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Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Random Metatheory

6 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 24, 2007

My previous post in the series on the first chapter of Capital has prompted a nice set of meta-theoretical questions from Nate, revolving loosely around the question of whether some of my formulations suggest the need to breach the immanent frame of the analysis. This discussion is still continuing in the comments, but some of the questions that have come up in that discussion strike me as potentially relevant for the main line of analysis of Marx’s text.

What I want to do in this post, is not so much answer Nate’s questions directly, as use the thought-space that those questions have opened as an excuse, first, to explore some of the implications of this reading of Capital for how we can conceptualise critical judgements about competing forms of theory and practice generated immanently within capitalism. And second, to talk a bit about how this kind of theory involves a form of relativising, locating, or situating dispositions (intuitive forms of perception and thought) by demonstrating at least one dimension of collective practice in which such dispositions are enacted, without, however, reducing dispositions to the theorised form of enactment (i.e., without claiming that the theorised form of enactment is the only space in which such dispositions are enacted), and without automatically undermining the validity of such dispositions (i.e., without acting as though situating a disposition by itself suffices to debunk the insights or potentials that disposition expresses).

Although I will use examples from the first chapter of Capital to explore these issues, my goal here is a bit different from my goal in other posts in this series: here, I will be deploying a particular reading of Marx without, however, trying to render this reading plausible with reference to the text of Capital. I may use some occasional quotations for illustrative purposes, but I’ll leave for the other posts in this series, the issue of whether I can defend this kind of reading textually. I will also not be concerned here with whether the reading I’m deploying is making a defensible argument about capitalism: my concern is rather to explore the form of the argument, the sorts of moves the argument makes, regardless of the content. By limiting the post in this way, I will try to bring some of the meta-theoretical implications of this reading a bit more clearly into view.

Okay. Where to start. I think the easiest way to organise this discussion is to explore (in a very, very superficial way) one example of a set of dispositions that Marx begins to “situate” in the first chapter of Capital – an example that relates to dispositions we might be tempted to associate with the study of the natural world (note that, in the discussion with Nate below, I have sketched a partial second example, relating to dispositions that we might associate with the study of history). These dispositions are related in complex ways to how social actors might be tempted to orient themselves in practice – they thus carry potential political implications, even if these implications might not be immediately clear when Marx begins his analysis.

The first chapter begins to suggest that there is some way in which we are enacting, in collective practice, a kind of social indifference to different forms of labouring activity. This indifference does not extend to all dimensions of collective practice: in some dimensions of practice, the variegated qualitative forms in which labour is expended remain collectively important. In at least one specific dimension of collective practice, however, we are treating a wide range of empirically distinct labouring activities as, in some respect, qualitatively the same – and thus enacting a practical equality of types of human labour (a practical equality that, significantly, takes the form of a coercive and normalising indifference to empirical labouring activities).

Because of how we are enacting this equality, however, it is not immediately obvious that we are the ones enacting it. The argument for why it is not immediately obvious – for why it might be structurally difficult for us to recognise our own collective hand in constituting various forms of labouring activity as equal in at least one dimension of collective practice – is complex, and not fully laid out in the first chapter of Capital. Very roughly, in terms of what is visible at this early stage in Capital, the argument involves a claim we are enacting a collective indifference to the qualitative diversity of labouring activities “behind our own backs” – unintentionally and coercively – through a form of mutual compulsion that we are not individually or collectively setting out to generate. This particular form of unintentional mutual compulsion possesses certain specific qualitative characteristics: it is “universalising”, “lawlike”, and coercively “normalising”, and manifests itself via quantitative relationships that seem to govern movements of the products of labour. It also drives a constant process of transformation of concrete labouring processes, thereby constituting such processes as contingent and potentially ephemeral. It confronts individuals and social groups as an alien force outside themselves and beyond their control, to which they must adapt. Investigation can lead to the discovery and description of some of the lawlike principles of this form of compulsion. These discoveries, however, do not by themselves dissolve the coercive force of this compulsion, which, although contingent and grounded in human practice, is not “imaginary” or subject to individual control.

Note that, at this stage in the text, when the category of capital itself has not yet been unfolded, the metaphors for this impersonal social compulsion tend toward the “Newtonian” – toward metaphors of universal, abstract, mathematical laws. As we approach the category of capital, the metaphors will become more organimistic – more vitalist. I’ll discuss this shift more adequately in relation to Marx’s text at a later point. (This point begins to suggest how I would eventually like to answer a question posed by Joseph Kugelmass some weeks back about why the model of capitalism I’ve been pointing toward seems to resemble some thematisations of evolution and complexity theory. I suspect that, in asking this question, Joe might have been tugging on some of the threads he has now written into a fantastic post at his own site and The Valve. Just as a quick side note – Joe: I haven’t forgotten your question: perhaps it will be becoming a little bit clearer why this is a particularly complicated question for me to answer, even though it’s an important question to ask… Some of your questions on uneven development from that same comment, incidentally, also lie in the background of some of my discussions in the previous post in this series – albeit very abstractly, at this point.)

For the moment, I simply draw attention to the fact that the account in the first chapter is not intended to be complete, and note that Marx will eventually ground other dispositions, aside from the lawlike universals that concern him here. In any case, when Marx draws attention to specific qualitative characteristics associated with unintentional forms of impersonal compulsion, he is setting up for an analysis of why there is an intrinsic, immanent, “structural” risk that certain specific moments generated by collective practice within capitalism, might plausibly be interpreted, not as peculiar dimensions of our social environment, but instead as qualitative characteristics of asocial material nature. The argument here is both extremely complex and irritatingly tacit in Marx’s text, and I can at best be gestural at this point. But Marx is suggesting that a complex combination of factors – the unintentional nature of the compulsion, its impersonal character, the fact that it manifests itself through the movements of “things”, the way that other elements of social practice become, by contrast, “overtly” social (demonstrated in practice to be arbitrary and contingent, and forced to adapt themselves to this more impersonal form of social compulsion) and a number of other factors – combine to render it plausible for dispositions to emerge that interpret this dimension of social practice as asocial.

The implications of this go beyond the claim that this “impersonal” dimension of social practice is thereby “naturalised” and shielded from critique. The suggestion here is also that our practical experience of this dimension of capitalism “primes” us to “expect”, or sensitises us to the possibility, that asocial environments will possess certain specific qualitative characteristics (note that these characteristics can be mutually exclusive or contradictory of one another – as always, Marx tends to try to capture capitalism as an unstable unity of opposites): that the asocial world is quintessentially “material”, for example, and that such a world exists “outside us”, as an object for human contemplation or manipulation; that the asocial world is governed by impersonal universal laws best captured via mathematical models; that the asocial world (or elements of it) has vitalist properties and should be seen as in some sense a self-determining organism; etc. Again, I am not trying here to do full justice to these suggestions in Marx’s text, but more to open a sense of the scope of the argument and a feel for the way the argument is intended to operate. The important thing here is that there is a complex argument in Marx’s text about the ways in which we unintentionally render ourselves open to certain possibilities through our experience as social actors enacting and engaging with moments of capitalism.

Okay. Here a complex dance begins. I’m going to make the claim that, in unfolding this kind of argument, Marx is not trying to reduce everything we think and perceive back to specific moments in capitalism. First, the theory of capitalism is bounded – it doesn’t capture everything in contemporary experience, and it in fact explicitly defines certain things as contingent (or, at least, as untheorisable), from the perspective available to this specific kind of theory. A simple example of this kind of defined contingency can be found in Marx’s discussion about the conflict over the working day, expressed in the famous passage:

We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class.

What this passage suggests is that Marx can theorise that a particular structure of social conflict is intrinsic and likely to recur under capitalism, and he can even say a bit about the forms in which this conflict will likely be articulated (about plausible self-conceptions of political subjects and about likely forms of self-organisation, for example). He cannot, however, theorise the outcome of the conflict in any particular instance: force decides. Marx’s descriptions of actual political conflicts in Capital express this combination of contingent and “theorisable” elements – Marx is clearly comfortable with the boundedness of his theoretical framework, and with the tools it can provide to orient action, even though there are also limits to the reach of the theory (which have to do, interestingly, with limits to the compulsions that characterise capitalism itself: it’s not necessarily a good thing, strictly speaking, to inhabit a context amenable to this form of theorisation – the possibility for this form of theory itself is a testament to the existence of a particular form of constraint). As I continue to move forward through the text in future posts, I’ll no doubt have occasion to draw attention to other examples of this sort of self-bounding of the theory.

Second, the fact that a particular form of perception and thought is enacted in a specific moment of capitalism, does not mean that this form of perception and thought cannot also be enacted in some other way in collective practice. Just to take a throwaway example: Marx makes an extremely complex argument about the specific ways in which a kind of human equality is enacted in collective practice in the reproduction of capitalism. This doesn’t mean, however, that human equality is not or cannot be enacted in completely different ways (in fact, it is actually essential for Marx’s critique that it at least be possible to enact certain dispositions in different ways, else the abolition of capitalism would necessarily entail the abolition of forms of perception and thought that Marx clearly wants to preserve and views as integral to a more emancipated form of collective life). So, a particular group of people may well constitute some local environment in the present time that enacts some kind of human equality in a particular way that is separable from the ways in which a particular kind of equality is unintentionally played out in capitalist reproduction – or a human collectivity in the future might devise very different (less abstract and formal, etc.) ways of enacting human equality in a very different form of social life.

Third, even if Marx successfully establishes that a particular form of perception and thought arises as a moment in the reproduction of capitalism, this kind of argument does not by itself invalidate the entirety of this form of perception and thought. Again, let’s take the issue of human equality as an example. Marx’s argument here (and please forgive that I am stating this very, very roughly, and without trying to establish the plausibility of the argument, but only to give a sense of some of the “moves” involved) is that, in some dimension of collective practice, we are coercively enacting an indifference to the variegated qualitative forms of commodities – including commodities of the human sort – by treating those commodities, in collective practice, as bearers of a common, qualitatively homogeneous social substance, which Marx calls “value”. Sticking to the terms set out in the first chapter, we are (at first unintentionally) collectively treating commodities (including humans) as “intrinsically” material objects that possess supersensible essences and are governed by impersonal universal laws, but which can also be contingently pressed into arbitrary and ephemeral social roles. By engaging in this unintentional practice, we inadvertently constitute a situation in which “the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice”.

This prejudice has a strange, “counterfactual” character, since it is not based on any extrapolation or conceptual abstraction from our experience of empirical humans, but rather on our experience of a “real abstraction” generated in collective practice (I realise the nature of this argument will probably not be completely clear at this point – this is one of the issues I hope to thematise more precisely as I continue moving through Capital). It is therefore socially plausible that a belief in human equality should arise and spread, in conditions in which humans are in other dimensions of social practice treated profoundly unequally. This belief may then provide the motive force for the emergence of social movements that mobilise to transform other dimensions of collective practice, in order to enact the equality already being practised elsewhere. (Note that the qualitative form of equality sought politically – abstract, formal, and universalising, for example – can also be primed by the qualitative characteristics in which equality is coercively enacted in the course of capitalist reproduction.)

When social actors set about trying to understand the basis for this belief in human equality, however, they run the risk of not grasping the social genesis of the impersonal dimension of capitalist practice in which this equality is being unintentionally enacted. This risk does not reflect the potential that social actors might make a “mere” conceptual error or suffer from a defect in cognition, but is rather a risk grounded in the determinate qualitative form of specific moments within capitalism. If social actors fail to grasp this social genesis, then they might, for example, conclude that human equality is natural, while the various forms of inequality that confront us on all sides in other dimensions of social practice, might strike them, by contrast, as artificial: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”

When they try to explain the basis for this “natural” equality, they might interpret it in biological or physiological terms – Marx suggests that this is a socially plausible interpretive move when he mentions that we treat commodities as material objects in at least one dimension of social practice. Or they might interpret this naturally equality more “spiritually”, in terms of the supersensible essence – the ghost in the machine – that also emerges in our collective enactment of the commodity form.

By “grounding” these interpretive moves, by suggesting that it makes a certain social sense or reflects a certain immanent plausibility that these sorts of interpretive strategies would arise, Marx is not necessarily debunking the entirety of the claims associated with these interpretations. His argument suggests that we are “primed” for, or may find it more “intuitive” to arrive at, specific kinds of interpretations – that these interpretations seem “always already familiar” to us, and therefore lie ready at hand – in part because they do express and are adequate to particular aspects of the context in which they arise. This does not mean that these are the only interpretations possible, or that it is “predetermined” that social actors will make specific interpretations – only that they have a certain social plausibility (since Marx treats capitalism as a complex and multi-layered social form, there are always multiple plausible perspectives, such that forms of perception and thought are neither random, nor are they fully theoretically determinable) . Probabilistically, it is likely that certain kinds of interpretations will arise, given the specific qualitative characteristics of our collective practice. Marx’s argument also suggests that the existence of such interpretations can deflect our attention from the ways in which, to continue with the example, we are enacting a certain sort of equality (coercively) in collective practice. But it leaves open the possibility that these interpretive moves might themselves be subject to validation (and contestation) in their own terms (albeit with a complex potential for cross-interference between moments within capitalism and other elements within collective practice).

To explore this just a little bit more: take, as an example, the notion, mentioned above, that there might be a biological basis for human equality. Marx argues that we enact a kind of equality in collective practice by treating commodities as though they are partake in some qualitatively homogeneous social substance, which he calls value. Commodities might vary in how much of this social substance they embody, but they all share this common qualitative social “essence”. He also argues that there is a determinate risk that this common social substance won’t be recognised as social, but will instead be interpreted as “material”. If, in commodities of the human sort, this social “essence” is misinterpreted as a biological substance, this opens up certain deeply ambivalent potentials. It becomes plausible, for example, to investigate how biologically similar humans actually might be to one another, and to open up for a “secular” investigation of the human form. There is potential in such an investigation for uncovering new grounds for the assertion of human equality, as well as for other scientific and medical discoveries that increase our mastery over our own physiological states. There is also, however, great risk that biological difference – gender, race, disability, simple biological variation from the “norm” – can become inflected in terms of a lack of the common “substance” that renders us equally human – that a biologised notion of the potential basis for human equality could increase the vulnerability to a situation in which biological difference is taken as an “objective” or “material” refutation of the possibility of human equality, and received (given our “priming” to view the “material” as asocial and impersonal) as something more “objective” and less contingent than forms of inequality that appear to result from practices that we are “primed” to perceive as “overtly social” – and therefore as arbitrary and ephemeral.

One reason for exploring the links between such potentials and risks, and capitalist reproduction, is that it makes it a bit easier to understand why certain kinds of theories may recurrently arise (and be defeated, and arise again) so long as capitalism continues to be reproduced: capitalism itself may (in nonintuitive ways) be priming dispositions that render social actors receptive to specific interpretive schemas. At the same time, the sorts of social practices that might be directly associated with the reproduction of capitalism, need not be the sole or even, in particular periods, the primary ways in which particular forms of perception and thought are “primed”: other forms of institutionalisation and other types of social practice that are more contingent in relation to capitalist reproduction may operate to reinforce or to diminish the force of our experiences in engaging with, and extrapolating from, specific moments immanent to capitalism.

On another level, the ability to demonstrate that some particular set of dispositions plays a role in capitalist reproduction, does not by itself “debunk” those dispositions: capitalism may, for example, prime us to be open to many new potentials that we value and wish to retain. Theorising how we might open ourselves to such potentials simply prepares us to understand a bit more about how our own appreciation for specific potentials (and, no doubt, relative insensitivity to others) is located – is something that exists for us, in ways that we can potentially come to understand a bit better. This process of understanding our own locatedness then also potentially renders more readily available a movement across the various moments and perspectives that are available to us, rather than a default glide into whatever perspective happens to lie most closely to mind… But this is an issue for a different metatheoretical discussion.

It’s late, I’m becoming very tired, and I have a very long day tomorrow (apologies, as well, that I’ll be very unlikely to be active online over the next couple of days). I had wanted to do much more with the sorts of things I’ve discussed above (I’m particularly self-conscious about this topic, as there are folks lurking about who know far more about the specific issues, well outside the confines of a theory of capitalism, than I ever will: if it needs to be said, I’m not making grand claims for the power of a theory of capitalism to thematise such issues in a general way, but rather suggesting that there is more potential for interconnection and cross-fertilisation than might appear if Capital is read, for example, as a straightforward “economic” theory). In part, I’m realising that I’m hampered by not having gotten further in the discussion of Capital and, in part, I need more time and space for much greater nuance that I’ve allowed myself above – hopefully the resultant post won’t be too irritating, but will be taken as a sort of promissory note that I can hopefully cash in, in a less superficial way, at some later point.

Previous posts in this series include:

Relativism, Absolutes, and the Present as History

Cartesian Fragment

Abstraction, Conversations, Critical Theory, Critique, Fetish, Materialism, Metatheory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity, Social Movements

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Relativism, Absolutes, and the Present as History

11 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 21, 2007

Okay. Back to Capital. The third section of the first chapter. When I was last discussing this section, I had just finished an analysis of the section on the relative form (3.A.2), which would suggest that I should perhaps pick up with the subsequent section on the equivalent form. But of course that would be too simple… ;-P

What I want to try to do here is skip around a bit to see if I can make some sense of a few of the overarching lines of analysis that structure this text. I’ll apologise in advance, as I suspect this might be quite a scattered post – I may need to come up behind it with subsequent posts that will express the content more clearly and coherently. But anyone reading along in this series will probably be somewhat used to that…

In earlier posts, I’ve made the claim that, in spite of appearances, Marx isn’t outlining an historical development of capitalism in this section. When I say “in spite of appearances”, this is because there are moments in the text where it looks very strongly like Marx is doing precisely that, so my claim about textual strategy is not immediately or self-evidently true. Marx speaks of “metamorphoses” that the forms must undergo, in order finally to yield the money form. He speaks of “transitions” from forms that are more “elementary” to forms that are more “complete”. He speaks of the simple commodity form as the “germ” of the money form. And in section 3.C.1, you get a long passage that looks very much as though it is recounting stages in historical development:

All commodities now express their value (1) in an elementary form, because in a single commodity; (2) with unity, because in one and the same commodity. This form of value is elementary and the same for all, therefore general.

The forms A and B were fit only to express the value of a commodity as something distinct from its use value or material form.

The first form, A, furnishes such equations as the following: – 1 coat = 20 yards of linen, 10 lbs of tea = ½ a ton of iron. The value of the coat is equated to linen, that of the tea to iron. But to be equated to linen, and again to iron, is to be as different as are linen and iron. This form, it is plain, occurs practically only in the first beginning, when the products of labour are converted into commodities by accidental and occasional exchanges.

The second form, B, distinguishes, in a more adequate manner than the first, the value of a commodity from its use value, for the value of the coat is there placed in contrast under all possible shapes with the bodily form of the coat; it is equated to linen, to iron, to tea, in short, to everything else, only not to itself, the coat. On the other hand, any general expression of value common to all is directly excluded; for, in the equation of value of each commodity, all other commodities now appear only under the form of equivalents. The expanded form of value comes into actual existence for the first time so soon as a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities.

The third and lastly developed form expresses the values of the whole world of commodities in terms of a single commodity set apart for the purpose, namely, the linen, and thus represents to us their values by means of their equality with linen. The value of every commodity is now, by being equated to linen, not only differentiated from its own use value, but from all other use values generally, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities. By this form, commodities are, for the first time, effectively brought into relation with one another as values, or made to appear as exchange values.

The two earlier forms either express the value of each commodity in terms of a single commodity of a different kind, or in a series of many such commodities. In both cases, it is, so to say, the special business of each single commodity to find an expression for its value, and this it does without the help of the others. These others, with respect to the former, play the passive parts of equivalents. The general form of value, C, results from the joint action of the whole world of commodities, and from that alone. A commodity can acquire a general expression of its value only by all other commodities, simultaneously with it, expressing their values in the same equivalent; and every new commodity must follow suit. It thus becomes evident that since the existence of commodities as values is purely social, this social existence can be expressed by the totality of their social relations alone, and consequently that the form of their value must be a socially recognised form.

What gives? How is this passage – with its “in the first beginning”, its shifts from “‘accidental” to “habitual” exchanges, its “lastly developed form”, etc. – not a description of an historical progression? The answer, I would suggest, is that the account above does express itself as though we used to have “accidental” commodity production, and then moved on to “habitual” commodity production, and finally to “fully developed” commodity production – but that the historical rendering of this narrative can be read as an expression of the particular phenomenological perspective Marx is analysing at this point in his narrative. It does not, in other words, reflect the “for us” of Marx’s text, but simply the latest located perspective – one that, in this case, confuses a potential logical ordering of these various expressions of value, for an historical progression in which the less “complete” expressions of the value form are interpreted as being more historically primitive. (This begs for a meta-commentary on Durkheim’s Elementary Forms, but I’ll restrain myself… ;-P)

How do we know that this is the case? First, because we have already been “primed” for this conclusion, in the digression on Aristotle that takes place in 3.A.3. Marx has claimed that the elementary form of value – the form in which individual commodities are “accidentally” exchanged with one another, which appears to be historically primitive in the passage above – already contains “the whole mystery of the form of value”. Yet he presents Aristotle, analysing something that looks very much like the elementary form of value – hypothetically arriving at the notion that some underlying common substance must exist, in order for the exchange of unlike goods to be possible – and yet ultimately dismissing his own hypothesis, and concluding:

“It is, however, in reality impossible, that such unlike things can be commensurable” – i.e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature, consequently only “a makeshift for practical purposes”.

Marx doesn’t quite voice the “for us” of the text explicitly here, but his ironic engagement with this example is more palpable than in many early sections of the text. He argues with Aristotle here – of course there is something that makes diverse goods qualitatively equal – their common quality of being products of human labour! Aristotle doesn’t see this, however, because Greek society is founded on the slavery – and, thus, on the incommensurability of different kinds of people – and, therefore, of the practices those different kinds of people perform – their diverse labouring activities. Marx then makes explicit that the “mystery” of the elementary form is one that requires a fully developed system of commodity production, to “solve”:

The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities. The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality.

Marx can’t resist putting “in truth” into quotation marks. The meta-commentary here suggests that the form of perception being analysed in this section may indeed perceive Aristotle’s society to possess the same “essence” – to contain the same “truth” – as our society. Aristotle might not have seen this truth – but nevertheless it was always there, waiting for historical circumstances to bring it to light. The “for us” of the text is meant to see through this form of perception: human labour was not “in truth” at the bottom of exchange in Aristotle’s time – the conditions of his society did not simply prevent him from seeing value or the equality of human labour – those conditions meant that this “truth” had not yet been brought into being in collective practice – the “truth” of value hadn’t yet been enacted for Aristotle to “see”. In the section on commodity fetishism, Marx offers a more explicit meta-commentary on the perspective he is illustrating here:

forms of social production that preceded the bourgeois form, are treated by the bourgeoisie in much the same way as the Fathers of the Church treated pre-Christian religions.

Elaborated in the attached footnote, which quotes Marx’s earlier critique of Proudhon:

“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. … Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any”

The perspective being unfolded here is thus historicising to the extent that it is explicitly aware that not all times have possessed the insights of the current moment. It is also dehistoricising, however, to the extent that it exempts its own insights from (reflexive) historicisation, and views them instead as capturing a “truth” that has always existed, but that has become apparent only in the present time. Marx can’t resist a playful poke at the form of thought he is immanently unfolding here – offering side by side an historical explanation for why the “mystery” of value (and the solution to this mystery) relies on a particular historical configuration, while continuing to speak as though he is solving a timeless riddle – uncovering a material reality that has “in truth” existed all along.

Even without the leap forward to the section on the fetish, and even without a recognition of the mild irony in the digression on Aristotle, it is still possible to see that Marx is embedding and relativising the notion that there might be some kind of historical progression in the “development” of value’s forms of expression. Marx unfolds these forms of expression, ranking them by how well each one meets the criteria of expressing the opposition between use value and value, and of expressing value as the materialisation of “undifferentiated human labour”. Along the way, he undermines the historical interpretation by showing how the “less adequate” forms continue to be preserved as moments of the “fully developed” expression.

Thus, in the “fully developed” expression – the “general form” – one commodity (money) has come to be exceptionalised out from the universe of other commodities, such that its own value is never directly expressed, because it serves as the universal equivalent in terms of which the values of all other commodities are measured. Yet the universal equivalent can fill this role only by entering into the relationship described by the “elementary” form, with all other commodities. So the elementary form of expression of value is preserved as a necessary moment within the most developed expression:

All commodities now express their value (1) in an elementary form, because in a single commodity; (2) with unity, because in one and the same commodity. This form of value is elementary and the same for all, therefore general.

More interesting, the “expanded” form of value – which Marx initially analyses as an intermediate stage between the elementary and fully developed forms – is also preserved. Marx had originally determined this expanded form as one in which each commodity expressed its value in relation to the entire universe of other commodities. Most commodities leave this “expanded” form behind when a particular commodity crystallises out as the universal equivalent, expressing their value in terms of the universal equivalent alone. There is, however, one exception: the commodity that serves as the universal equivalent, which cannot serve as equivalent to itself, and which therefore continues to express its value through the expanded form, in relation to the entire universe of other commodities. The “expanded” form is thus also preserved as a necessary moment within most developed expression of the form of value:

The commodity that figures as universal equivalent, is, on the other hand, excluded from the relative value form. If the linen, or any other commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent. We should then have 20 yds of linen = 20 yds of linen; this tautology expresses neither value, nor magnitude of value. In order to express the relative value of the universal equivalent, we must rather reverse the form C. This equivalent has no relative form of value in common with other commodities, but its value is relatively expressed by a never ending series of other commodities. Thus, the expanded form of relative value, or form B, now shows itself as the specific form of relative value for the equivalent commodity.

Why on earth does all this matter? Well, for starters, it’s fairly clear, once Marx makes these points, that he cannot intend the logical development he traces in this section, to be any kind of straightforward historical progression: the forms that initially appear more “primitive” (and that in reality are less adequate, when viewed with reference to how fully they can express certain social potentials) nevertheless remain integral to the ongoing operation of the most “developed” form, which expresses these potentials most clearly.

This is a motif that will recur throughout Capital, and it carries profound implications for the normative evaluation of proposals for specific forms of political practice. Marx will use this sort of analytical strategy repeatedly, in order to foreground what he will claim is an underlying and tacit unity between moments of capitalist society that appear superficially opposed to one another. Although I can’t develop these points adequately here, it may be worth exploring some of the general sorts of things Marx will try to do with this kind of analysis.

At the most basic level, he will suggest, at times, that specific proposals for political practice may be “utopian” in the sense of being unrealisable – because, for example, they call for the abolition of some dimension of capitalist society that is integrally bound together and generated along with another dimension that will be preserved. In terms of the categories introduced at this point in the text, for example, it would be “utopian” to put forward a proposal for retaining the “general form” of value, while abolishing the other forms of expression, since the general form bears these other forms necessarily in its wake – this point is less narrow than it may appear, once we’ve explored some of the implications of these forms – I’ll come back to this in just a bit.

Marx will also use this form of analysis to suggest specific ways in which complex interrelationships between moments in a multi-layered social context can operate to trick the analytical eye. In the sections we’re discussing here, for example, Marx explicitly argues that certain strands of political economy get distracted by the contingency inherent in the equivalent form – in which the specific commodity that comes to play the role of equivalent is a matter of contingent social custom. This contingency is “genuine” – and it leads the political economists to make perfectly valid claims about the various arbitrary commodities that have served the role of equivalent in different times and places. Yet, to the extent that analysis stops at this point, the mystery of value cannot even be posed as a problem for analysis – the focus on which commodity serves the role of equivalent deflects attention to the contingent contents that happen to occupy a certain position in a structural relationship, and thus helps to obscure the question of how such structures or forms have come into being. As a result, the contingency or necessity of those structures becomes more difficult to analyse – the problem becomes more difficult to “see”.

The temptation to read logical ordering as historical progression is another form of perception that this text highlights as a kind of immanent risk – a socially plausible form of “misrecognition”. Marx here suggests a way to ground a teleological perspective that, once again, expresses something genuine about its context – that different forms express, to greater and lesser degrees, specific potentials immanent within the context. Yet other immanently-available perspectives reveal the teleological perspective to be an inadequate expression of the potentials it attempts to express. The teleological perspective inappropriately (if plausibly) projects a logical order back into time, confusing moments within contemporary capitalist society, for historical stages of development that purportedly led to contemporary capitalism. Capitalism thus comes to be positioned as a teleological culmination – as a kind of immanent “truth” toward which previous human history was always already tending (for better or for worse – Marx will eventually explore both potentials). This teleological perspective impedes an adequate exploration of the form of this “logic” and obscures the contemporaneous relationships that connect moments within the logical “progression” intrinsically to one another.

While Marx doesn’t thematise this issue explicitly at this point in the text, the consequences of the teleological form of perception for modern history have been particularly devastating, as actively constituted, fully modern, forms of “underdevelopment” have been recurrently recast as naturally-occurring, indigenous, “primitive” social forms, perceived as occupying some early stage on an as-yet-unrealised continuum to capitalist modernity… Marx is beginning to set up for a critique of such narratives of “underdevelopment” – very tacitly – at this early point in the text.

The tension Marx outlines between the “expanded” and “general” forms of value is also of particular normative interest. The expanded form of value – in which each commodity seeks to express its value via relationships with all other commodities – is positioned in the text as a kind of materialised relativism:

The value of a single commodity, the linen, for example, is now expressed in terms of numberless other elements of the world of commodities. Every other commodity now becomes a mirror of the linen’s value. It is thus, that for the first time, this value shows itself in its true light as a congelation of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour that creates it, now stands expressly revealed, as labour that ranks equally with every other sort of human labour, no matter what its form, whether tailoring, ploughing, mining, &c., and no matter, therefore, whether it is realised in coats, corn, iron, or gold. The linen, by virtue of the form of its value, now stands in a social relation, no longer with only one other kind of commodity, but with the whole world of commodities. As a commodity, it is a citizen of that world. At the same time, the interminable series of value equations implies, that as regards the value of a commodity, it is a matter of indifference under what particular form, or kind, of use value it appears.

And, moreover, as intrinsically corrosive and unstable:

In the first place, the relative expression of value is incomplete because the series representing it is interminable. The chain of which each equation of value is a link, is liable at any moment to be lengthened by each new kind of commodity that comes into existence and furnishes the material for a fresh expression of value. In the second place, it is a many-coloured mosaic of disparate and independent expressions of value. And lastly, if, as must be the case, the relative value of each commodity in turn, becomes expressed in this expanded form, we get for each of them a relative value form, different in every case, and consisting of an interminable series of expressions of value. The defects of the expanded relative value form are reflected in the corresponding equivalent form. Since the bodily form of each single commodity is one particular equivalent form amongst numberless others, we have, on the whole, nothing but fragmentary equivalent forms, each excluding the others. In the same way, also, the special, concrete, useful kind of labour embodied in each particular equivalent, is presented only as a particular kind of labour, and therefore not as an exhaustive representative of human labour generally. The latter, indeed, gains adequate manifestation in the totality of its manifold, particular, concrete forms. But, in that case, its expression in an infinite series is ever incomplete and deficient in unity.

The “general form” at first appears to be a solution to this spiralling relativistic regress. In this form, one master commodity steps outside the endless mutually-referential signifying chains, to stand, apparently exceptionalised, in relation to the sliding and endlessly permutating network of relationships among the universe of commodities, in an attempt to “ground” entire network of relations on a more secure foundation:

Finally, the form C [the general form] gives to the world of commodities a general social relative form of value, because, and in so far as, thereby all commodities, with the exception of one, are excluded from the equivalent form. A single commodity, the linen, appears therefore to have acquired the character of direct exchangeability with every other commodity because, and in so far as, this character is denied to every other commodity.

Significantly, this general form is presented as fully adequate as an expression of the distinctive social form of labour under capitalism – “undifferentiated human labour” – which, in this text, figures as a form of domination (more on this, hopefully, in the next post):

The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent. The bodily form of the linen is now the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it therefore becomes directly exchangeable with all and every of them. The substance linen becomes the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state of every kind of human labour. Weaving, which is the labour of certain private individuals producing a particular article, linen, acquires in consequence a social character, the character of equality with all other kinds of labour. The innumerable equations of which the general form of value is composed, equate in turn the labour embodied in the linen to that embodied in every other commodity, and they thus convert weaving into the general form of manifestation of undifferentiated human labour. In this manner the labour realised in the values of commodities is presented not only under its negative aspect, under which abstraction is made from every concrete form and useful property of actual work, but its own positive nature is made to reveal itself expressly. The general value form is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour generally, of being the expenditure of human labour power.

The general value form, which represents all products of labour as mere congelations of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social resumé of the world of commodities. That form consequently makes it indisputably evident that in the world of commodities the character possessed by all labour of being human labour constitutes its specific social character.

As discussed above, however, the general form – introduced as a form that would constrain the inherent corrosive relational permutations of the expanded form – necessarily draws the expanded form along in its wake. Exceptionalised from the universe of commodities, having no relative form in common with other commodities as a result, the commodity that occupies the role of universal equivalent (money) can express its own value only in relation to the entire universe of all other commodities – only, that is, through the expanded form:

The commodity that figures as universal equivalent, is, on the other hand, excluded from the relative value form. If the linen, or any other commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent. We should then have 20 yds of linen = 20 yds of linen; this tautology expresses neither value, nor magnitude of value. In order to express the relative value of the universal equivalent, we must rather reverse the form C. This equivalent has no relative form of value in common with other commodities, but its value is relatively expressed by a never ending series of other commodities. Thus, the expanded form of relative value, or form B, now shows itself as the specific form of relative value for the equivalent commodity.

I would suggest that this complex, somewhat convoluted discussion of the relationship between expanded and general forms of value, sets up the possibility to determine a structural tension within capitalism for an antinomy between a particular kind of relativism and a particular kind of “fundamentalism” or “absolutism”. In this antinomy, both forms of thought, and the practices with which they are associated, are mutually constitutive, intrinsically drawing one another along in their mutual wake – each perhaps at times appearing as the solution to the other, both potentially failing to grasp their own mutual imbrication. Marx here suggests here a potential to embed forms of perception that seek out an exceptionalised a priori ground on which to found a stable system, as well as forms of perception that deny the possibility for such a ground, and that then see a corrosive instability as the inevitable result. He thereby points to at least one dimension within collective practice where a conflict between “absolutist” and “relativist” forms can be seen as inhering in more than abstract “ideas” – where such a conflict can be seen to be enacted within collective practice. He further suggests the potential that such a conflict – to the extent that it can be seen to be enacted in practice – might not be amenable to a purely “conceptual” solution. To the notion that such antinomies might result from trying “to scratch where it doesn’t itch”, Marx might reply that, unfortunately, the itch, although social, is nonetheless all too real – and we can’t expect to abolish in thought, what is generated in practice…

But all of this is very gestural at this point in the text – most of these points remain extremely tacit. I draw attention to them as suggestions for a potential, more fully developed, analysis, rather than as points that are in any way fully fleshed out here.

At this point, I have an awkward decision: I have a few additional points I’d like to make on this section – points that don’t necessarily follow from what I’ve written above, but that also might not be substantive enough (or sufficiently closely related to one another) to form a cohesive post of their own. I think I’ll separate them out into a separate post, just to preserve the quasi-cohesive content I’ve posted above in its own distinct space. This means, though, that the next post in this series is likely to be extremely disjoint, as it will very likely take the form of my playing around with a few stray passages with interesting implications that don’t, at this point, connect up with any the overarching narrative strands to which I’ve been drawing attention… So, one scattered post coming up after this one – and then, perhaps, I’ll be ready to move into the section on the fetish?? We’ll see…

Apologies as always for the non-proofread state – I’m particularly worried about slippage in the terminology I’ve used for the various forms (there are distinctions in the text between relative and equivalent forms within each of the forms I’ve analysed above – writing in a rush, and so I didn’t do justice to this…). Hopefully people will bear with this…

Previous posts in this series include:

Cartesian Fragment

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Metatheory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Cartesian Fragment

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 17, 2007

Head spinning from the conference and, of course, I have another damned cold, so I’m unfortunately not up to serious writing. I have plans for a post on several themes that have emerged during the conference, once I get back to Melbourne and catch up on some sleep. I’ll also get back to the series on Capital in a more serious way once I get home – I’ve decided to select from some of what I’ve been writing here, to put together a paper for the Modernities: Radicalism, Reflexivity, Realities conference at the University of Melbourne in late November, so I have a… strong incentive to finish writing about the first chapter of Capital before then, and to assemble the fragments I’ve been tossing up here into a more cohesive and distilled form.

Unfortunately, this decision will probably further entrench what has already been a feature of this series: revisiting and reworking sections of the text I’ve written on already, as I gradually build a clearer sense of what I’m trying to say. Might be a bit dull for others reading on, but it’s helpful for me to toss things up, and then look back over what I’ve done to see what proves closest to the mark…

Tonight, writing briefly before heading back to the conference, I just wanted to tuck a quick note to myself – no new content; just a reminder that I want to think about this particular content at greater length. In the introductory passage to Capital, which I can’t quite seem to let go of, Marx argues that the wealth of capitalist societies “presents itself” as a vast accumulation of commodities. Those commodities, in turn, present themselves as objects “outside us” – as material things. A bit later in this same passage, we learn that the intrinsic material properties of these objects present themselves as things that can be discovered in history – that, in fact, the discovery of such intrinsic material properties presents as “the work of history” – as history’s telos, perhaps? And we learn that this material layer of the commodity presents as what constitutes “the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth”. This material substance then presents as encased in a social form, which is more arbitrary and contingent, more the consequence of human practice, than the intrinsic material substance that the social form shapes.

I’ve mentioned previously that, because Marx is proceeding immanently, starting with a particular form of “givenness” or phenomenological experience, from which he gradually unfolds more and more complex categories, he cannot have recourse to all categories of analysis at the beginning of his account. One of the categories he cannot have access to, at this stage of his analysis, is the category of wage labour. This doesn’t mean that the category of wage labour is not already imbricated in these earliest moments in the text.

“For us” – to whom the category of wage labour exists – the introductory sections of Capital echo with an interesting set of additional meanings: in a situation in which commodities are objects “outside us” – and in which we (or, at least, our labour powers) are also commodities – we are also objects “outside us” – we also possess a “material substance”, whatever the social form of that substance might be – our material substance is also experienced as encased in a social form that is more arbitrary and contingent, more a product of human practice, than we take our intrinsic material substance to be – we also experience ourselves as “discovering”, over the course of history, more and more about the material properties that determine what we “really are”. We are the Cartesian ghost contemplating what we experience as our physiological machine (cf. Marx’s subsequent determinations of “abstract labour” in physiological or biological terms – as the “productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles” – a definition that, it is already clear in the text, cannot be fully “true”, since Marx has already told us that not all “productive expenditure” of biological energy gets to “count as labour” under capitalism).

Marx is therefore already, in these earliest passages, describing, not simply a relation of humans to an external world, but a relation of humans to themselves – a mode of embodiment and self-experience, that incorporates a felt distinction between material bodies, cultural or social shaping of those material bodies, and a disembodied, contemplative “ghost in the machine” that experiences itself as having “discovered” an intrinsic division between matter and society. Marx is already here setting up to relativise this mode of embodiment and self-experience by setting up for an analysis of how this apparently asocial and intrinsic “material substance” comes to be constituted unintentionally in collective practice – to be “read” or experienced as “natural” in the sense of timeless, intrinsic and asocial, when, Marx will argue, it itself is the product – very real, but still also contingent – of a particular qualitative structure of collective practice. This will not be the only form of embodiment Marx analyses in the course of Capital – I’ve already gestured in previous posts at some of the others. I am lifting this particular example out here as an illustrative example of a mode of argument that carries through much of the text.

Apologies for the repetition – again, there’s a benefit to me in reworking some of these points and experimenting with slightly different forms of expression – I’m conscious that this benefit might not carry through to folks reading on… 😉 More new material, hopefully, when I’m back in Melbourne, and a bit better rested…

Previous posts in this series include:

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Events, Fetish, Materialism, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Not Knowing Where to Have It

1 Comment Posted by N Pepperell on October 14, 2007

Okay. Let’s see if I can move a bit further through the first chapter of Capital before I leave for Sydney.

In the last instalment, I suggested that the first chapter should be read as a sort of immanent dialectical unfolding of forms of phenomenological experience that are “given” under capitalism. Each of these forms of phenomenological experience is (at least tacitly) positioned as simultaneously a form of subjectivity and objectivity – as a form of perception and thought whose existence is rendered plausible by the experience of social actors attending to or engaging with a particular moment in collective practice. These forms of phenomenological experience are therefore not positioned in the text as imaginary – Marx doesn’t criticise them as “mere” beliefs, cognitive errors, or subjective illusions, but instead tacitly points to the ways in which they are the “true” expressions of some determinate moment of a complex, multi-layered social form.

At the same time, to the extent that Marx shows how each phenomenological perspective fails to recognise that it is the perspective of such a determinate moment – to the extent that he can demonstrate how a perspective hypostatises itself, either by abstracting itself from the determinate collective practices within which it is enacted, or by totalising its partial perspective and thus confusing its situated vision for an “objective” view of the whole – he can also demonstrate that each perspective is also false. Marx reveals this falseness by gradually unfolding, immanently from within each phenomenological perspective he analyses, symptomatic indications through which a perspective reveals its partial character – often in the form of questions a perspective can pose, but not answer; problems it can open up, but not resolve.

The complex critical strategy that motivates this presentation (discussed in more detail in previous posts) enables Marx to avoid unfolding his critique in the name of some kind of objective Archimedean point that purports to stand outside the context being criticised. Instead, he can “ground” his critique by demonstrating how his own critical perspective can be generated from within the context itself, by appropriating the insights made available by its own movement across various immanently-generated perspectives that have been constituted as moments within a complex overarching context that spawns multifaceted internal tensions and contradictions. This critical strategy has practical, as well as philosophical, significance: philosophically, it “performs” or expresses a form of subjectivity adequate to Marx’s own theoretical claims; practically, it enables Marx to demonstrate how the context itself is generative of practical potentials for its emancipatory transformation.

In the sections we’ve discussed thus far, Marx begins with a phenomenological perspective that perceives a world of subjects and objects, and a world of arbitrary human history, and timeless, essential nature. From the standpoint of this perspective, a contemplative subject interacts instrumentally with an object world, projecting its own historically variable interests onto nature’s objective reality. Instrumental manipulation of the intrinsic material properties of the natural world provides the basis for meeting human needs – and thus for the creation of use values. Use values, grounded as they are in objective materiality, are the “true” substance of wealth in all human societies. Wealth can, however, take arbitrary, historically variable forms in different human societies – in our society, for example, this historically variable form is exchange value, which appears to be a purely quantitative, accidental, and relative matter governing the proportions in which goods exchange for other goods.

Marx will move quickly to undermine this perspective. He does this by tugging on the thread of whether use value can be validly seen as the material “substance” within the historical “form” of exchange value. His argument runs roughly: If exchange value establishes quantitative proportions in which goods are exchanged, then surely there must be some common, qualitatively homogeneous “substance” whose quantity is being equated. But use values or the material properties of goods cannot provide such a substance, because use values and material objects are qualitatively diverse. Something else must therefore provide the “substance” encased in the “form” of exchange value – but the original phenomenological perspective, although it can use its subject/object, substance/form distinctions to pose such a question, is not adequate to provide an answer.

Marx then quickly unfolds a second perspective, which offers a kind of transcendental argument that the condition for exchange is the existence of some common, qualitatively homogeneous substance common to all commodities – a substance which Marx calls “value”. This second perspective “deduces” that this substance cannot reside in the material properties of commodities – for what single material property could possibly be held in common among all the universe of diverse commodities? This perspective inherits the dichotomy between material nature and human society from the first perspective, and so concludes that, if the common property cannot be material, then, ergo, the only remaining possibility is for it to be social.

But what common social property might all commodities share? “Obviously”, the property of being products of human labour. But labouring activities are as diverse as the material properties of goods, so we cannot be proposing that any specific labouring activity could serve this role. Instead, we need something universal, something abstracted from empirical labouring practices – something Marx calls “human labour in the abstract”. This phenomenological perspective sees “human labour in the abstract” as a sort of physical or biological category, a distillation of the expenditure of human “brains, nerves, and muscles” that must take on some specific form, but that can be conceptually abstracted from these particular forms and thereby grasped in its universal essence. This homogeneous universal essence of human labour can then be measured and subdivided into units, based on the duration of the expenditure of labour – labour time.

Logically, this transcendental argument suggests that it ought to be possible to measure the value that inheres in individual commodities, or that is generated by specific labouring activities, by measuring the duration of the labour empirically spent in the production of particular goods. Yet this logical conclusion isn’t drawn, as what counts in determining the measure of value is not actually the labour time empirically invested in the creation of a good, but rather the labour time socially required, on average, to produce goods of a particular sort. The amount of value that inheres within goods therefore cannot be established through the examination of an individual good or labouring activity taken as an atomised and isolated entity. Instead, individual goods (and, indirectly, empirical labour processes) must be brought into relation with one another, in order to grasp the determinants of value.

Once this relational dimension of value is brought into being, it becomes clear that we cannot be dealing with a simple conceptual abstraction. Instead, something more like a real abstraction is involved: some overarching social process that is in practice – as an “external” operation of the objective world, and not simply as an internal operation of the perceiving mind – indifferent to the empirical expenditure of labour time in production. This second perspective has thus opened onto the need for yet another perspective – one that can grasp this immaterial, but objective, relationship binding commodities to one another and constituting the substance of value. This second perspective has opened the need, in other words, for an approach that can grasp something like intersubjectivity.

And so we find ourselves in the third section of the first chapter – on which I seem strangely reluctant to write directly – I think this is now the third post that I’ve begun, intending to write on this section, that instead devolves almost entirely into elaborate retrospective reflection, as I try to reposition what I’ve been saying about previous sections, so that I can open up for a half-adequate discussion of what’s happening here. Let’s see if I can at least press a little bit into what Marx is doing here, before I become too tired to continue writing tonight.

This section begins by revisiting (is this why I always feel compelled to do this, as well?) the initial determination of the commodity as a two-fold object, with a material form related to use value, and a value form related to exchange value. No commodity, however, can directly express this dual character in its own material body. Examining an empirical commodity will reveal nothing more than its material properties, and value, as earlier sections have established, is unrelated to those. The inner duality of the commodity – the existence of its supersensible social essence – can therefore become manifest only if the commodity is brought into a social relation with some other commodity, such that their common identity as bearers of value can be compared. At this point, Marx returns to the category of exchange value, which he had set aside after the first few paragraphs in order to unfold the category of value: his analysis has now reached a point where it has immanently unfolded the need to analyse commodities, not as atomised objects or material things that sit “outside” contemplative subjects, but as “expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance” – as entities that exist intrinsically in social relations, whose inner essence therefore becomes manifest only through their social interactions, which are mediated by the process of exchange.

Marx here unfolds a simply astonishing analysis – peppered through with footnotes and textual allusions to relational and intersubjective understandings of human “nature”. He is not ready, at this stage in his analysis, to unfold the category of wage labour, but, if this has been unclear up to this point, here the interstices of the text scream the ways in which the arguments about “commodities” are intended to grasp and ground some of the self-perceptions that circulate amongst commodities of the human sort:

In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom “I am I” is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo (ftnt 19)

And this pair, one in the main text, and one a footnote (from a different section of the text):

And as equivalent of the linen in the value equation, it exists under this aspect alone, counts therefore as embodied value, as a body that is value. A, for instance, cannot be “your majesty” to B, unless at the same time majesty in B’s eyes assumes the bodily form of A, and, what is more, with every new father of the people, changes its features, hair, and many other things besides. (sctn. 3.2.a)

Such expressions of relations in general, called by Hegel reflex categories, form a very curious class. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king. (ftnt 22)

In terms of the structure of the section: the organisation, which moves from “elementary” to fully “developed” forms, suggests an historical progression. I have suggested previously that this should be read instead as a logical progression – as an analysis of forms that should all be taken as existing contemporaneously within the same fully developed capitalist context. This section begins to suggest, in other words, that fully developed capitalism admits of the simultaneous co-existence of forms of practice that do not equally express certain potentials immanent to that context, such that it becomes possible to organise or “rank” forms of practice based on how fully they express determinate potentials. It also begins to hint at a certain risk of confusing this logical ranking with an historical one – and therefore, for example, mistaking some particular moment of capitalism for a pre-capitalist social formation, or incorrectly ascribing to human history as such a teleological direction culminating in capitalism, or similar normative moves. I’ll leave this point to one side, as I can’t fully develop these suggestions here, but there are some beautiful potentials in this section for the philosophy of history tacit in this work…

Marx first hints that all forms – even the most elementary – presuppose the full development of capitalism, by stating, “The whole mystery of the form of values lies hidden in this elementary form” – the form in which two commodities are equated by exchange. He unfolds from this binary relationship the categories of the “relative” form – the commodity whose value is being expressed – and the “equivalent” form – the commodity that expresses this value. Relative and equivalent forms are necessarily interconnected and mutually dependent – the value of one commodity can only be expressed by another – and yet also mutually exclusive and antagonistic – the same commodity cannot simultaneously occupy both roles. Marx calls the relative and equivalent forms “poles of the same expression”.

Within this “elementary” form, it is entirely accidental which commodity plays which role. Marx uses this point to ground and criticise the political economists’ fascination with which commodity (gold, pepper, salt, cattle, etc.) plays the role of equivalent. He suggests, in effect, that they become distracted by a level of arbitrariness that genuinely does exist, and therefore fail to recognise the overarching necessity that inheres in the dichotomous poles of the value relation. So, it may well be a matter of indifference (and therefore arbitrary custom) whether cattle or gold coins play the role of the equivalent, but it is not a matter of similar indifference that the value of the commodity occupying the role of the relative form, can be expressed only in relation to some equivalent form. The puzzle of why this dichotomous form should exist is therefore overlooked – the form taken for granted, while attention is deflected to the more malleable contents that occupy structural positions within this form.

Marx here begins in earnest to embed some of the forms of perception and thought that, from the standpoint of the previous two perspectives analysed in this chapter, appear “given”. He quickly suggests that the earlier determination of the commodity, which presented it as a unity of a use value and a value, could only be made in a situation in which value had found some way to become manifest – for, as an immaterial property, a physical examination of a material good in isolation would never reveal its existence. He further suggests the need to invert the transcendental argument that human labour is the condition of exchange, arguing that it is rather in the act of exchange that we equate two dissimilar material goods, and therefore, by extension, equate the dissimilar forms of activity that led to their production:

If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other.

By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to that in the latter. Now, it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.

Having thus reached beyond atomised commodities with purported supersensible properties, to the exchange relation between those commodities, Marx is now ready to move to an analysis of how these supersensible properties – although social and immaterial in origin – must also find a material expression:

There is, however, something else required beyond the expression of the specific character of the labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities. The problem is already solved.

This material expression is, of course, the equivalent form.

Before moving to an analysis of the equivalent form, Marx detours into the quantitative determination of the relative form (a topic he had previously bracketed, arguing that political economy focussed too exclusively on the quantitative aspect of the problem). The argument here parallels earlier moments in which Marx has mentioned the quantitative dimension of value: it quickly runs through several scenarios in which the proportion in which goods are empirically exchanged remains the same, but in which this outcome is generated by very different “real changes in the magnitude of value”, to conclude:

Thus real changes in the magnitude of value are neither unequivocally nor exhaustively reflected in their relative expression, that is, in the equation expressing the magnitude of relative value. The relative value of a commodity may vary, although its value remains constant. Its relative value may remain constant, although its value varies; and finally, simultaneous variations in the magnitude of value and in that of its relative expression by no means necessarily correspond in amount.

These sections of the text are strategically extremely interesting – I should have drawn attention to some earlier examples, to prepare for this point. On several different levels in the text, Marx has been introducing strong distinctions between what will be perceived through immediate empirical observations of particular sorts, and the sorts of categories he is mobilising in his own analysis. Thus, the value of commodities cannot be discovered through an exploration of their material properties. Human labour in the abstract is distinct from the labour empirically expended in production, even when we conceptually abstract from the various concrete forms in which human physiological exertion takes place. And now, “real changes in the magnitude of value” cannot be observed directly from the empirical investigation of the proportions in which goods exchange on the market. Curiouser and curiouser: how, exactly, can this supersensible essence of value, which we now know always must appear in some physical form, but which can never be detected in that physical form – nor, apparently, in the relation between that form and commodities occupying the relative position – be perceived? How do we know that such a thing exists? What is its ontological status?

The answer isn’t fully clear at this point in the text. I believe, though, that we are intended to be becoming a bit perplexed: the section does begin, after all, with Marx teasing “The reality of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don’t know ‘where to have it’.”… And I believe that the answer is peeking through the interstices of the examples Marx uses to illustrate the law of value asserting itself – coercively distributing socially average labour time and dictating what gets to “count as labour”. Value is gradually being determined, as the text unfolds, as Marx’s name for this unintentionally generated collective social compulsion whose existence structures and shapes collective experience into, among other things, the forms Marx has been analysing throughout this chapter.

Tired. Lots of strangeness to come in the next subsection. Time to get some sleep – with my apologies for the complete absence of proofreading in this post. I have no idea whether and how much I can post from Sydney. If I can post, it’s also possible that this particular series will be temporarily interrupted as I process thoughts provoked by the conference papers. But I suspect that, one way or another, I will find my way back here again soon…

Previous posts in this series include:

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

What Presses Now

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 12, 2007

Sinthome’s continued fascination with Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura has led to another wonderful post on historical materialism, in which Sinthome quotes a passage that expresses one of the forms of perception and thought I’ve recently been suggesting Marx is trying to ground in Capital – the distinction between a timeless “material” reality, and contingent, arbitrary, “social” attributes projected onto this reality:

A property is that which not at all
Can be disjoined and severed from a thing
Without a fatal dissolution: such,
Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow
To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,
Intangibility to the viewless void.
But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,
Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else
Which come and go whilst Nature stands the same,
We’re wont, and rightly, to call by-products.
Even time exists not of itself; but sense
Reads out of things what happened long ago,
What presses now, and what shall follow after:
No man, we must admit, feels time itself,
Disjoined from motion and repose of things.

Sinthome adds:

Lucretius’ stunning observation– I’d be interested to see whether it was commonly made in antiquity, I cannot think of other examples off-hand –is that by-products are not connected to the object itself. Lucretius’ examples are clear enough: regardless of whether I have the property of wealth, poverty, slavery, freedom, or am in a state of war, or peace, I remain the same person. That is, were I to lose all my wealth, I am still this person who has lost all of his wealth. As such, these properties are not connected properties of my being.

For obvious reasons, I’m also interested in the question of how common this kind of observation might have been in other contexts: Marx is making an argument that we are somehow constituting this kind of distinction unintentionally in collective practice. Among the several stabs I’ve taken below to try to express what Marx might be up to (and to continue Marx’s grand tradition, and quote myself), I take Marx to see capitalism as a situation in which:

we say that commodities possess a dual character – and then we analyse how that dual character that we take to be intrinsic, becomes manifest when commodities interact with one another on the market. We become sensitive to the possibility of a “material” world that operates according to supersensible laws whose existence can be inferred from observing patterns in the movements of material objects, and we begin to try to discover and to manipulate such “laws” instrumentally to human advantage. We become sensitive to the possibility that certain dimensions of social practice – dimensions associated with direct personal or intersubjective relations – are social (and therefore contingent on human practice and – potentially – contestable). We therefore collectively, unintentionally enact two mutually-differentiating, interpenetrating dimensions of social life: an “overtly social” realm of interpersonal relations, and an impersonal realm in which material objects are governed by invisible laws. Both realms are “social” – but not in the same way. And their mutual determination can render plausible a systematic trompe-l’œil in which one dimension of our social is taken not to be social at all.

Or, a bit later in my trundle through the first chapter:

I have suggested that the argument about the fetish is not concerned solely with explaining the “supersensible” properties that are perceived to inhere in material objects: it also lays the foundation for grasping the conviction that there are “material objects” – problematising the conception (expressed in many places in the first chapter) that our perception of a “material world” represents some kind of “demythologised” form of thought that arises quasi-automatically, once artificial social determinations have been stripped away, leaving “nature” behind. Instead, the “material world” is grasped in this argument as its own practically constituted “positivity” – as the product of determinate kinds of collective practice. (As a side note, to avoid confusion: This kind of argument is not intended to position human practice as somehow generative of the entirety of the non-human world – evoking a sort of radical social constructivism – but rather to explore connections between our current sensitivity to specific potentials of the non-human world, and other dimensions of our contemporaneous historical experience.)

Note that, since I’m suggesting that Marx is unfolding a reflexive critical theory, this sort of analytical move does not invalidate his own critical deployment of a (grounded) notion of “materialism”. Instead, this move enables Marx to deploy a concept of materialism (or other normative standards) non-dogmatically, in a way that symmetrically applies the same critical framework to his own position, and to positions he criticises, and thus does not rely on critical standards that float above the context being criticised.

I therefore see the “denaturalising” move made by the argument about the fetish as cutting “both ways” – as encompassing concepts of use value and exchange value, sensuous material nature and supersensible laws, subjects and objects, and a constellation of other dichotomies that will be unfolded as having interrelated, practical bases in the course of this analysis. And I see this argument opening up the possibility for an analysis of capitalism as a peculiarly “layered” social context, constituted by intrinsically bound and yet conflictual dimensions of collective practice that mutually differentiate one another to constitute a practical dichotomy between, on the one hand, a “secularised” impersonal world of “material” objects whose interactions are governed by “universal” laws, and, on the other, a contingent, historically-variable, intersubjective realm of human custom.

Sinthome is drawn – as I think Marx also was – to the political implications of such forms of perception and thought. To sample another passage from Larval Subjects:

Lucretius’ distinction between properties and by-products has implications that reach far beyond the examples he gives, and which are a central axiom of historical materialism. His examples of freedom and slavery are particularly telling. Freedom, slavery, are not natural features of physical bodies, but are rather a product of relations among bodies. That is, they are, according to this metaphysic, institutions. Many will recall that Aristotle had argued that non-Greeks and women are naturally inferior to Greek men, thereby treating this inferiority as a property of these bodies. Aristotle naturalizes social relations, thereby treating them as the natural order of things.

If Lucretius’ words cause the world to shake, then this is because this thesis belongs not only to the various social identities we might possess, treating them all as by-products rather than properties, but it also extends (without him saying so) to all social institutions as well. Being-a-king is not a property of the king, but is instead a by-product of being recognized as a king by his subjects. Gender relations between men and women are not the natural way of things, but the result of ongoing autopoiesis whereby both parties involved reproduce themselves in their gendered identities through their interactions with one another (without it being possible to say one group produces the identity of the other). Sexual identities are not natural properties, but are again by products of practices and institutions.

Sinthome also hits perfectly on the critical intention of the form of critique in which I see Marx to have been engaging (without suggesting that Sinthome would have agreed with Marx’s specific claims or with the social or practice-theoretic framing of Marx’s critical approach):

These concepts are perhaps familiar to us today– though I hear people making such claims on behalf of the natural all the time –so it is difficult to hear just how much they make the world rumble and shake. However, if there is one central function of the project of critique and historical materialism, this is to show the essential contingency of social institutions and identities… The way they are “by-products” or “accidents”, rather than properties. The activity of demonstrating the contingency of institutions is not an activity of “debunking” or falsifying. We might, for instance, show that rights are by-products or accidents of certain social organizations. This does not render rights false, just as it is no less the case that I am a professor because being-a-professor required a whole host of institutions from universities, places to teach, states, and my students acting towards me as a philosopher. Rather, if rights are by-products or accidents, then this is because they can fail to exist in certain bodies. This entails that perhaps we fight all the more vigorously for the existence of these by-products. Rather, in the activity of critique, in the activity of uncovering contingency, we render possibilities available, allowing us to counter-factually envision how other forms of life might come to be. The slave that comes to see the institution of slavery as a contingent by-product of his socio-historical setting rather than a natural property of his being also comes to envision the possibility of another life, another world. Perhaps we should begin with the premise that we’re all slaves. Perhaps this would paradoxically be the most affirmative position one could advocate. Sometimes the entire world is changed through a simple distinction, an incorporeal transformation, a concept, that then functions as a lens so potent it is able to concentrate light into fire.

The point of immanent critique (and this perhaps touches on some of the issues currently under discussion in another thread over at Larval Subjects) is precisely not to debunk, but rather to liberate and free up for conscious political practice, potentials that may have been constituted unintentionally, in alienated form, by enabling a better understanding of the determinate sorts of relationships in which these potentials are currently constituted – and the other ways in which those relationships might be unfolded, to release potentials more completely.

Caveats as always that I am not trying in any way to assimilate Sinthome’s argument to my own – just thinking in tandem, as the waves and resonances of online discussion sometimes unexpectedly make possible…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Materialism, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Value and Its Form – from Deduction to Dialectic

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 7, 2007

Once again, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to carve out a discussion-sized section from the material in Capital’s introductory chapter – in this case, the third section, on “The Form of Value or Exchange Value”. Once again, the problem is that the meta-commentary going on in this section is densely packed and intricate, and much of the power of the section hinges on drawing attention to this too-tacit argumentative layer of the text.

I read this section, among other things, as Marx’s somewhat playful virtuoso demonstration of the ease with which he can (from his perspective) surpass Hegel by embedding certain core concepts of “dialectics” by revealing the ways in which certain dimensions of collective practice possess practically dialectical properties. It’s not an accident that Aristotle figures in this section, in a discussion of the historical determinants of logical deduction – a passage in which Marx will both relativise the deductive form of reasoning on which he had been apparently relying in the previous sections, and also suggest the need for an immanent and reflexive theory to account, not simply for the content of its own theoretical claims, but for the very form of theoretical analysis itself. The tacit argument here is that theories – even (especially?) critical ones – must locate themselves as determinate moments of the objects they theorise.

This is almost over-clever stuff, and I don’t really think I can do it justice without writing something that moves back and forth between Hegel and Marx to draw out the elements of this complex master-apprentice conversation much more clearly. For the moment, unfortunately, “not doing justice” is what I’ll need to settle for – perhaps I can come back to this more adequately over the summer break, when I’ll need to explore Hegel in more detail to prepare for an event where I’ll be speaking on Hegel and Marx… For present purposes, I’ll simply mention that one layer of this section begins to suggest an unacknowledged practice-theoretic dimension to Hegel’s analytical technique, while another layer hints at the potential for theorising how notions of reciprocal intersubjective recognition might arise as a moment within a more overarching impersonal social dynamic. Beautiful, provocative, generative material – much of which I won’t cover with anything close to adequate complexity here.

Okay. So what to say. In this post, I think I’ll limit my comments primarily to the question of how I understand the meta-commentary Marx is offering here on the reflexive relationship of theory to its context.

We’ve previously discussed Marx’s statement that the first chapter of Capital presents the “greatest difficulty” in grasping the analytical strategy of the text. In section 3A, Marx confronts us with the difficulty of that difficulty:

The whole mystery of the form of value lies hidden in this elementary form. Its analysis, therefore, is our real difficulty.

Let’s see what this might mean.

Section three begins by reminding us that we are still operating within the form of phenomenological experience that is “given” in the way that wealth “presents itself” in capitalist society. As Marx has already outlined in the first section, this form of subjectivity perceives commodities as dual entities, possessing use values that are conditioned by their qualitatively specific, bodily, natural, “material” properties, and exchange values that appear to entail accidental and purely relative quantitative proportions, and that relate to supersensible social properties that bear no intrinsic relation to the material form the commodity possesses. In the present section, Marx expresses this in the following way, incorporating elements from the discussion of value that Marx has unfolded in the previous sections:

Commodities come into the world in the shape of use values, articles, or goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form. They are, however, commodities, only because they are something twofold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form.

The reality of the value of commodities differs in this respect from Dame Quickly, that we don’t know “where to have it.” The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity. In fact we started from exchange value, or the exchange relation of commodities, in order to get at the value that lies hidden behind it. We must now return to this form under which value first appeared to us.

Every one knows, if he knows nothing else, that commodities have a value form common to them all, and presenting a marked contrast with the varied bodily forms of their use values. I mean their money form. Here, however, a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been attempted by bourgeois economy, the task of tracing the genesis of this money form, of developing the expression of value implied in the value relation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form. By doing this we shall, at the same time, solve the riddle presented by money.

The simplest value-relation is evidently that of one commodity to some one other commodity of a different kind. Hence the relation between the values of two commodities supplies us with the simplest expression of the value of a single commodity.

Note that this passage still follows the deductive mode of presentation Marx has been spoofing up to this point: Marx “deduces” here that “it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity”. This conclusion is positioned in the text as pointing to something that “Every one knows, if he knows nothing else” – that commodities share a common value-form in the form of money. The strategy of the text is important here: the question that motivates this section – how to “solve” the mystery of the value form (the question, ultimately, of why value is expressed, or, what it implies that value is distinguishable from the form in which it nevertheless must appear) – has been posed by forms of analysis that derive directly from how the wealth of capitalist society presents itself.

The question has therefore arisen immanently within a particular dimension of a specific context. Marx argues, however, that this immanently posed question cannot be answered by the forms of perception and thought that have posed it: instead, he argues, “a task is set us, the performance of which has never yet even been attempted by bourgeois economy”. Bourgeois political economy has therefore pointed beyond itself, gesturing to the existence of something that it cannot itself adequately grasp, and opening the way for a more adequate theoretical approach.

With this move, Marx has overtly, if subtly, tipped his hand, and revealed the preceding sections as the opening volleys of a dialectical presentation that has unfolded only with reference to the insights available to a particular phenomenological perspective. At this point in the text, Marx believes he has demonstrated that this initial phenomenological perspective itself betrays the signs that it is not fully adequate to the phenomenon it seeks to grasp – that its perception of the wealth of capitalist societies, as well as its self-understanding, are partial and relate to a specific moment within the reproduction of such societies. Marx’s analysis has shown how this partial character is expressed or symptomatically betrayed within the perspective he is analysing, even though the perspective itself does not recognise its own partial character or realise how it points beyond itself.

So, in this section, what I have been calling the “deductive” mode of presentation, used in the earlier sections of the chapter, is revealed explicitly as a form of theorisation expressive of the phenomenological perspective that, as described in the opening sentences of this chapter, sees the commodity as “an object outside us”. The deductive presentation on which Marx has been relying thus far in this chapter is one that takes the “objectivity” of its object of analysis as a “given” – as something that sits “outside” the perspective from which the theoretical analysis is being offered, and whose properties, once discovered, might be manipulated to serve some human purpose, but that are not constituted through contingent human practices. The deductive presentation thus perceives no intrinsic relationship between its own form, its own analytical method, and the form of its object. Subjectivity and objectivity are not posited in any intrinsic relationship.

This dualistic, deductive form of theory, however, runs aground on the problem of how to grasp the intrinsically relational and reflexive aspects of the value form. In bringing the deductive method to its limits by unfolding from it the problem of the value-form, Marx opens a breach through which some of the elements of a dialectical analysis then enter. As this “dialectical” analysis unfolds, it will react back on some of the claims put forward by the deductive mode of presentation, relativising them as forms of thought that appear adequate only when a very specific slice of an overarching context was being engaged by the analysis. When viewed in the light of the additional perspectives made available by even this introductory “dialectical” perspective, the earlier “deductive” form of presentation comes to appear both plausible, and partial – opening the way for the explicit critique Marx will offer in the section on commodity fetishism.

At this point in the narrative, then, we have moved beyond the phenomenological perspective with which Marx opens Capital. Does this mean that we have now reached Marx’s own “position” – the critical standpoint that provides the tacit “for us” of this text? I don’t believe so. As I mentioned above, I take this section to be, at least in part, a gesture toward Hegel – an acknowledgement of how Hegel’s work moves beyond the forms of thought on display in the previous sections, as well as a rapid-fire set of gestures to where Marx believes Hegel went astray. At the same time, this part of the text continues the work of suggesting how particular political economic perspectives are bound together with specific dimensions of collective practice. Since, however, the “for us” of this text voices the standpoint of an immanent critical theory, Marx will gradually appropriate the alienated elements of the context as his analysis unfolds, leveraging the critical insights unfolded with each stage of the presentation. At this moment, those critical insights are sufficient to begin to point past the dualistic forms of thought with which the text begins, to illustrate (albeit too tacitly) the presentational method of the text, and to open up the critique of commodity fetishism.

So what does Marx actually say in this section? The section as a whole gradually moves from accident to necessity. It is easy to read the textual strategy here as though Marx is making a historical argument – moving progressively through an analysis of earlier forms of production for market exchange, through to fully developed capitalist production. My impulse is to resist this interpretation, and to read this text instead as describing a logical, rather than an historical “progression” or development. My impulse, in other words, is to treat all of the forms Marx analyses here as presupposing the full development of capitalism – and, therefore, as expressions of contemporaneous moments within that fully developed social form.

Some of the moments Marx analyses here do bear a stronger resemblance to pre-capitalist institutions: the analysis of the “elementary” form of value, for example, examines transactions that resemble an intuitive notion of the sorts of exchanges that might have taken place in a pre-capitalist market. Yet Marx specifically draws attention to this possible historical interpretation, by saying that he can best cast light on some of the “peculiarities” of the equivalent form (the basis for the money form) through a digression on Aristotle. Marx then uses this digression to argue that Aristotle was not able to “discover” the secrets of the equivalent form because he lacks a concept of value – because he lacked experience with wage labour. Apparently, then, comprehension of even the most “elementary” form Marx analyses in this section, cannot proceed until capitalism is fully formed – or, better, in spite of superficial historical similarities, the “elementary” form of value should not be taken to have been constituted in collective practice until the development of capitalism.

There are some fantastic side points that beg to be made here about the construction of history and of particular imaginaries of the past, organised around moments that are generated within contemporary societies, but that possess qualitative characteristics that suggest that they are somehow historically “primitive”. For the moment, I’ll just leave this hanging as an interesting tangent for later development, as this isn’t something that Marx thematises in any detail at this point in the text.

The section on Aristotle makes a fairly clear case that the forms Marx is analysing here are not historical forms. The language of this section also hints that the forms being analysed, particularly the “accidental” form, lie quite close the surface of everyday phenomenological experience – they point back to the very first discussion of exchange value, in the opening section of this chapter, which argued that exchange value “appears to be something accidental and purely relative”. This reference to the appearance of “accident” is carried over into this section – except that, instead of looking at this accidental characteristic as it relates to the properties of an object – an individual commodity taken in isolation – we are now exploring the appearance of “accident” within a relation between commodities.

Looking at the exchange of two commodities – coats and linen – Marx differentiates two positions each commodity might occupy within the exchange relationship: the “relative form”, a role occupied by the commodity whose “supersensible” value is expressed in terms of the other commodity, and the “equivalent form”, a role occupied by the commodity whose “body” expresses the value of the other commodity. Marx unfolds some complex characteristics from this apparently simple relationship:

The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes – i.e., poles of the same expression… A single commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously assume, in the same expression of value, both forms. The very polarity of these forms makes them mutually exclusive.

So Marx unfolds a strange, intrinsically dichotomous relationship that simultaneously binds together and opposes the bodily and supersensible qualities of commodities related in this way. Marx then argues that, when the relationship is looked at from the perspective of any two commodities, the specific role that each commodity occupies within the relationship appears arbitrary:

Whether, then, a commodity assumes the relative form, or the opposite equivalent form, depends entirely upon its accidental position in the expression of value – that is, upon whether it is the commodity whose value is being expressed or the commodity in which value is being expressed.

This appearance of arbitrariness will gradually be replaced, as the analysis unfolds, such that necessity closes in – not because the commodity that occupies the role of the equivalent isn’t an “arbitrary” matter of convention (on this level, the accidental appearance of the equivalent form is “true”, and renders plausible the forms of subjectivity that focus on the elements that are accidental within this form), but because, as Marx will argue in the section on commodity fetishism, a focus on the arbitrariness of which commodity comes to play the role of equivalent, involves a partial perspective that fixates on a single, “overtly social”, element of the value form, and thereby deflects its analytical gaze from the impersonal forms of social coercion that exert themselves in part through this form:

in the midst of all the accidental and ever fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour time socially necessary for their production forcibly asserts itself like an over-riding law of Nature. The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.

Marx thus “grounds” theories that focus on the accidental or arbitrary nature of which commodity plays the role of equivalent, by demonstrating such theories to be plausible approximations of a particular aspect of collective practice, while also setting up for a critique that such forms of thought participate in the collectively-constituted trompe l’oeil that grasps the arbitrary nature of “overtly social” dimensions of the context, while failing to grasp the contingent character of impersonal forms of compulsion that also characterise that same context.

Marx next moves to bracket the analysis of the quantitative proportions in which commodities exchange – another apparently contingent aspect of the exchange relationship that he first introduced in the preliminary discussion of exchange value at the beginning of the chapter:

Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place.

In section 3.2.a, he puts forward the goal instead of considering the expression of the value of a commodity apart from the quantitative proportions in which commodities exchange:

In order to discover how the elementary expression of the value of a commodity lies hidden in the value relation of two commodities, we must, in the first place, consider the latter entirely apart from its quantitative aspect. The usual mode of procedure is generally the reverse, and in the value relation nothing is seen but the proportion between definite quantities of two different sorts of commodities that are considered equal to each other. It is apt to be forgotten that the magnitudes of different things can be compared quantitatively, only when those magnitudes are expressed in terms of the same unit. It is only as expressions of such a unit that they are of the same denomination, and therefore commensurable.

The footnote attached to this paragraph continues this argument in a less immanent voice:

The few economists, amongst whom is S. Bailey, who have occupied themselves with the analysis of the form of value, have been unable to arrive at any result, first, because they confuse the form of value with value itself; and second, because, under the coarse influence of the practical bourgeois, they exclusively give their attention to the quantitative aspect of the question.

The phrasing in this footnote is interesting: the political economists have been unable to grasp the form of value, because they confuse this form with value itself. Marx calls explicit attention here to a distinction already introduced in the previous sections: between value – as a socially-constituted “essence” of capitalist production – and exchange-value – as a necessary form of appearance of that essence. As the analysis unfolds, Marx will rely on this essence-appearance relationship to unfold an analysis of how a social “substance” like value might be constituted by social actors as an unintentional by-product of practices oriented to other goals.

Here, though, Marx focusses on unfolding an extraordinary set of metaphors to capture the qualitative, rather than the quantitative, dimensions of the value form. (I should note that Sinthome has walked before me here, in a beautiful post I wasn’t able to address adequately at the time it was written, but which picks up on Marx’s use of metaphors of coagulation and congealment in this section of Capital, and then improvises around these metaphors into a much broader set of reflections on materialist philosophy.) Marx reflects back here on the earlier sections, which had seemed to suggest that commodities, as objects, possessed a dual character; he now begins to unfold some of what was tacitly presupposed in this perception of commodities:

If we say that, as values, commodities are mere congelations of human labour, we reduce them by our analysis, it is true, to the abstraction, value; but we ascribe to this value no form apart from their bodily form. It is otherwise in the value relation of one commodity to another. Here, the one stands forth in its character of value by reason of its relation to the other.

By making the coat the equivalent of the linen, we equate the labour embodied in the former to that in the latter. Now, it is true that the tailoring, which makes the coat, is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating it to the weaving, reduces the tailoring to that which is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to their common character of human labour. In this roundabout way, then, the fact is expressed, that weaving also, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities that alone brings into relief the specific character of value-creating labour, and this it does by actually reducing the different varieties of labour embodied in the different kinds of commodities to their common quality of human labour in the abstract.

Marx is beginning here to suggest that the perception that commodities are objects with supersensible social properties, always already presupposes some perspective or dimension of social practice within which these “internal” properties are “externalised” or overtly expressed – already presupposes the relation of commodities Marx has here characterised in terms of the value form:

There is, however, something else required beyond the expression of the specific character of the labour of which the value of the linen consists. Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object. In order to express the value of the linen as a congelation of human labour, that value must be expressed as having objective existence, as being a something materially different from the linen itself, and yet a something common to the linen and all other commodities. The problem is already solved.

I’ll leave until next time an exploration of why Marx thinks this discussion has “solved” the problem that thwarted “bourgeois” economics. It’s getting late on my end, and the upcoming passages include some fantastic, suggestive sections on the objective, subjective, and intersubjective relations of commodities of all sorts. Hopefully I can work my way into some of these issues when I next return to this series.

(Apologies for typographical and editing issues above: too late on my end to do a proper review of what I’ve written…)

Previous posts in this series include:

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Human Labour in the Abstract

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 3, 2007

So I’ve decided that I’m not quite ready to let go of the first chapter of Capital. My provisional thought, very much subject to change, is that I’ll write something brief tonight on abstract labour, then at some point soon take up the complex discussion going on in the section on the form of value, and then write something on whatever bits of the section on commodity fetishism I haven’t managed to roll into the other posts.

In my last post in this series, I suggested that:

the first chapter was driving toward the argument about commodity fetishism,
significant aspects of the earlier sections of the chapter were intended to express fetishised forms of perception and thought, rather than Marx’s own “position”, and
fetishised forms of perception involve the attribution of supersensible social qualities to material objects.

In previous posts in this series (I’ve included a full list at the bottom of this post), I’ve suggested that this argument doesn’t simply involve the claim that “supersensible” qualities are inappropriately “projected” onto material nature. First, since this is a reflexive argument, Marx is seeking to ground, rather than simply debunk, the forms of thought he is analysing (including the forms of thought mobilised in his own critique). He therefore won’t treat the fetish as a “mere” conceptual error or a simple “illusion”. He will instead position fetishised perceptions as “forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production”. He will also present the fetish as arising from a particular way of enacting our collective lives, such that fetishised forms of thought are related to determinate qualitative characteristics of social “realities” enacted in particular forms of collective practice:

the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. (emphasis mine)

This reflexive strategy enables Marx (in principle) to construct a socially immanent critique that accounts for the practical genesis of the forms of thought it opposes, while also using the same analysis to demonstrate that such forms of thought are partial, and thus fail to grasp emancipatory potentials necessarily generated through the same practical, collective process that reproduces capitalism.

Second, I have suggested that the argument about the fetish is not concerned solely with explaining the “supersensible” properties that are perceived to inhere in material objects: it also lays the foundation for grasping the conviction that there are “material objects” – problematising the conception (expressed in many places in the first chapter) that our perception of a “material world” represents some kind of “demythologised” form of thought that arises quasi-automatically, once artificial social determinations have been stripped away, leaving “nature” behind. Instead, the “material world” is grasped in this argument as its own practically constituted “positivity” – as the product of determinate kinds of collective practice. (As a side note, to avoid confusion: This kind of argument is not intended to position human practice as somehow generative of the entirety of the non-human world – evoking a sort of radical social constructivism – but rather to explore connections between our current sensitivity to specific potentials of the non-human world, and other dimensions of our contemporaneous historical experience.)

Note that, since I’m suggesting that Marx is unfolding a reflexive critical theory, this sort of analytical move does not invalidate his own critical deployment of a (grounded) notion of “materialism”. Instead, this move enables Marx to deploy a concept of materialism (or other normative standards) non-dogmatically, in a way that symmetrically applies the same critical framework to his own position, and to positions he criticises, and thus does not rely on critical standards that float above the context being criticised.

I therefore see the “denaturalising” move made by the argument about the fetish as cutting “both ways” – as encompassing concepts of use value and exchange value, sensuous material nature and supersensible laws, subjects and objects, and a constellation of other dichotomies that will be unfolded as having interrelated, practical bases in the course of this analysis. And I see this argument opening up the possibility for an analysis of capitalism as a peculiarly “layered” social context, constituted by intrinsically bound and yet conflictual dimensions of collective practice that mutually differentiate one another to constitute a practical dichotomy between, on the one hand, a “secularised” impersonal world of “material” objects whose interactions are governed by “universal” laws, and, on the other, a contingent, historically-variable, intersubjective realm of human custom.

But I said I was going to write about abstract labour… ;-P I’m realising as I pause here that I’ve become extremely tired, but I likely won’t have much time to write for the next couple of days, and I’d rather not let this line of thought go completely cold. As a least-worst option, I’m going to dash something out that I suspect won’t manage to express what I’m after. Apologies for the confusion this will probably cause, but my hope is that folks will be patient enough to offer criticisms in the gamble that my next attempt might be a bit clearer and closer to the mark.

I’ve already suggested in previous posts that the “deduction” of the existence of abstract labour, as presented in the early sections of this chapter, does not represent Marx’s own position, but rather a form of fetishised thought. Thus, in the first section, Marx writes as though commodities can be exchanged because, as objects, they possess the supersensible property of containing equal quantities of abstract labour:

A given commodity, e.g., a quarter of wheat is exchanged for x blacking, y silk, or z gold, &c. – in short, for other commodities in the most different proportions. Instead of one exchange value, the wheat has, therefore, a great many. But since x blacking, y silk, or z gold &c., each represents the exchange value of one quarter of wheat, x blacking, y silk, z gold, &c., must, as exchange values, be replaceable by each other, or equal to each other. Therefore, first: the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.

Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.

A simple geometrical illustration will make this clear. In order to calculate and compare the areas of rectilinear figures, we decompose them into triangles. But the area of the triangle itself is expressed by something totally different from its visible figure, namely, by half the product of the base multiplied by the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity.

This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value. Then one use value is just as good as another, provided only it be present in sufficient quantity. Or, as old Barbon says,

“one sort of wares are as good as another, if the values be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value … An hundred pounds’ worth of lead or iron, is of as great value as one hundred pounds’ worth of silver or gold.”

As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.

If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.

In the section on the fetish, Marx explicitly contradicts this claim:

As a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange. In other words, the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their varied forms of existence as objects of utility. This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a twofold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others. The equalisation of the most different kinds of labour can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz. expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to him, when reflected in his brain, only under those forms which are impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of products. In this way, the character that his own labour possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour. have one common quality, viz., that of having value.

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered. (bold text mine)

In between the sections quoted above, Marx scatters a number of indications that the concept of “human labour in the abstract” picks out a very peculiar social entity. In the first section, he argues:

The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary.

When Marx refers to the “total labour power of society”, this initially sounds as though he might be suggesting that “abstract labour” could just be something like “the total amount of goal-directed energy humans expend to transform material nature to meet their needs” – as though the term is just a conceptual abstraction from all the varieties of concrete labouring activities humans happen to undertake. Passages elsewhere in the chapter that speak of labour in physiological terms would seem to reinforce this impression:

Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour power.

From the beginning, however, it is clear that the concept of “human labour in the abstract” is not just a useful conceptual category for classifying and grouping all different sorts of labour activity. Instead, the concept seems intended to pick out something coercive – a sort of unintended collective normative force that adjudicates what gets to “count as labour”. So, as Marx presents it, labouring activities – human physiological exertion, goal-directed transformations of nature, etc. – get to “count as labour” only if they generate a use value for others, and only to the extent that they conform to a socially average level of productivity. And the producers, although they may certainly strategise, plot and scheme, cannot know in advance whether, and to what extent, their labour will “count”.

Marx is already hinting at the coercive nature of abstract labour when, just after he first notes that value is measured by labour-time, he then immediately explains that there is a difference between the empirical expenditure of time in a production process, and the normative measure of abstract labour. He illustrates the potential consequences of this distinction with a well-chosen example:

The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

Abstract labour figures in this account as a sort of socially-constituted mass with a qualitatively homogeneous, undifferentiated character. Commodities are treated in social practice as though they “partake” of this qualitatively homogeneous supersensible substance to greater or lesser degrees. Concrete labouring activities therefore “count as labour” only to the degree that these activities are productive of commodities that “participate” in this socially-constituted mass. The empirical efforts expended in the production of particular commodities, the empirical form of concrete labouring processes, do not determine the extent to which empirical products serve as receptacles of materialised value. In relation to concrete “sensuous” elements of material production, value stands as a “counter-factual”, sensuously undetectable, social constraint.

Except. Commodities must also be use values. And productivity pertains to the production of some particular kind of use value. So there are determinate connections – conflictual ones – between empirical labouring processes and “human labour in the abstract”. These connections feed into the coercive dynamic associated with value:

If the productive power of all the different sorts of useful labour required for the production of a coat remains unchanged, the sum of the values of the coats produced increases with their number. If one coat represents x days’ labour, two coats represent 2x days’ labour, and so on. But assume that the duration of the labour necessary for the production of a coat becomes doubled or halved. In the first case one coat is worth as much as two coats were before; in the second case, two coats are only worth as much as one was before, although in both cases one coat renders the same service as before, and the useful labour embodied in it remains of the same quality. But the quantity of labour spent on its production has altered.

An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic movement has its origin in the twofold character of labour. Productive power has reference, of course, only to labour of some useful concrete form, the efficacy of any special productive activity during a given time being dependent on its productiveness. Useful labour becomes, therefore, a more or less abundant source of products, in proportion to the rise or fall of its productiveness. On the other hand, no change in this productiveness affects the labour represented by value. Since productive power is an attribute of the concrete useful forms of labour, of course it can no longer have any bearing on that labour, so soon as we make abstraction from those concrete useful forms. However then productive power may vary, the same labour, exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value. But it will yield, during equal periods of time, different quantities of values in use; more, if the productive power rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use values produced by that labour, will diminish the total value of this increased quantity of use values, provided such change shorten the total labour time necessary for their production; and vice versâ.

At this early point, then, Marx has already begun to hint that increased productivity, in spite of the greater material wealth and command over nature it may generate, can provoke counter-intuitively negative consequences under capitalism, as concrete labouring activities are coercively compelled to comply with a new social norm of productivity. Marx describes this situation as “a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him”. Significantly, the type of social coercion being described here, while grounded in human practice, is impersonal in character – generated as the unintentional consequence of practices oriented to other purposes. This is one aspect of why, as Marx describes, value is a “social hieroglyphic” that needs to be deciphered: compared with other, more “concrete” social institutions whose intersubjective character renders them “overtly” social, the dynamics associated with value confront people, by contrast, as if they are an asocial “objectivity”. Marx describes this strange, distinctive “relation of production” as “the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour” – the first generation Frankfurt School capture something similar when they discuss the domination of individuals by the social totality.

More – and hopefully more adequate – commentary on all of this, once I’ve recovered from teaching this week… Apologies for the many problems in this piece – just too tired to edit in any form…

The previous posts in this series are:

Abstraction, Critical Theory, Fetish, Materialism, Negations, Political Economy, Self-Reflexivity

Things and Their Relations

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 1, 2007

Exhausted today, so just a stray association – something I wouldn’t mind exploring systematically at some point, but will just point out as a curiosity for now.

Reading Lukács’ “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat“, I noticed an interesting displacement that occurs when Lukács translates Marx’s concept of the fetish, into his own concept of reification. In the first section of this work, Lukács offers the following gloss of Marx’s argument:

The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.

Compare this to Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism:

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 therefrom. 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.

I’m much, much too tired to outline – let alone substantiate – a proper argument here, but I wanted to suggest briefly that there is an interesting, if subtle, tension between these two formulations. Lukács takes commodity fetishism to refer to a situation in which “a relation between people takes on the character of a thing” (emphasis mine). Marx speaks, instead, of a situation in which producers’ relation to “the sum total of their own labour” is expressed in terms of “a social relation… between the products of their labour”, and in which “a definite social relation between men… assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (emphasis mine).

Among the different paths these concepts then travel: Lukács describes social relations taking on a “phantom objectivity”, and goes on to argue that this is related to the ascendency of formal, abstract and instrumental forms of perception and thought; Marx, by contrast, draws attention to an apparently mystical process in which material things are constituted as the bearers of supersensible social properties. Lukács speaks as though the spread of market relationships generates “reification”; Marx instead argues that the fetish results from “the peculiar social character of labour” – something that he does relate to the spread of market exchange, but only en route to discussing how commodity-producing labour possesses a dual character, split between human energy actually expended in concrete “sensuous” labouring activities, and “human labour in the abstract” – a collectively-enacted, supersensible pool of homogeneous, undifferentiated “labour” in which concrete labouring activities partake, more or less successfully, at the point that their products enter into relations with one another during market exchange. Lukács’ reification picks out the hypertrophic and cancerous expansion of a one-sided, abstract and formal “rationality”; Marx’s fetish picks out a sensuous material world “haunted” by supersensible entities.

At some point when I’m less tired, I’ll try to do something with this tension. 🙂 For the moment, I just toss it out as a placeholder, and to see whether others have any thoughts or associations on the issue…

Abstraction, Fetish, Materialism, Political Economy

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: An Aside on the Fetish

4 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 30, 2007

Okay. I want to stop here for a moment, catch my breath, and emphasise a couple of things about how I’m interpreting the argument on the fetish, before moving back into the text in greater detail. Note that this post might not make sense unless you’ve read at least the post immediately prior, on Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions.

As I have presented it here, “commodity fetishism” is a form of perception or thought that perceives material objects and human beings to possess supersensible essences that are distinct from their overtly-observable, sensuous properties. These essences are understood to be governed by impersonal laws. The existence of such laws can be inferred or deduced from empirical observation and manipulated instrumentally for human ends, but the laws (and the essences) are not understood to derive from contingent human practice.

Marx will not deny that such “essences” and “laws” exist – he is not undertaking an “abstract negation” that sees political economy as a simple error in thinking. His critical argument is that he can reach beyond the political economists to show how such “essences” and “laws” are brought into being, why it is plausible to perceive such essences and laws as “natural”, and yet why it has also become possible, over time, to understand the practical basis for these fetishised forms of thought – and thereby to open the possibility for transformation.

In the previous posts in this series, I have suggested that this line of argument opens up some very interesting potentials for understanding dimensions of modernity that reach well beyond the discourse of political economy: our sensitivity, for example, to a particular kind of dichotomy between “society” and “nature”, in which both poles of this dichotomy possess a very distinctive qualitative form; our sensitivity to the possibility for something like “matter” (understood as secularised “stuff” whose intrinsic nature is devoid of anthropological determinations); our sensitivity to the notion of an essential “human nature” lurking beneath the diverse overlays of culture (I’ll poke Wildly Parenthetical here, although I think she’s away at the moment – readers should note I’m not trying to hold her responsible for what I’m saying, but just flagging something I suspect she’ll be interested in – her work on experiences of an inner self is much more extensive than mine, so this is just a quick nod and a wave as I stumble across her terrain…). I could add other examples – and none of the examples I list here have been unfolded in a persuasive way in the writings I’ve undertaken so far. I list these points as placeholders for future development, as partial explanations for why I’m spending so much time lately on Marx, and as suggestions that Marx offers something vastly more powerful than a “critical economics” – that his work carries implications for a critical social theory of modernity that does something much more wide-reaching than it might initially seem.

A few further asides, on other interpretations of the fetish. The argument on the fetish is very often understood – or, at least, very often used – in quite different ways from what I’m outlining here. It is often used, for example, as a kind of anti-consumerist critique: we value money or material wealth so highly that we forget that it’s just an object, just a thing, of importance socially only because we make it important. It is often used as a kind of critique of individualism or private property: because we produce goods privately, rather than planning production collectively, we don’t become aware that, in reality, we are collectively engaged in a single, unified process of social production. It is often used as a critique of class domination: because the circulation of goods appears to involve only the exchange of equivalents, the reality of inequality and class domination is masked. It is often used as a critique of market distribution: markets abstract from the concrete conditions in which goods and services are produced, and thus veil the network of concrete social relations in which material reproduction actually unfolds. It is often used as a critique of “reification” or the domination of instrumental reason: because we perceive the natural world, and our fellow human beings, as “things” – as objects – we therefore treat them instrumentally, as nothing more than objects to be manipulated for our own gain. Etc.

I need to be very, very, very careful here: I am making a small and quite specific point, which is that none of these arguments captures what Marx is trying to say in the section on the fetish. I am not saying that Marx never makes points like those above – in places, even during the argument about the fetish, he will. And I am not dismissive of the potential importance of such arguments as important issues for critical analysis and as pivotal rallying-cries for political mobilisation.

I am saying that these arguments as attempts to articulate the notion of commodity fetishism are missing some of the strategic intent of this section of Marx’s text. The reading I am offering here is intended to drill in on a sometimes overlooked arc in this first chapter, to draw attention to how the entire chapter revolves around a series of reflections on forms of perception that attribute supersensible essences, governed by invisible laws, to things and to people. Such forms of perception, I am suggesting, are the “target” that the term “commodity fetishism” is trying to hit.

Understanding the argument in this way clarifies what was going on in the earlier sections of this chapter – in which Marx was deploying forms of thought that attribute supersensible essences to things and people, and then claiming to deduce laws from this starting point, in order to set the stage (hat tip john hutnyk) for the critique of such forms of thought. This interpretation makes sense of the first chapter as a reasonably unified argument, driving all along toward the critique of commodity fetishism. At the same time, this reading begins to suggest the power of Marx’s critique as a theory of modernity, and as a critical social theory that reaches far beyond a critical analysis of an “economic dimension” of modern society.

I have to plunge into marking first-year economics essays now – something that I suspect will see me longing for a bit of “critical economics” by the time I’m done. I’ll try to come back to this arc later in the week – I have to decide whether to plunge back into the minutiae of the sections of the chapter I’ve skipped across, or whether I’ve said as much as I have to say on this chapter for now, and should move forward in the text…

The previous posts in this series are: