveals that it abounds in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  It is, no less than the Eucharist, a being whose accidents have persisted while its substance has changed.  Only it is not the body of Christ that has been exchanged for the substance of the bread; rather, it is the labour of the baker!  Or more precisely, a quantum of abstract socially necessary labour of which the baker’s concrete, particular labour is but the most imperfect copy.

Now, the holy wafer really is just a cracker.  And though it requires the labour of a Voltaire to strip from it its holy shroud, still it is just a cracker.  The rest is superstition, with which we can once for all dispense.  Just so is the tree merely a tree, a doll merely a doll, the rock merely a rock, and all the other fetishes of primitive religion merely the physical objects they manifestly reveal themselves to be under scientific scrutiny.

            So the commodity, too, is a fetish. Marx seems to tell us.  And we scientists will recognize it for what it is – a cracker, a coat, a bolt of cloth, no more.  The classical economists may imagine a commodity to be congealed labour, in some pathetic imitation of the theology of their childhood.  But we will see corn and iron, spindles and coats, for what they are.

            Marx is being sarcastic, therefore, in the opening lines of this section.  He is mocking Smith and Ricardo, much as the Philosophes mocked the Church and its apologists.  And yet, perversely, with what any good enlightenment debunker would consider a most reactionary persistence, Marx continues to speak of the commodity in just those mystified, fetishized terms that he has apparently condemned!  For two thousand pages, through all three volumes of Capital – and for two thousand more in the Theories of Surplus Value, Marx speaks the language of congealed labour.  He manipulates quanta of value, defines their ratios and relationships, and puzzles over the mysterious divergence of manifest, observable prices from the true, underlying, real value relationships hidden from mortal eyes.  It is a performance, one might think, to rekindle faith in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Immaculate Conception.

Does Marx truly believe that linen [or gold, it matters not here] is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour?  Verrückt, he says – which our translation renders “absurd,” but which might, more colloquially,  be translated as “crazy,” “cracked,” “deranged.”  Why does Marx deliberately adopt a mode of speech which he himself ridicules as verrückt?

The bread and wine of the Eucharist appear at first sight extremely obvious, trivial things.  But the teachings of Mother Church reveal them to be strange things, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  Even so.  A commodity appears to be an extremely obvious, trivial thing.  But analysis reveals that a commodity is not an object at all.  It is, in the strictest sense of our words, a system of social relationships of production and distribution that necessarily appear to us as a physical object.  This physical stuff before me, shaped and colored and arranged as it is in space and time, is no more capable of being, all by itself, a coat – if by the term “coat” we mean to imply “a coat qua commodity´-- than that man with his stripes on his sleeve and the bit of metal pinned to his tunic is capable, by himself, of being a sergeant-major!  Just as the poor, verrückte man who acts out the shreds and tatters of his familiar social role in the midst of catastrophe is a stock comic figure of literature, so we might imagine a mad pair of boots desperately seeking to effect its customary commodity exchange in the marketless desert of a subsistence economy!

I repeat, a commodity is a system of social relationships of production and distribution that necessarily appears to us as a physical object.  A further step: exchange value is a system of wage labour and commodity production that necessarily appears to us as money capital.  Commodities present themselves to us as objects even to scientists – nay, even to political economists!  The objectification of the subjective is a necessary condition of capitalism.  The sociologist of religion need not believe in the transubstantiation of the host.  But the political economist must believe in the reality of the commodity.  “When producers of coats and boots bring their commodities into relation with linen … as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them [necessarily] in exactly this absurd form.”

The labour theory of value is a system of ironic discourse.  It expresses the complexity of the object of investigation, and also the ambivalence of the subject of discourse, the speaker.  The labour theory of value is the necessary and appropriate misrepresentation of the social and economic reality that is its object.