Capitalism Part 1

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist

CAPITALISM: INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

In the the previous tab, I presented my home as a microcosm of place. There's nothing special about my home; it just happens to be the place I know better than any other. Your home would have served just as well since every home is a bounded space permeated with lived experience. There's no place like home when it comes to observing how human beings make space meaningful.

Yet in detailing how Allyson and I "dwell" in our domestic space, to borrow one of Heidegger's favorite words, I may have left the impression that the home specifically and place in general are self-contained, self-regulating islands which have little interaction with the larger world. The story I told was about how two people (five if you add our son, daughter-in-law and Alice Alma; seven if you include Sugar and Clay) make a meaningful life inside the four walls and property lines of a privately-owned residence.

But what about the everyday economic realities of home life? What about rent and mortgage payments, property values, zoning restrictions, interest rates, insurance premiums, utility bills, home equity, evictions, foreclosures and the like? What about unhoused people and their relation to home and place? Shouldn't I say something about the abstract economic forces that keep spatial configurations in a constant churn and from which no home or place is spared?

Yes, I should. I will now turn from place to space. And I will take up the subject of capitalism, a mode of production that molds place and space in its own image while reproducing itself on an ever-expanding scale.

Diagram 1 above will be our road map as we set out to explore the internal dynamics and spatial configurations of capital. It was developed by Marxist geographer David Harvey in order to represent capital as a totality of value flows. In what follows, I'll do my best to explain the terms totality and value.

For the time being I will simply draw your attention to the three red rectangles in the diagram which represent critical moments in capital's life cycle, when value is produced, realized and distributed. You should also take note of the black border that encloses the flow chart. Here, we find two enabling conditions without which capital is inconceivable: nature and space (at the bottom) and human nature and culture (at the top). While these are treated by capital as "free gifts" originating outside the totality of value flows, capital transforms both non-human and human nature through a process of creative destruction (remember the kaleidoscope).

Since Harvey and his flow chart receive red-carpet treatment in this essay, it seems proper to acknowledge my intellectual debt to him. For half a century he has championed the theory of capital as set out by Marx, insisting that it is more relevant today than it was when Capital was first published in 1867, thanks to the globalization of capitalism since Marx's death and the triumph of what Harvey calls the neoliberal "counter-revolution" since 1973.

Harvey has advanced Marxist theory on multiple fronts. The processes of globalization, financialization, neoliberalization, urbanization, uneven geographic development and the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalism more generally have all come under his sharp analytical eye. Harvey's pathbreaking The Limits to Capital, published in 1982, together with a steady flow of monographs and essays in the years since, to say nothing of his wildly popular online reading courses on Capital and the Grundrisse, have helped persuade a growing number of people on the left and beyond that Marx's ideas remain a force to be reckoned with.

Count me among the persuaded.

The rest of this essay is divided into eight parts.

The first pours cold water on the claim made by mainstream economists that capitalism allocates scarce goods and resources efficiently and fairly by building a self-equilibrating market economy on the solid pillars of small government and individual freedom.

The second takes up Marx's concept of capital as a historically-specific mode of production which operates according to its own "laws of motion" and whose defining feature is the class relation between capitalists who own the means of production and wage earners who don't.

The third unpacks Marx's claim that value, defined as socially necessary labor time, serves as the "law" governing all aspects of the capitalist mode of production.

The fourth casts a vote in favor of Marx's proposal that we use value theory to explain the social relations of capitalist production instead of the price-setting mechanisms of the market.

The fifth explains how and why "value in motion" and the "coercive laws of competition" combine to make capital the most dynamic mode of production in human history, thanks to its unceasing pursuit of labor-saving technology.

The sixth shifts the focus from the production of value to its realization and circulation, where the dynamics of overaccumulation play out in such a way as to intensify capital's internal contradictions and raise the possibility of full-blown economic crisis, the nightmare that haunts all of us.

The seventh discusses how capital produces its own "space-time," as when it seeks a temporary solution to overaccumulation by expanding into new spaces and reconfiguring old ones, a displacement mechanism which Harvey calls the "spatial-temporal fix."

The eighth and final part brings our two tabs together in order to show how and why both place and space are incorporated into capital's laws of motion through travel, tourism and place branding.

MARX VERSUS THE MAINSTREAM

Anyone curious about monopoly business practices can learn a lot from the the profession of economics, where the chances of finding a self-identified Marxist are close to zero. The mainstream has established a de facto monopoly over its corner of the knowledge market, one that extends across the length and breath of institutional life in the US, from the halls of academe to research institutes, think tanks, the business world, corporate media, non-governmental organizations and the public sector.

What do these monopolists have to say about the economic system that controls our lives? If you were a college freshman required to take Econ 101, what would you be likely to hear on the subject of capitalism?

In search of an answer, I clicked on the website of the International Monetary Fund, the tough-love enforcer of fiscal austerity and structural adjustment across most of the planet today. The IMF is a go-to source for official wisdom on the dismal science by virtue of its status as a financial cornerstone of the global economy, described in glowing terms by the World Economic Forum as "the world's financial firefighter." The Forum is speaking for the global elites who converge on Davos every year, projecting confidence and competence but, in truth, terrified at the thought that the financial system in which they are deeply invested could go up in flames at any time. The IMF's job is to keep borrowers in line, lenders in the black and the Davos crowd in high spirits.

I ordinarily try to steer clear of the IMF and the World Economic Forum for the same reason that I avoid SWAT teams, bill collectors and the IRS. But I decided to make an exception in this case because I wanted to eavesdrop on what the masters of the universe are saying about capitalism.

I came across an essay titled, "What Is Capitalism?" Bingo!

The authors of this piece provide a convenient list of what they call the six "pillars of capitalism": private property, self-interest, open competition, the market mechanism, individual freedom and small government.

The first four of these items would make the cut in most definitions of capitalism, Marxist and mainstream alike.

But the last two are debatable, to put it mildly. "Individual freedom" has a particularly discordant ring. In the mainstream view, it basically boils down to the freedom of a capitalist to invest his money and run his business as he sees fit and the freedom of a worker to spend her paycheck or max out her credit card on whatever she wants. This is a pretty stingy conception of freedom when you take a moment to reflect on the billions of people worldwide who do not have money to invest, businesses to run, paychecks to spend or credit cards to max out.

And what about "small government"? The last three centuries of world history provide ample evidence, in my opinion, that capitalists and the economic system that underwrites their power are perfectly happy with big government, indeed the bigger the better, as long as it serves their interests.

The acid test of any theory or concept is how well it explains the subject under investigation. So, it seems fair to ask how well the IMF's six pillars explain the world in which we live, a world that both mainstream economists and Marxists readily agree is dominated by capitalism. For example, how well do the pillars hold up under the weight of the following developments on the global stage:

the ever-expanding global working class which keeps consumer markets in the US and Europe filled to overflowing, despite earning low to subsistence-level wages under exceedingly difficult working conditions;
the unprecedented pace of worldwide urbanization as rural populations pour into the favelas and shanty towns of Latin America and Africa, the booming megalopolises of East and South Asia, and the aging capitals of the Global North whose basic infrastructures are nearing their expiration date;
the militarization of national borders in the historic heartland of capitalism as desperate populations seek better jobs, new lives and relief from the ravages of climate catastrophe and IMF-imposed fiscal austerity;
the deepening legitimacy crisis of neoliberal governing regimes in the advanced capitalist world, as expressed in a pervasive sense of alienation from established political parties and practices which have been in place since the end of the Second World War;
the surge of ethno-religious-national hatreds as increasingly marginalized populations circle the wagons in a desperate effort to protect themselves against the zero-sum game of capitalist globalization and super-power rivalry;
the constant threat of future economic crisis and social havoc, similar to what was experienced during the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 and the COVID-19 recession, both of which created fertile soil for the rise of all manner of right-wing demagoguery and revanchist politics;
the continued upward trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions which poses an immanent threat to planetary life and is fueled by the growth imperative or what Marx would characterize as capitalism's logic of "accumulation for accumulation's sake."

The mainstream would say that the trouble spots I have flagged, while regrettable, have little if anything to do with capitalism. Far from being the cause of the cascading calamities engulfing the planet capitalism gives us the best chance of solving them, provided that we put in place the proper set of economic incentives enabling the invisible hand of the market to do what it does best, namely allocate scarce resources efficiently and for the betterment of all.

That the perilous state of the world might have something to do with the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of capitalism is dismissed out of hand by the mainstream. Whatever problems exist are external, not internal, to the economic system under which we live.

This is an ideological blind spot. In the last tab, I defined ideology as "the appropriation of values and norms in order to buttress social power." Is the IMF appropriating the positive values and norms that attach to the terms "individual freedom" and "limited government" in order to buttress the social power of capitalist class interests, particularly those that have taken up lodging in the financial sector, where the IMF has a penthouse suite with breathtaking views of the global economic order?

Yes, I believe it is.

Ideology can take a variety of forms, according to the balance of class forces on the ground. It can celebrate the dominant power arrangements as the best for all concerned, divert attention from them through tried-and-true techniques of misdirection or simply pretend they don't exist.

The IMF definition checks off all three boxes, but it's the last one that really jumps out. In making the case that capitalism is the nursery of individual freedom and small government, the mainstream must tiptoe around what Marx calls "the hidden abode of production" aka the capitalist workplace.

It's easy to understand why. The moment wage workers step inside the capitalist workplace, they leave any semblance of freedom behind. Whatever freedom they might enjoy as consumers in the marketplace does not carry over into the workplace. True, workers are always looking for ways to exercise their freedom at the point of production through individual and collective acts of resistance. But in doing so, they invariably run up against the written and unwritten rules of the capitalist workplace, rules that, when push comes to shove, will be strictly enforced by the repressive apparatus of the state, from judges with their injunctions down to cops and soldiers with their guns.

So much for individual freedom and small government.

In his sustained critique of bourgeois political economy, Marx points out that the problem with definitions of the IMF variety is that they dwell on surface appearances and external forms, which are then posited as universal and timeless characteristics of what humanity is or at least ought to be. Such approaches easily slide into a kind of essentialism in which the roots of capitalism are traced to something called human nature or what Adam Smith characterized as our species-specific "propensity to truck, barter, and exchange."

Naturalizing capitalism is precisely what unifies the bourgeois political economy of Marx's day and the mainstream economics of our own.

Mistaking surface appearances for the real thing can be dangerous, as anyone who has spent time at the beach knows. We might not be able to see the riptide from our comfortable spot under the umbrella, but it's terrifying reality will become instantly clear the moment we decide to take a nice cool dip.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever likened Marx to a lifeguard. But perhaps the analogy is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Suspended between heaven and earth in his lifeguard tower that gives him a bird's-eye view of the crowded beach, Marx has raised the red hazard flag. If we heed his warning and look beneath the placid surface of capitalism to its turbulent depths, what we will see is not the IMF's self-equilibrating mode of exchange but Marx's contradiction-ridden mode of production.

NAMING THE SYSTEM

You might be surprised to learn that Marx, whose name will be forever attached to the word capitalism, never used it in any of his voluminous writings, published and unpublished, on political economy. But this is easy to explain: the word capitalism was not introduced until the middle of the 19th century and did not begin to circulate widely on the political left until after Marx's death. As you can see in the photo above, it continues to circulate in Florence, adding another voice to the street art that decorates that beautiful city and urban space generally, wherever you go.

If the word capitalism was not available to political economists of the 18th and 19th centuries, what did they call the new economic system that by their own account was turning the world upside down? In his 1763 Lectures on Jurisprudence, Adam Smith contended that history fell into four "ages," each of which corresponded to a predetermined stage of development. All societies were obligated to pass through these stages on their way to the promised land of civility, civilization and material abundance. In chronological order, Smith enumerated the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture and the age of commerce. He designated "commercial society" as humanity's crowning achievement, the highest form of social organization ever devised.

In The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, Marx and his fellow revolutionary Frederick Engels likewise marveled at the technological and material achievements made possible by the new economic system. But they refused to gloss over the violence, oppression and upheaval that were the flip side of Smith's narrative of enlightened progress. "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles," they famously proclaimed.

Writing at a moment when such struggles had suddenly taken a revolutionary turn in Europe, Marx and Engels set out to unmask the contradictory social relations that were exploding along the street barricades of Paris but were notable by their absence in Smith's story of human advancement. By redesignating "commercial society" as "modern bourgeois society" they made clear how closely the new economic system was tied to the rise of a new ruling class bent on conquering the world.

In Marx and Engels's revolutionary call to arms, Smith's assumption that progress was an unqualified blessing for all took quite a beating.

Unsurprisingly, Marx ran afoul of the authorities. During the next nineteen years of political exile in London, he undertook a herculean inquiry into the economic system on which modern bourgeois society and its ruling class were based. He conceived of this system as a historically-specific "mode of production" in which the material forces and social relations of production fused in a contradictory unity. Like all previous modes of production such as feudalism, Marx contended, this one operated according to its own "laws of motion."

Marx named this mode of production and its laws of motion capital.

This is a good place to stop and ask what is the difference, in Marx's view, between capital and modern bourgeois society, and how do both of these relate to what nowadays we call capitalism?

"What Marx subjects to analysis," Harvey explains, "is the totality of capital within the much broader totality of capitalism. His reason for so doing is that he sees capital as the economic engine, the foundational power-house, the source of the abstract forces to which all of us are willy-nilly obligated and bound to some degree."

You'll spare yourself a lot of headaches if you keep in mind Harvey's distinction between capital as a specific mode of production and capitalism as the more expansive social formation in which the mode of production is situated.

Marx never intended his theory of capital to be a theory of everything. It was not, for example, a theory of modern bourgeois society. For the most part Marx chose to ignore matters that go to the heart of capitalism as a social formation, such as social reproduction, culture, literature, consumption, everyday life, religion, the state, civil society and identity formation. He pushed these things to the side not because he thought them unworthy of analysis, but in order to focus his full attention on the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production, which, as he stated in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "can be determined with the precision of natural science."

It is true that Marx saw a close connection between the mode of production and the social formation. And it is also true that in the Preface and elsewhere, he seems at times to prioritize the mode of production and the forces of production over everything else. But when Marx's writings are read through his concept of totality, which posits capital and capitalism as dynamic wholes made up of co-evolving and overdetermined processes, I think it is fair to say that Marx saw the social formation as relatively autonomous vis-à-vis the mode of production, to borrow a term from Louis Althusser, a leading Marxist intellectual of the 1960s.

Don't be taken in by those who would have you believe that Marx was a crass economic determinist and a technological reductionist. While he never wavered in his commitment to historical materialism, Marx understood that capitalism did not lend itself to the kind of "scientific" analysis that was suitable for capital.

The study of capitalism called for the narrative skills of a historian, the nose-to-the-ground doggedness of a journalist, the imaginative powers of a novelist and the expressive brush strokes of a painter—in short, the sensitivities of an observer open to the contingencies of everyday life. Marx was fully capable of undertaking this kind of analysis, as is attested by The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), a rip-roaring classic of Marxist historiography on par with Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution, E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and Harvey's Paris: Capital of Modernity.

If Marx had decided to spend his adult life analyzing capitalism rather than capital, we might remember him today as the author of Modern Bourgeois Society. But every author must choose which books to write and which to put on the bucket list. Marx made Capital his life's work, even though it meant postponing, permanently as it turned out, a projected series of books that would have dealt directly with many topics that fall on the capitalism side of the divide, including a literary study of novelist Honoré Balzac whose fictional works he admired for their warts-and-all depiction of the spectacles and seductions of modern bourgeois society.

For what it's worth, my view is that Marx made the right choice in putting capital before capitalism. However much he left undone and however much we might regret not being able to read Modern Bourgeois Society or his book on Balzac, no one before or since has written more or more insightfully about capital as an economic system, a mode of production.

What, then, is this mode of production? What are its laws of motion? The long answer will be found in the 2,600 pages of Capital, to which we should probably add the 900-page Grundrisse, Marx's unpublished preparatory notes written in 1857-58. But if you're looking for a sentence or two rather than a life sentence, consider the following definition:

Capital is a self-reproducing totality of co-dependent processes through which value is produced, realized, exchanged, distributed, circulated, consumed and reinvested so that there is more value at the end of the day than there was at the start.

If this exceeds your word count, try Harvey's three-word definition: capital is value in motion.

I can almost hear you asking, "OK, but what is value?"

WHAT IS VALUE?

Marx thought long and hard about where to begin the first and only volume of Capital to appear before his death in 1883. The next two volumes would be published later, assembled from writings in various stages of completion by Marx's lifelong friend and collaborator Frederick Engels. After years of reading, taking notes and producing draft after draft of his projected multi-volume inquiry, Marx had succeeded in formulating the key concepts guiding his analysis. But only one of them was judged by Marx to be suitable as an opening gambit, a point of departure. Only one would be the subject of Chapter 1 of Volume 1.

Marx might have devoted this chapter to a historical sketch of how the capitalist mode of production emerged in fits and starts from the interstices of feudalism and the organized violence of slavery, conquest and colonialism. Alternatively, he might have begun on a transhistorical note with a discussion of how the labor process mediates the metabolic relation between society and nature, and so forms the material foundation of every historic mode of production. A third possibility would have been to return to the central point which he and Engels had made with such fiery passion in The Communist Manifesto, namely that the driver of the most recent phase of history is the class struggle between capitalists who own the means of production and workers who own nothing more than their capacity to labor.

So, where does he begin his magnum opus on the internal workings of capital?

With the commodity.

A surprising choice, to put it mildly. To appreciate just how surprising let's play make-believe. The above photo is of the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico. I want you to pretend that Marx is a twenty-first-century geologist who is researching and writing a book about the formation of this gorge. He spends years immersed in the scholarly literature. Finally, the time comes to put the books aside and see the gorge for himself. He catches a flight to Albuquerque, rents a car at the airport and heads north to Taos County. Sitting in the passenger seat is his loyal research assistant, Frederick Engels. They cross over the Gorge Bridge on Highway 64, park the car at the nearby rest stop and walk along the west rim trail, stopping at a viewing point to gaze in wonder at the gorge's immensity.

Nothing has prepared Marx for this view. He is stupefied by the sheer power of the forces that have sculpted and continue to sculpt this landscape. Then he looks down and notices a small rock at the toe of his boot, close to a bleached-out wooden cross, perhaps a memorial to one of the dozens of suicides who each you throw themselves off the bridge that he sees in the distance. The rock is nothing special, no different from all the other rocks scattered around the viewing point. He picks it up, examines it from every angle. He then turns to Engels and says, "Frederick, I shall title Chapter 1 of my book, The Rock."

Back to reality. As you may already know and can easily guess, the title Marx chose for the real Chapter 1 was "The Commodity."

Anyone reading this chapter for the first time will probably find the experience disorienting, owing to the way in which Marx toggles back and forth between the rock-like part (the commodity) and the gorge-like whole (capital). On the one hand, Marx wants to identify capital's laws of motion in the most ordinary thing that all of us living under their sway are familiar with and take for granted, "the economic cell-form" of capital, as he calls it, otherwise known as the commodity. Rather than trying to present capital in the round from some godlike vantage point as if he were Zeus sitting on his throne, Marx proposes to view it at ground-level where the mere mortals live.

On the other hand, this chapter is famous for its high level of abstraction, in which Marx seems to be viewing capital's laws of motion from the moon. It introduces difficult concepts with little historical context and few illustrative details, leaving us to wonder how the same Marx who co-authored the Communist Manifesto with its passionate call for proletarian revolution could have written something so seemingly apolitical and untethered to the class struggle. Marx knew that this chapter would send many readers running for the hills, either because it was too damn hard or because they expected a little more heat in their communist gumbo. But in the end, he saw no way around the problem. "There is no royal road to science," Marx explained in one of his prefaces, "and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits." Readers of Chapter 1 have been gasping for air ever since.

Strap on your oxygen tanks and mountain shoes because we're going for a climb.

The commodity or "commodity form," Marx tells us, is an external thing that internalizes the relations and contradictions of capital by virtue of its three-fold identity. It is a "use value" that satisfies some human want or need; an "exchange value" that can be bartered for other commodities; and a "value," which turns out to be the Gordian knot tying the first two identities together.

What is this last identity, this value stripped of any adjectival noun? Marx reasons that value must be a quality that all commodities share in common and without which they would not be exchangeable. The quality that makes commodities commensurable, he concludes, is the human labor objectified in them. What is more, the magnitude of value is measured in units of human labor time.

In setting out this labor theory of value, Marx remained within the general outlines of classical political economy as represented by David Ricardo. However, he introduced two modifications to Ricardo's value theory that changed everything.

First, Marx specified that value is the "socially necessary" labor objectified in the commodity. Likewise, he identified the magnitude of a commodity's value as the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. By socially necessary Marx meant the average labor time congealed in a commodity, taking into account such factors as the level of skill, intensity of labor, state of technology and availability of natural resources prevailing in a given branch of industry. The addition of the two words socially necessary to Ricardo's labor theory of value signaled Marx's awareness of the crucial role of technology in the accumulation process and put labor productivity at the heart of his value theory.

"A commodity's magnitude of value varies directly with the amount of labor realized in it, and inversely with labor's productive power," Marx writes. The implications of this relationship—that an increase in labor productivity will lower the value of commodities by reducing the quantity of abstract labor objectified in them—will be the steady backbeat of Capital as Marx trains his value theory on the internal contradictions and crisis tendencies of this mode of production.

Second, Marx observes that in commodity production under capital labor undergoes a bifurcation from which emerges "concrete" and "abstract" labor. While Marx could be quite generous in acknowledging his debt to classical political economists like Smith and Ricardo (and quite merciless in his dismissal of their "vulgar" wannabes), he was quick to claim credit for being "the first to offer a critical account" of the double-sided nature of labor. It's easy to understand his proprietary feelings on this score, since he considered the concrete/abstract distinction to be "the nub of any real attempt to understand political economy." For Marx concrete labor refers to the particular and multifarious types of labor that go into the production of use values; abstract labor refers to the homogenized and fungible labor that goes into the production of values.

To visualize the contradictory unity of concrete and abstract labor, and of use value and value, imagine that you have just become the proud owner of a state-of-the art blender equipped with a high-speed setting for making the smoothies your personal trainer swears by. In go the separate ingredients—yogurt, fruit juice, raw fruit, kale, crushed ice, protein powder—and out comes a substance of uniform consistency, taste, smell, temperature and color.

In this analogy, the pre-blender ingredients represent different types of concrete labor, each of which is qualitatively distinct from the others, while the post-blender smoothie represents abstract labor whose aliquot parts differ from one another only in quantitative terms. Think of the commodity as an empty glass into which you pour your smoothie.

In the new English edition of Capital, translator Paul Reitter hits the perfect note in rendering the abstract labor contained in a commodity as "a ghostly objecthood—a bare gelatinous blob of undifferentiated human labor, of human labor-power expended without regard for the form of its expenditure." The difference between Reitter's translation and my analogy is that gelatin is not made from fruits and vegetables, as are smoothies, but from animal parts, which evokes the chilling association of abstract labor and value with bodily dismemberment, slaughter houses, steaming vats and hulking processing machinery. Given the gothic and vampiric imagery threading through the first chapters of Capital, there is every reason to think that Marx used such language purposefully and with considerable relish.

We are only a few pages into Chapter 1 and already Marx has planted in our mind the grotesque image of flesh-and-blood workers, the bearers of abstract labor, pureed and consumed by capital.

Of course, we should not take such metaphors literally. The value of a commodity is not a material thing that can be pureed, consumed or, for that matter, perceived directly with the physical senses. It is a social relation specific to commodity production under capital, a relation among private producers whose abstract labor, measured as socially necessary labor time, congeals into Reitter's gelatinous blobs of undifferentiated human labor.

Like all social relations, value is immaterial. But if commodities are to exchange on a large scale, value must have some kind of material representation or form of appearance, otherwise capital would remain permanently stuck in a barter system, a victim of arrested development.

The material representation and measure of value, according to Marx, is exchange value. Marx posits a barter economy in which commodities exchange directly with one another. In this situation, the value of one commodity (the relative form) is measured against the value of another (the equivalent form). But this unmediated system of exchange will shrivel away once capital takes hold. In a capitalist system of generalized commodity production and exchange, where market relations have seeped into every nook and cranny of social life and money has emerged as the universal equivalent and medium of exchange, exchange value is expressed in monetary terms as price. Price is not identical with value, nor value with price, and herein lay a tangled nest of contradictions which Marx will try to tease out in the third volume of Capital.

The main point Marx wants to drive home, in response to all those who see the monetization of gold and silver as the be-all and end-all of political economy, is that the money form is immanent in the commodity form. If not gold and silver, capital would find something else to serve as the universal equivalent.

The contradictory unity of value and its monetary representation sets the stage for "The Fetish Character of Commodities—and the Secret It Entails," the famous final section of Chapter 1, in which Marx allows his imagination and language to run wild. Coming on the heels of the rather dry discussion of relative and equivalent value-forms, Marx now seeks to explain how and why the processes of commodity production and exchange mask the true nature of capital and its social relations. By the time he's finished every commodity has been transformed into "a social hieroglyphic" while ordinary tables stand on their heads and perform acrobatic feats for the entertainment of other commodities.

Block quotes are something I try to avoid, but when it comes to a bona fide puzzler like the fetishism of commodities, I think it best to let Marx speak for himself before trying to get to the bottom of what he's saying:

"The mystery of the commodity-form amounts, then, simply to this: the form reflects back at people the social characteristics of their own labor as objective characteristics of their labor products, as socio-natural properties of those things. And so the commodity form also reflects back at people the producers' relation to the totality of labor as a social relation among objects that exists apart from and outside the producers themselves."

Let's try to break this down. Commodities in their capacity as use values are produced by people to satisfy some human want or need. But they are produced under conditions that are not of the producers' choosing. For example, the social division of labor under capital has developed to the point where all producers are entangled in dense webs of interdependency with other producers. But because these producers are private individuals who go about their productive activities like so many Robinson Crusoes on their desert islands, they have no direct way of knowing each other, of pinpointing their place in the social division of labor or of relating their private labor to the totality of social labor. The social relations of production appear to them only when the material products of their labor are exchanged. At the moment of exchange, however, the relations among the producers and between the producers and their products are turned inside out, taking the form of "material relations between persons and social relations between things."

In unmasking the fetish character of commodities Marx is able to bring capital's well-kept secret to light: value is not an intrinsic quality of use values, it is a product of abstract human labor.

Let's go to the movies for what I hope will be a helpful analogy. In Walt Disney's 1940 animated classic, Fantasia, Mickey Mouse makes cinematic history in the role of the sorcerer's apprentice. The story opens with the Sorcerer practicing magic while the Apprentice drudges away mopping the floors. When the Sorcerer decides it's naptime, Mickey takes the opportunity to try on his magical hat and cast a spell, bringing to life an ordinary mop who will take over the chores. The mop is a perfect worker, filling up bucket after bucket with water for the many rooms of the castle that are in need of a good cleaning. Confident that everything is under control, Mickey dozes off and dreams of the unlimited powers he commands. Upon awakening he discovers to his horror that the inanimate object he has conjured into existence is threatening to flood the entire castle. Mickey goes after the mop with an axe and chops it into splinters. But each splinter is immediately reborn as a new mop, unleashing an army of water-carrying mops who overrun the castle, determined to finish their job, even if this means drowning Mickey and every living thing in sight. Fortunately, the Sorcerer arrives in the nick of time to save the day.

If Mickey had read "The Fetish Character of Commodities," he would have known that the products of labor, given the right circumstances, can develop a mind of their own and turn against their producers.

Let me caution, once again, against taking these analogies literally. When Marx describes the commodity as being "full of metaphysical quibbles and theological quirks" or refers to the table that, upon taking the commodity form, "turns upside down and spins bizarre notions out of its blocky head," he is trying to shake readers out of their complacency and puncture the pretensions of bourgeois economists by associating commodities and capital with Medieval scholasticism and pagan wizardry. This is a rhetorical strategy, one that works effectively, I believe.

Marx is not saying that fetishism is an illusion that will go away as soon as we recognize it as such. Fetishism is all too real, lodged as it is in the very heart of capitalist production and exchange. To rid ourselves of commodity fetishism, hints Marx in this opening chapter, we must rid ourselves of value and its mode of production.

Capitalism in Place: Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist

CAPITALISM: INTRODUCTION

Capitalism in Place:
Photos and Text by a Marxist Tourist