Did Marx Fetishize Labor?

Abstract

Labor is often construed as the universal ontological ground of social life, the differentia specifica of human beings in most, but not all, Marxian accounts. But such a rendition fetishizes labor: a quality that arises as an effect of a network of relations (self-realizing productive activity, or the creator of all that exists) is conceived as the inherent, natural, and essential characteristic of an element of this network (labor). Despite occasional “slips,” Marx carefully avoids this fetishistic inversion: consequently, neither the creator of use-values nor the producer of values should be read as labor's innate or essential attribute. Rather, labor acquires these characteristics within Marx's discourse, rendering class relations visible.

Key Words:

• Capital
• Fetishism
• Labor
• Karl Marx
• Value

Acknowledgments

I thank David Ruccio and Antonio Callari for their insightful comments on an earlier version. I am thankful to Ceren Özselçuk, Yahya Madra, and Ruth Toulson for discussing this paper with me over the years. I am grateful for their, as well as two anonymous reviewers’, helpful comments. The usual caveat applies.

Notes

1 I refer to Marx's rare “moments” of, rather than tout court, fetishization, following Ruccio and Amariglio (2003), who register the “postmodern moments of modern economics.”

2 However, one person can be substituted for another person, or a signifier can take the place of the signified, which I discuss in detail below (Žižek 1997, 111).

3 For a brief history of various conceptualizations of fetishism and “Marx's appropriation” of this category, see Pietz (1993). I. I. Rubin (1972) contends that commodity fetishism is solely about “reification”: the objectification of social relations as relations between things is necessary for capitalism to function properly, and Marx's achievement lies in his treatment of “material categories as reflections of productive relations among people,” thus seeing the internal connections of these relations and the essence of capitalism. See Lukács (1971) for a different rendition of fetishism as “reification.” Amariglio and Callari (1993), in their seminal essay, criticize those who construe commodity fetishism as a theory of “false consciousness” and read it as a Marxian theory of subjectivity.

4 Dimoulis and Milios (2004) refer to this formulation as the “pre-Marxian” conception of fetishism.

5 Bellofiore (2014), referring to Ehrbar (2010) and Schulz (2011), suggests that Marx differentiates “fetish-like character” from “fetishism”; a “Hegelian-subject substance”—for example, the commodity—has a fetish-like character.

6 See Cornu (1957) and McLennan (1969) for a discussion of Marx's relationship to the Young Hegelians.

7 Among others, Murray (2000) questions Marx's interpretation of Hegel; see also Arthur (2004), especially the introduction and the authors cited therein.

8 This section, including its title, borrows heavily from R. P. Wolff (1989), who draws an analogy between “absolute fruit” and “abstract labor.” However, as it should become clear below, my analysis and conclusions differ significantly. Also see Murray (1988), and Rancière (1989), who suggest a similar analogy.

9 According to Arthur (2000, 107–8; 2002), Hegel's Logic (Idea) is homologous to Marx's Capital (capital). Arthur suggests that “Hegel's idea … provides the guideline to a reading of capital that uncovers the ‘metaphysics' of the value-form … the key thing about the bourgeois epoch is that real abstraction is present in exchange of commodities, and on this basis there develops a form, namely capital, which (like Hegel's Idea) is immanent in the phenomena and has effectivity in its objectification in them.” As a result, “the critique of Hegel cannot be separated from the critique of capital” (2000, 105).

10 Does Marx's (1977, 156) assertion that different useful labors count as “particular forms of realization or manifestation of human labor in general” constitute a rare and inadvertent instance of him deploying speculative inversion? An anonymous reviewer convinced me that it does not, as Marx does not ascribe an essence or telos to “human labor.”

11 However, if abstraction is a necessary yet not sufficient condition of fetishistic misrecognition, it is such a condition of “scientific knowledge,” as well. See Sohn-Rethel (1978). This is why Marx can refer to classical political economy as “scientific” despite these economists, as individuals within and representatives of the bourgeois society/economy/consciousness cannot but be commodity fetishists. Marx (1977, 173–4) can thus credit classical political economy for uncovering, albeit incompletely, the content of value—socially necessary abstract labor time embodied in commodities—hidden beneath the value-forms. But these economists never question and analyze why this content (labor) and its measurement (labor-time) has assumed these particular forms, value, and magnitude of value, respectively, and as such, classical political economists suffered from the fetishistic misrecognition that is part of their analysis by attributing these qualities to objects themselves.

12 Even if it were the case that Marx deployed the Hegelian speculative method, his insistence on the absurdity of construing values as universal incarnations of abstract human labor in particular, and his analysis of commodity fetishism in general is his warning against, and provides one with the theoretical framework to avoid such “inversions.”

13 Earlier, referring to the labor that produces a particular commodity, the coat, which is the result of a “specific kind of productive activity … determined by its aim, mode of operation, object, means and result,” Marx states that “we use the abbreviated expression ‘useful labor’ for labor whose utility is represented by the use-value of its product, or by the fact that its product is a use-value.” However, he declares useful labor “as the creator of use-values” almost immediately, no longer distinguishing between a specific useful labor, in its particularity—tailoring—from the concept, useful labor, in its universality, at this instance as if there is no difference between the two (Marx 1977, 133; emphasis added).

14 When Marx abstracts from particular useful labors in his analysis, he does not do so to arrive at the category useful labor but rather at abstract human labor. To put it differently, Marx sets the concrete/abstract, particularity/universality relationship between useful labors/abstract human labor, which has no room for the abstract category, useful labor as such. This is not to say that the relationship cannot be between useful labors/useful labor as such; however, this, in and of itself, is not helpful for analyzing commodities as bearers of value. Finally, abstract human labor is not a universally valid concept; rather, as the substance of value, it is specific to a commodity economy. See Murray (2000), who finds two notions of abstract labor in Marx.

15 Murray (2000, 46–7n42, emphasis added), while refuting “the unfortunate legend of Marx's asocial, ‘monological’ theory of labor and production,” argues that “some general observations regarding the distinctively human labor process can be made independently of, that is, in abstraction from, all specific social forms of the labor process.” In contrast, I contend that discussing labor independent of specific social forms is a moment of fetishization.

16 As Marx (1977, 982) puts it, “It is the same logic that infers that because money is gold, gold is intrinsically money; that because wage labor is labor, all labor is necessarily wage labor.”

17 By invoking the alienation of the objective conditions of labor, Marx refers to the private ownership of these means of production by nonlaborers; direct laborers cannot access the objects necessary to the labor process unless they sell their labor-power to their proprietors.

18 Marx left this section out of the first volume of Capital and subsequent editions; it appears for the first time in English as an appendix in the 1977 edition. See Mandel in Marx (1977, 943–7).

19 This is only one of three sources of “the desire to define productive and unproductive labor in terms of their material content.” The other two Marx (1977, 1046) designates as follows: (1) the consideration of labor as productive only if it results in a material product in the labor process as such and (2) the difference that exists “between labor engaged on articles essential to reproduction and labor concerned purely with luxuries.”