ES 2301

   

From Alienation to Commodity Fetishism

 

For the purposes of this lecture, we can say that Marx’s principle aim was to analyze how the working activity of people is regulated in a capitalist economy, and to do so in such a way that, the problem of capitalist relations of production having been established, a solution could be developed. The language in which Marx expressed this aim changed in different periods of his life, and his concepts were developed and, to some extent, transformed, but his underlying concern with human labour and creativity remained. So, in his early works, we see Marx’s focus on the concept of ‘alienation’ or estrangement, and, later, when he had more fully developed the economic framework for his analysis, the concept of commodity fetishism provides the focus.

 

Marx adopted Hegel’s concept of ‘estrangement’ as a tool of social analysis, but he did not agree with Hegel about what was actually estranged. For Hegel, humans’ essence can be identified in their self-consciousness, whilst for Marx, creative activity – labour – defines the human essence. So, for Hegel, alienation was a spiritual matter of estrangement from self-consciousness, and for Marx, humans are estranged in their labour.

 

A useful way into thinking about how human labour within capitalist society is estranged labour is to consider what un-alienated labour would look like.

·     Firstly, free human labour is unique and individual and it is undertaken freely and for its own sake and its product embodies the desires and personhood of its producer: it is a labour of love, and its achievement is deeply satisfying for the labourer.

·     Secondly, un-alienated labour meets a human need of some kind and part of its pleasure is the producer seeing that need met.

 

“Suppose we had produced things as human beings: in his production each of us would have twice affirmed himself and the other. (1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality and its particularity, and in the course of the activity I would have enjoyed an individual life; in viewing the object I would have experienced the individual joy of knowing my personality as an objective, sensuously perceptible, and indubitable power. (2) In your satisfaction and your use of my product I would have had the direct and conscious satisfaction that my work satisfied a human need, that it objectifies human nature, and that it created an objective appropriate to the need of another human being… Our  productions would be so many mirrors reflecting our nature… My labour would be a free manifestation of life and an enjoyment of life.” (Marx [1844], 1987, p.281)

 

·     Have you ever experienced this kind of work, or do you know of anyone who has?

·     Under what conditions do people work in this way?

 

In un-alienated labour people define their lives, and find dignity. But rarely, under capitalism, is this kind of free production engaged in as the means by which someone supports themselves. As you will have realised in discussing the questions above, free human production is not wage-labour. 

 

Under capitalism, people work in order to live. During Marx’s lifetime, such work very often required desperately long hours under appalling conditions. Many men’s women’s and children’s entire lives were taken over by work, and work which was so gruelling that it was killing them by degrees every day – in the words of an old song, “they work life out just to keep life in”.

 

·     Where might we find this kind of labour in the twenty-first century?

 

Within capitalist relations of production “my labour is an externalization of life because I work in order to live and provide for myself the means of living. Working is not living.” (Marx, [1844], 1987, p.281) Far from being a labour of love, this can become a labour of hate. It is work which feels completely pointless and alienating, individuality is squeezed out of it: there is no room in this kind of work for the producer’s personality to shine through. It fills the day with activity, but activity for another, the employer. It is work beyond the labourer’s own control. It is forced-labour, it is wage-slavery:

 

“my individuality is externalized to the point where I hate this activity and where it is a torment for me. Rather it is then only the semblance of an activity, only a forced activity, imposed upon me only by external and accidental necessity and not by an internal and determined necessity… My labour, therefore, is manifested as the objective, sensuous, perceptible, and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.” (Marx, [1844], 1987, pp.281-2)

 

Let’s ask the same questions:

 

·     Have you ever experienced this kind of work, or do you know of anyone who has?

·     Under what conditions do people work in this way?

 

Think, in particular, about mental labour, for instance schoolwork. In your experience, how does schoolwork match up to the two models of labour we have seen – un-alienated and alienated work? 

 

 

Alienation is absolutely central to capitalist relations of production. Workers experience alienation, but alienation cannot be reduced to a mere experience; rather the term describes the subjective side of objective condition of estranged labour – a structural condition of the capitalist mode of production wherein the labourer sells his or her capacity to labour for a wage. When he does so, he exchanges his own creative power, the essence of his humanity for something qualitatively quite different, dead cold stuff, things, commodities, money. If this seems like the natural and inevitable way things work to you, that’s because you too are part of the operation of capital – it works through you as ideology. We usually take wage-labouring to be a natural condition of mankind, but, far from it, the capitalist world is a topsy-turvy world wherein the more the labourer produces, the more he looses control of his life. The products of our labour, whether they are physical or mental products, come to dominate and regulate our lives. In both his 1844 Manuscripts and twenty years later in Capital, Marx compares the relationship between humans and the products of their labour with that between man and God:

 

“So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the fewer can he possess and the more he falls under the domination of his product, of capital.

All these consequences are contained in this characteristic, that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For it is clear that, according to this premise, the more the worker exerts himself in his work, the more powerful the alien, objective world becomes which he brings into being over against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, and the less they belong to him. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains within himself. The worker places his life in the object; but now it no longer belongs to him, but to the object. The greater his activity, therefore, the fewer objects the worker possesses. What the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life which he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien.” (Marx [1844] 1978, p.72)

 

At this stage, though Marx does not go quite as far as to identify the product of labour as ‘reified’ labour, or labour ‘congealed’ in the commodity – or to equate this work of the human hand and brain with the Gods who come to dominate society. In fact, although this account of alienation is superficially very similar to his later theory of commodity fetishism, significant differences exist in the nature of the problem which Marx is trying to solve in the two models and in the underlying concepts he puts to use in trying to solve them.

 

For the young Marx, the problem would seem to be one of reconnecting humans with their essential nature, lifting the veil of ideology and revealing the truth of alienated labour. That is, for Marx in the 1844, the beginning of the solution to the problem of alienation is educational; it is about changes in consciousness. Marx talked of it in terms of the ‘rehabilitation’ of human nature. However, for the Marx of Capital, a quarter of a century later, there is no transhistorical or fixed human essence or nature to be restored or rehabilitated.

 

Within a few short years Marx’s ideas about human essence were shifting, his criticism of young Hegelian idealism in the German Ideology in 1846 could almost be a criticism of his own earlier thinking. He condemns those who declare, “[l]et us teach men… to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man” (Marx & Engels, [1846], 1970, p.38), for no such essence can be conjured up. Rather, humans’ ‘essence’ is a temporary phenomenon, a product of the historical forces which drive society. Crucially, within capitalism, no distinction can be made between the worker who is alienated, and an un-alienated ideal form from which he is estranged. In a sense, it is of the ‘nature’ of humans as constituted within a capitalist mode of production to embody the contradictions inherent in that system. If anything transhistorical can be said of ‘human essence’, it is that it is a product of the “sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual finds in existence as something given.” (Marx [1846] 1970, p.59)

 

 

 

Commodity Fetishism

 

As Marx’s theoretical focus shifted from the ‘essence’ of man, to the historical conditions of man, he left behind the terms alienation and estrangement. However, the structuring conditions of capitalism remain and are cast in terms of Marx’s analysis of value, and the commodity.

 

Commodities are things produced for the purpose of exchange. The purpose of production – for exchange – has profound effects on the character of the production process and production relations. Producers must produce something with a use value, but, more than that they must also produce something which commands a sufficiently high exchange value. They must produce goods efficiently in order not to lose money invested in the means of production, and they must constantly ‘revolutionize’ production techniques to keep up with the competition. Whilst an activity which produces specific kinds of goods or services, Marx calls concrete labour, an activity which produces the congealed form of value in general, wealth in general, without regard to its physical form, Marx calls abstract labour.

 

“A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him.[But] [t]he mystical character of commodities does not originate … in their use-value.” (Marx, [1867] 1978, pp. 319-320)

 

In Marx’s formulation , it is not merely the case that commodities appear to have a kind of life of their own: they really do exist in an economy of exchange values which defines the character of social being within capitalism. This is still a ‘reification’ of social relations as existing among things, but not one existing ‘in the mind’, but in material reality. Hence, the solution to the problem of the separation of labourers (the forces of production) from the domination of commodities (the relations of production) is no longer an educational question of breaking labourers’ illusions in the reified relations of production, because this reification does not result from ‘false consciousness’ but from material conditions which mean that producers relate to their products as to Gods. What once were products of their hand and mind have really taken on a life of their own and dominate their daily lives. The employer – the capitalist buys not only the labourer’s capacity to work, but the products of that work in the form of that ‘congealed’ labour in commodities which gives them their unique quality, an exchange value, a relation to other commodities which Marx describes as ‘social’.

 

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself. The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising there from. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them.  (Marx [1867] 1978: p. 321)

 

Fetishism is a term coined by Charles de Brosses in 1757 and was used by French and German scholars in their study of ‘primitive’ religions. It refers to the belief that natural objects have supernatural powers and it related unlike objects, i.e., there is no necessary obvious connection between the fetish itself and the force it represents.

 

·        How is this also true of Marx’s fetishes – commodities?

·        What is it that endows the commodity with its supernatural powers of ‘social’ life?

·        How is it that different forms of labour are equalised and objectified in such different commodities?

 

 

Marx, K. [1844] (1987) ‘Free Human Production’ in Easton, L. & Guddat, K. (Eds.) Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

Marx, K. [1844] (1978) ‘Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844’ in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton.  

Marx, K. & Engels, F. [1846] (1970) The German Ideology, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Marx, K. [1867] (1978) ‘Capital, Volume One’ in Tucker, R. (Ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton.