Reified and Deified - Our World of Things
Can you imagine a world without capitalism? Yes? Are you sure the world you are imagining is truly free of capitalism? If not, why is this the case?
In my last post we have discovered what value is, we have seen its true face and "history" (if you can call it such), yet we have not really touched its implications. We know what value is and how it manifests itself as the money-form but this still does not touch capitalist reality, we do not know much about how value dominates us.
We shall at first again start with Marx own introduction to the fourth section of the first chapter of Capital:
"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."
-Karl Marx: das Kapital
This is not unknown to us, in my last article we have already seen how value assumes very complicated forms, which are expressed as very simple relations. A coffee costs roughly 1.40€ in Germany (around $1.50). This is a very simple relationship, you give the salesperson 1.40€ and you receive a coffee in return. But what are coffee's relations to other commodities like sugar, the bread my local baker sells or the energy drinks my friend buys every day? Here we have seen commodities taking complex forms of values, relating itself to many commodities or relating itself and many other commodities to a single other one. Yet commodities have something mystical within themselves, something that gives them not only power but makes it seem as if they rule over us and we want to know why this is the case.
There is something peculiar with things that once they turn up on the market as social labour (i.e. labour that has become a commodity, that has been produced and sold for others) they gain something mystical. We remember that the content of value is abstract labour, that is congealed homogenous human labour, labour that has been abstracted through mass exchange, that is not tangible and has a "spectral objectivity" within itself. So what do commodities reflect now? They reflect the labour of the humans behind it, they even reflect it as part of the natural property of this commodity and hence do these commodities also represent the relation between the producers of commodities as relations between things.
Let us recap this a bit. Why do these things appear as representatives of social relations again?
In capitalist society we produce things not for ourselves but for each other (speaking from the perspective of an individual producer). These things are called commodities. We must however note that all individual producers, as scattered and separated they are, are still united by the social division of labour.
"Social division of labour? Never heard of..."
Well the social division of labour is quite simply the splitting up of production into many sub-industries. The steel industry is split up into coal mines and iron mines and manufacture for example. But we have to consider that inside factories there too is a kind of division of labour, namely one that splits up a labour process into its smallest parts. This technical division of labour however is not a necessary precondition for commodity production for that no products of labour are exchanged (yet they are materially dependent on each other! Without the producer for agricultural tools there can be no coffee farmer!).
However there is another division of labour, namely our social division of labour, where we have isolated producers which independently of each other produce things and these things only meet each other on the market. Only after he sold his commodities on the market does the producer know that his price and production plan was correct.
In order to produce coffee the coffee farmer needs agricultural tools, the tools manufactory needs steel and wood which in return need coal and iron etc. all of these products meet each other on the market where they are exchanged and we are back at our value-theory again. But now we also notice that these commodities encompass all steps, all relations needed to make this commodity. We only see the coffee but the coffee saw everything before us and this is weird, because of instead of the relations between the workers needed to produce the coffee we see relations between their respective commodities, this is the great inversion of capitalist society, labour shows up as commodities, as mere things, the relations are reified ("verdinglicht").
In a capitalist society this material production and the social relations are entirely united in exchange. Every act of exchange between two individuals is carried out as an exchange of things. Without particular things in their possession people cannot enter economic relations, how do you want to get coffee without having money? Inversely, if our coffee production line is not established there is no way to buy coffee, so if the specific production relations do not exist to produce coffee, exchange cannot happen either. These two factors are not adjusted in advance, we see however that during exchange itself the social relation and the material production are adjusted for each other, as there does exist coffee in the bakery and there is a need for coffee and there is money in my pocket (most of the time). Hence these two factors need to be adjusted during every act of exchange, otherwise there will be a gap and this gap will widen up until we reach the state of crisis. If there is for example more coffee than there is needed and things to exchange in return.
The latter part is particularly interesting, people do not show up as mere persons in a specific place in production but as representatives and owners of the things they possess. It seems that the mere ownership of a coffee plantage means that you can establish a relation to the buyers of coffee and the sellers of other commodities that enable them to produce the coffee. This plantage and the coffee are not just things in their possession, they are commodities and by further extension they are capital. So the owner of the plantage shows up as the owner of capital and that points us to an interesting direction: People in capitalism are not simply people with things they are the representatives of things, the capitalist represents capital, the worker represents the labour he can produce. "Material relations between persons and social relations between things," as Marx calls it and this is finally the great inversion of capitalist society.
Furthermore specific relations receive a specific social form. The money you pay to a landlord becomes the "rent", the money your receive for your work is a "wage" and what the capitalist puts into his pocket after he sold all his commodities is the "profit". Even when the relation itself stops, the thing retains its social form, this is another striking feature of capitalism. As I mentioned, these things appear to have that property somehow in themselves: For some reason commodities inherently seem to have a value and paper money is seemingly in itself able to buy these (or all) commodities. Capital somehow accumulates just by moving around which seems to be a property of itself. This is reification.
But where there is a world of social relations between things and material relations between people there is also a "God". And this God is named money.
There is a proverb "money cannot buy love" but even this is wrong, money can buy everything, it is a commodity on steroids, whoever possesses it and brings it into circulation will receive more of it, in an endless circle. Money is social power, a thing that possesses all power. Yet what is actually money? It is just a piece of paper, its value comes from the things we produce, we attribute value to it. A thing we attribute value rules us now in return. This is what Marx means with "fetishism", attributing power to things that do not possess it and letting them rule you.
We have moved from our analysis of the commodity as a reification of social relations to the personification of things (capitalists as representatives of capital e.g.) to money as social power and we have completed our short excourse into the theory of commodity fetishism. Now we shall look at another phenomenon: Domination.
Our lives are full of personal domination, teacher and student, bosses and workers and and and. But with capitalism comes a specific form of domination, impersonal domination.
The power between a student and teacher is clearly visible, he can command the student to do x and y work or punish him, his power has clear legitimacy, at the end he is a teacher. But the market is not like that, money has incredible power over us, which we have not explained yet entirely. Commodities become something independent once they are on the market. It seems as if they move on themselves and exchange into money and back and then suddenly add more value on top, but most importantly commodities dominate our life, even our very means of subsistence have become commodity, we have to buy and consume to survive, to do that we need to work, we are separated from our means of production, which in turn means that we are at the mercy of those who own them and most importantly of the capital that dominates them too.
Impersonal domination affects the capitalist through competition, either you follow the logic of capital or you will be outcompeted and fall into the ranks of the proletariat. The logic of capital itself becomes the dominator over everything.
It is not entirely the commodity itself that seems to oppress us but the social relations that are embedded within the commodity, without them they would be mere things. Money has such power because of the social relations it represents. The market reduces us to mere numbers and to our labour power because we do not have anything else. It forces us to add more and more value to the sum of dead labour, we are forced continually produce and reproduce capital because of this form of domination.
It is dystopian in fact, the things we create start to rule us, a mere piece of paper wields such power in society, dead things suck up living labour like a vampire. How can we escape this?
"Once society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy in fact depends on the society."
-Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
Once society recognises the power these things have over us, society actually wields the power of these things. This means we have to destroy capitalism's social forms that arise with commodity production and most importantly the commodity production itself, by stopping exchange. The only thing that can stop capital is a social movement because capital is a social relation.
The Theory of Fetishism is indeed a very important cornerstone of Marxism. It shows how in capitalism mere things receive unique social forms and how capitalist society dominates us while we produce and reproduce it. It provides us with an explanation of value, problems of capitalist society and shows us who in fact has the power at the end, the industrial proletariat and its allied classes.
