Rough Theory

Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions

An Aside on the Fetish

Human Labour in the Abstract

Next post in this series:

Value and Its Form – From Deduction to Dialectics

Critical Theory, Fetish, 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:

Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions

An Aside on the Fetish

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:

Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions

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

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Value and Abstract Labour as Real Abstractions

13 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 29, 2007

Those who have been following this discussion closely enough to read along in the comments, know that I have been struggling to work out how to write this post. The main thing I’ve been wrestling with is how to write something that captures the concepts I think Marx was trying to express, while also giving some sense of why Marx expresses those concepts in the style that he does. My sense is that the style of these early sections of Capital – the form of presentation or the way in which the concepts are unfolded and defended in the first couple of sections of the chapter in particular – is intentionally not really adequate to the concepts these sections purport to express. In fact, the form of presentation in these early sections actually contradicts some of the specific claims that Marx will make later in this same chapter. This leaves the reader in the very strange position of trying to decide whether Marx is wildly inconsistent, or whether there is something very strange going on here at the level of presentational strategy. What I want to do here is try to express how I have threaded my way through this decision.

My way of trying to understand this text is to view the entire chapter as building toward the argument about commodity fetishism (I assume everyone would agree with this), but then to take the – perhaps more controversial? (how common is the reading I’m unfolding here?) – step of suggesting that elements of the earlier sections of the chapter are actually illustrations of fetishised forms of thought. Marx begins this chapter, in other words, within the fetish – within in a form of thought that attributes particular social properties to material objects. Thus: the wealth of capitalism presents itself as a vast accumulation of commodities – a commodity has a dual character – therefore we can deduce that the labour that goes into the production of a commodity has a dual character – therefore we can see how the process of exchange and the development of money expresses what we have discussed as a tacit, internal duality within commodities. The arc of the first few sections of the chapter unfolds in this way, with occasional interstitial comments that suggest that something else must be in play.

As I suggested to Nate in the comments below, I think this arc is “backwards” from the standpoint Marx unfolds later in this same chapter: these early sections unfold as though objects (commodities) possess supersensual properties that then become manifest when we toss those objects into relations with one another: what could this presentation be describing, if not precisely the form of thought Marx is criticising in the section on the fetish? I therefore think we need to see the concluding section on the fetish as reacting back critically upon the earlier sections of this chapter, revealing these sections to be expressing forms of thought predicated on fetishised modes of experience.

So, reviewing some of the material I covered in the previous post, when Marx tries to analyse why exchange is possible, he unfolds this argument as though there must be some common non-material property congealed in the objects themselves, that provides a universal, quantifiable essence that enables objects to be exchanged in whatever proportions ensure that they contain the same quantity of this supersensible substance. Marx then presents an argument that claims to deduce (through a decontextualised application of reason that Marx himself will refute in the discussion of Aristotle in the third section of this chapter) that this common substance is labour. The labour that enables exchange, however, is not labour in its variegated concrete forms, because these diverse labouring activities have no more common identity than does the material dimension of the diverse commodities such concrete labour produces. Instead, concrete labouring activities also possess a cryptic supersensible property that cannot be identified when just examining the overt qualitative characteristics of the production process: the property of being “human labour in the abstract” – of being an aliquot portion of the (normative!) labour power of society as a whole:

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.

This homogeneous labour power is then allocated across the universe of all commodities produced, determining which kinds and which amounts, of all the diverse concrete labouring activities that are empirically undertaken and that generate concrete goods and services that comprise material wealth, get to “count as labour” under capitalism. Marx argues that the production of “human labour in the abstract” – of the “total labour power of society” – and its allocation among the universe of commodities, is determined by the labour power socially required, on average, to generate those use values for which there is a social demand. Empirical labouring activities that produce material goods for which there is insufficient social demand may not count as labour under capitalism, because they will not receive an aliquot portion of “human labour in the abstract” – no matter how much concrete effort has gone into their empirical production process. Empirical labouring activities that fall behind the socially average level of productivity may also experience a disjoint between the amount of time empirically spent in labouring activities, and the labour time that gets to “count as labour”.

“Value” is Marx’s name for the supersensible measure of the amount of labour power that “counts as labour” within particular commodities. The quantity of “Value” cannot be determined from any empirical property of a commodity or a labouring process taken in isolation: it is established only when goods are brought into relation with the entire universe of commodities through the process of exchange. Yet, in Marx’s account, “Value” is also not created within exchange – instead, the apparently random and arbitrary proportions in which commodities are exchanged are taken to express an underlying “lawlike” regularity that governs exchange in such a way as to distribute an impersonal compulsion to labour at socially average levels:

The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. It requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them. And why? Because, 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. The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.

Marx’s own “position”, I would suggest, goes something like: we are doing something extremely strange with our collective practice under capitalism. We are behaving collectively as if there exists some supersensible entity called “human labour in the abstract” – a specific, bounded quantity of a homogeneous substance that exists apart from material wealth or the actual expenditure of human effort to achieve some determinate aim, and that comes to be congealed in material objects as “Value”. By behaving this way, we are, in effect, creating or enacting “abstract labour” and “Value” as real (albeit social) entities. We do this by unintentionally collectively enacting a situation in which the production and distribution of value is somehow the pivot around which much of our social and material reproduction revolves. This unintentional collective enactment of a supersensible realm of “real abstractions” (more on this term later), far from bringing into being a rational and demystified form of social life, generates its own distinctive mystifications:

…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.

For many reasons (I’ll come back to this more adequately in later posts), when we come to discover that such “real abstractions” are operating to constrain our behaviour, we don’t initially grasp that our own social practice is the origin point for these coercive abstract structures or patterns. Instead, we do what the political economists did: we interpret these supersensible, socially-constituted entities to be an “essence” intrinsically existing tacitly within more overtly-observable, “sensuous” empirical entities.

So 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.

There is much, much more to say here – I’m not doing the argument justice, both in the sense that I am skipping details that are present in this chapter, and in the sense that I am also skipping ahead to elements of the argument that are not yet evident from this chapter at all. I’ll try to come back to all of this more adequately as I have time. My goal for the moment is just to render plausible the notion that Marx might be aiming for a WTF? reaction in the early sections of Capital. Marx might expect his readers already to know the punchline – already to be “in” on the joke. Marx then takes us through an immanent exploration of this fetishised position anyway because the standards of immanent critique don’t allow him to dismiss fetishised forms of thought as “mere” errors – he has to show how and why they arise, and also how they point beyond themselves, suggesting the possibility for something like his own critical position. And he also has to give an account of how his own position is given immanently within the social context he is criticising. He doesn’t do any of these things completely in this first chapter, but I think this is the kind of argument he is trying to set up here, to prime the reader for what is to come. Perhaps there’s a point to be made here about what goes wrong when an author has to explain their own jokes – or, perhaps in this case, what goes wrong when an author desperately needed to explain their own jokes, but didn’t get around to doing it… At any rate…

More on all of this as I have the time…

The quotations here are taken from the version of the first chapter available online through the Marxists Internet Archive.

Previous posts in this series are:

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

Self-Quoting in Capital

9 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 28, 2007

So now I’m curious: in this discussion below, both Nate and The Constructivist have raised the question of why Marx quotes himself in the first sentence of Capital:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

The Constructivist has mentioned Keenan’s discussion of the same question, in Fables of Responsibility (around p. 104 in this edition).

I’ve offered my (very off the cuff!) guess here – or perhaps a little self-quoting will make this easier:

I don’t have a definitive take on the issue, but, given that I read Marx as self-consciously putting forward an immanent critical theory, the most straightforward thing Marx might have been doing in quoting himself, was treating himself as he treats the political economists: flagging himself, and the critical perspective he is putting forward in the text, as objects of analysis – hinting to the reader that this starting point is not a priori, but something that will eventually be embedded as the text unfolds. In this sense, he is treating himself symmetrically to how he treats the political economists, whose quotations he footnotes and occasionally brings into the main text, and whom he criticises for their failure to treat themselves as objects of analysis, in the same way that they treat older forms of thought that they criticise. So I would take that initial quotation as a quick signal that Marx is placing himself and his positions on the same plane that he will place the political economists – which means that he has to understand their errors as more than “mere” errors – as errors that were historically plausible given the circumstances in which they were working – and he also needs to position his insights as more than “mere” good thinking – he needs to explain why his insights have become plausible in his own historical period.

I’m curious whether others have an opinion on this question – or whether anyone knows of other secondary sources who have commented on this question.

While I’m posting on Marxian things, I should also mention Sinthome’s interesting post and discussion on “The Utopia of the Commodity– Revolution by Proxy”, and the discussion at Nate’s what in the hell… on a troublesome passage from the section on primitive accumulation.

Political Economy, Reading, Self-Reflexivity

Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1: Nature and Society

8 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 21, 2007

Just a fragment tonight – very tired… A quick look at the introductory section of the first chapter of Capital, from the online version here.

Marx begins this chapter with what looks to be a fairly straightforward definition of the commodity:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.

Every useful thing, as iron, paper, &c., may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be of use in various ways. To discover the various uses of things is the work of history. So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.

The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities. When treating of use value, we always assume to be dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron. The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.

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. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.

I’ve previously suggested that this opening definition is not meant to represent Marx’s own position, but is instead intended to express the way in which the wealth of capitalist societies is intuitively perceived by social actors embedded in this context. By examining the implications of these intuitive perceptions, Marx will gradually unfold more complex categories – with the intention, ultimately, of looping back and “grounding” the sorts of definitions with which he starts: showing that these apparently simple and pristine beginnings presuppose, and express, the much more complex social and historical process that he will analyse throughout Capital.

In this opening passage, Marx suggests that capitalism presents itself in terms of a bifurcation between nature and society. On the one hand, in discussing use value, Marx suggests that capitalism presents us with (or sensitises us to the possibility of) a “thingly”, objective, material world that possesses timeless intrinsic properties. We can study and eventually uncover the properties of material objects over time, and we can also project human desires and meanings onto them, but the material world fundamentally sits “outside” of us.

On the other hand, in moving from use value to exchange value, Marx suggests that capitalism presents us with (or sensitises us to the possibility of) our current social arrangements as only the most recent instance in an ever-changing, accidental, relativistic historical succession – a succession of human conventions that may wrap themselves arbitrarily around, or project themselves contingently on, the “outside” material world. The material world figures by contrast as intrinsically devoid of anthropological determinations, as what remains behind when arbitrary human social arrangements have been stripped away – as a “true” content, which then comes to be covered over or masked by arbitrary social forms.

Why do I suggest that this is not Marx’s own position? Am I suggesting that Marx doesn’t believe that human social conventions are historical to their core? Am I positioning him as some kind of radical constructivist who sees in the natural world nothing but a human invention? No, to both questions. But something about the ways in which nature and society “give” themselves to us intuitively under capitalism, strikes Marx as in need of further investigation: after he outlines the definitions above, he invites: “Let us consider the matter a little more closely”.

Where he goes next is to a series of deductions or “conceptual abstractions” (the significance of this term will become clearer over time). Here, once again, I would suggest that Marx is not entirely speaking in his own voice, but is instead attempting to remain immanent to the phenomenological perspective he is trying to analyse.

So, still speaking in this immanent voice, Marx begins to analyse the process of exchanging two commodities. He presents an argument that runs along the following lines: The material forms of the commodities you intend to exchange are qualitatively different from one another: the goods aren’t in any qualitative sense the same. You would hardly desire to exchange one for the other if the goods were identical: what would be the benefit? Yet exchange makes an equation: it determines that the goods must be exchanged for one another in some specific quantitative proportion – the goods must therefore be “equal” in some sense.

But what is being equated? Not the determinate, qualitative, material properties of the goods – we have already established that we do not exchange goods that are qualitatively the same and, Marx adds, in a context in which any good can in principle be exchanged for any other, we are clearly willing to abstract from every material property of a good for purposes of exchange.

If we aren’t equating a material property of the goods, then we must be equating something else – Marx suggests that this must be a purely social property – without “an atom of use value”. Marx nominates the social property of being the products of human labour, “arguing” (remembering, again, that we aren’t yet reading Marx’s own position, but rather his exposition of what is “given” to a particular phenomenological perspective) that the only possible thing diverse commodities could have in common, is their common origin in human labour.

This common property, however, can’t refer to any specific kind of labour: if the determinate qualitative characteristics of particular labouring activities were taken into account, then we still wouldn’t have a common property, something homogeneous and uniform, to render possible the exchange. We must therefore be talking about labour abstracted from all its variegated concrete forms – abstract labour – a measure of the human labour power congealed in particular objects – a “social substance” that Marx calls “Value”.

But how is this labour power measured, such that it becomes possible to equate commodities in various exact proportions? Marx suggests (again not in his own voice) that abstract labour, devoid as it is of any qualitative characteristics, can only be measured by its duration – as labour-time. The measurement of the labour-time congealed in particular commodities enables the equation required for exchange.

Yet different amounts of labour are expended in the production of particular goods of the same type – and, if the actual labour time empirically invested in production were to determine the Value of a good, then the least efficient production process would generate the greatest Value. What prevents such a thing from happening? Marx answers: Value is not measured by the labour time empirically spent in particular individual acts of production, but rather by the labour time required, on average, in a given historical and social context, to produce a particular good.

Value therefore acts as a coercive social standard, which operates independently of particular empirical processes of production, which may be more or less efficient than the social norm expressed in Value. Producers labour as they do, at the level of productivity their skill and equipment allow. Value then determines how much of the labour they empirically spend in production, gets to “count as labour”. The producers can’t reliably know in advance how much of their labour will “count”:

The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions.

And, even where producers have reasons to suspect that much of their labour won’t “count”, they may be powerless to avert the situation:

For example, the same amount of labour in favourable seasons is embodied in 8 bushels of corn, and in unfavourable, only in four. The same labour extracts from rich mines more metal than from poor mines.

The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. 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.

In summarising Marx’s text above, I have suggested several times that he is not quite speaking in his own voice: I should clarify here the sense in which I mean this. Marx does retain the notion that socially-average labour-time constitutes the “social substance” of the Value congealed within commodities. The voicing in this section – the deductive form of the presentation that suggests that this social puzzle could be reasoned through with a detached and decontextualised logic – is something Marx will explicitly call into question in section 3, by asking the simple question of why, if logical reasoning were all that were required to deduce the existence of Value, Aristotle rejected the notion and viewed market exchange as a mere “makeshift for practical purposes”. As the chapter unfolds, Marx will therefore suggest that something other than a “conceptual abstraction” is at stake in the recognition of Value – that this conceptual breakthrough of political economy may owe an unrecognised debt to historical shifts – specifically to the constitution of a “real abstraction” enacted in collective practice.

More on the notion of a real abstraction, the concept of abstract labour, and the argument about the fetish (which will bring us back to the nature/society dichotomy with which I started this piece), as I have the time…

The previous instalments in this series are: