In a fascinating essay “Marx’s Coat,” Peter Stallybrass traces the origins of the concept of fetishism with the help of thinkers such as William Pietz, Marcel Mauss and others to argue that commodity fetishism “is one of Marx’s least understood jokes,”[i] often mistakenly invoking a negative attitude toward materials, objects and things. Quite the contrary, fetishes in Africa, Latin America, South Asia and beyond have been historically worn, worshipped and believed to be objects or ornaments having the spiritual power to keep demons away. Still worn around the neck or the upper arm in large parts of South Asia, the leather pouches containing passages from the Quran are fetishes offering ontological protection against the devil. Be this as it may, the history of fetishism in the non-European world has been a history of attachment with materials, objects and things. So much so that these non-living things appeared to have “a name, a personality, a past.”[ii]

Attachment to material objects came to be demonised only in the aftermath of the European trading encounter with West Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. European traders found it bizarre how people in Africa and the Americas could worship ““trifles” (“mere” fetishes) and “valuable” things (i.e. gold and silver) alike.”[iii] Considering such emotional fondness for objects pre-civilised, the European subject recognised “the true (i.e. market) value of the object-as-commodity.”[iv] Instead of being fixated upon objects (fetishes), it chose to be fixated upon “the transcendental values that transformed gold into ships, ships into guns, guns into tobacco, tobacco into sugar, sugar into gold, and all into an accountable profit.”[v]

Such insightful history by Stallybrass helps us juxtapose long-standing material fetishism with the recent commodity fetishism in order to understand how capitalism reversed the entire history of fetishism. But let us walk through the process first. As early as the opening line of Capital I, Marx defines a commodity as the “elementary form” of the capitalist mode of production. In addition to having a use-value, unlike things or objects of use that have always existed either in the natural form or in the form modified by human labour, commodities also have an exchange-value. While the objects of use have a particular quality, reflecting either their natural properties or the specific concrete human labour that re-ordered matter, commodities also have an overwhelming quantative element.

It is important to ask how objects of use (use-values) that had been integral to human history came to be transformed not merely into commodities (exchange-values) but into commodity-form. Marx repeatedly cites examples of non-capitalist modes of production to decipher what exactly it was that got metamorphosised. For instance, in the fourth section of the first chapter of Capital I, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret,” Marx famously cites four examples of non-capitalist modes of production: Robinson Crusoe living on an island; medieval European societies; an English peasant family; and an association of free men. What binds these varying spatiotemporal modes of production is collective labour (excluding, obviously, Robinson, who lived alone). Similarly, debunking the bourgeois economists’ fallacy that commodity production is a necessary condition for the division of labour, Marx refers to the primitive Indian society with its elaborate division of labour. Historically, therefore, neither collective labour nor its division turned products into commodities. Indeed, “only the products of mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation, can confront each other as commodities.”[vi]

However, the problematic transition is not from products (use-values) to commodities (exchange-values), for commodities have been produced in pre-capitalist societies too, albeit at the margins. Commodity exchange, historically, has not been an exception, although, by and large, it existed between communities, not between independent producers. The unusual transition, to Marx, is that it is only under capitalism that we have a commodity–producing society.

We have seen that it is only capitalist mode of production—with its conditions of private, isolated labour and exchangeability—that not only turns products into commodities but also social relations into commodity–producing relations. Other things are happening in the process too. Commodity production robs labour of its ever-standing particularity, its concreteness and its qualitative aspect. Since commodities, as exchange-values, “are merely definite quantities of congealed labour time,”[vii] labour, under capitalist commodity production, is nothing but a magnitude. And because its qualitative aspect is suppressed increasingly, it loses its concreteness in favour of abstraction.

We have reached a point where quantification and abstraction have taken over quality and concreteness, where abstract labour takes over concrete labour, where products of labour have turned into commodities and where commodities cannot be separated from the commodity-form. Marx also defines the commodity as “a born leveller and cynic…always ready to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity.”[viii] In another instance, he writes: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”[ix] Yet in other instances, he equates commodities with, at times, social hieroglyphs and, at other times, with “sensuous things which are at the same time supra-sensible and social.”[x]

Why does Marx use such metaphysical attributes for commodities, theorising them not as passive items of consumption but as protagonists, as “autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own”?[xi] And why does Marx think they are not trivial things but strange, mysterious entities? These are inter-related questions, but let us attend to the latter first.

Marx himself explains where the enigma, the mystery, comes from: it arises neither from the commodity’s use-value nor from the “nature of the determinants of value,”[xii] as bourgeois economists want us to believe, but from the commodity-form itself. Three things occur here:

“The equality of the kinds of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of the expenditure of human labour-power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the value of the products of labour; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of their labours are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour.”[xiii]

Commodity production is a process in which the “social characteristics of men’s own labour” are reflected as “objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves,” in which “the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour” is disguised as “a social relation between objects.”[xiv] In complete conjunction with the two conditions we outlined above (isolated labour and exchangeability), this substitution is what turns products of human labour into commodities. The commodity-form “is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”[xv] Just like in religion “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own,” in the world of commodities, too, it is “the products of men’s hands”[xvi] that get out of hand and attain the status of active beings with a life of their own. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism, commodities becoming overbearing entities exercising their power over humans.

Here we can transition to the first of the two questions posited above: why does Marx use such metaphysical attributes for commodities? It is neither metaphorical nor accidental. Three things to note here. First, he makes it clear that fetishism “is inseparable from the production of commodities”[xvii]: fetishism is the natural outcome of the commodity-form. Second, both the workers and the capitalists remain unaware of the culmination of the process. To the capitalist, on the one hand, the relations of production start appearing as “material relations between persons and social relations between things.”[xviii] To the workers, on the other hand, “the specific social character of private labours…appears…to be just as ultimately valid as the fact that the scientific dissection of the air into its component parts left the atmosphere itself unaltered in its physical configuration.”[xix] For the capitalist, the workers are the walking commodities and commodities are the persons in the making. For the worker, the social character of private labour—the exploitation regime—gets naturalised, concealing “the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects.”[xx] That is, the irrationality of the commodity-form gets rationalised.[xxi] Third, Marx explains the general formula for value/capital as a shift not only from C-M-C (selling a commodity to get money to eventually buy a commodity) to M-C-M (buying a commodity to eventually sell it) but also from M-C-M to M-C-M’ (where M’ = M + ΔM, i.e. a sum of the original money/investment advanced and an increment—the surplus-value). If we look closely at the process,

“…both the commodity and money function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodity. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the forms in turn of money and commodity, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently.”[xxii]

It is clear that the movement of value—from M-C to C-M to M-M’—is its very own, just like its valorisation is self-valorisation. But Marx goes even further to argue that the value “now enters into a private relationship with itself… It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person.”[xxiii]

We can now see that capital is an autonomous subject. It is not only self-valorising but also has its own language. It has its own logic of domination: it comes to dominate not only the sphere of circulation and production but also law and ontology. The logic of capital becomes the logic of being.

Just like the leather pouches containing verses from the Quran exercised power over their wearers, modern commodities have come to control humans. But the difference lies in the fact that people in Africa, South Asia and the Americas wore those pouches as a conscious cultural practice to keep the demons away, while, in the capitalist mode of production, commodities have attained the status of powerful fetishes without humans being aware of it. Far from being a fetish resisting the power of the demons, the commodity itself becomes a spectre, having a “phantom-like objectivity.”[xxiv] The commodity-form indeed is a spectral-form. Rather than attachment to concrete objects, the commodity-form induces an attachment to the abstraction of the commodity. Instead of holding on to objects as things containing labour, social relations, memories and pasts, the idea here is to keep chasing the abstract indefinitely. Instead of being attached to things, the idea is to exchange and give them up, only to exchange and give up again. The result is the spectacle of humans being possessed by the commodity fetish, a spectacle that today manifests itself in hyper-production and hyper-consumerism.

So, Stallybras was right when he argued that commodity fetishism for Marx “was a regression from the materialism (however distorted) that fetishized the object.”[xxv] But this regression owes itself to what we may call the autopoiesis (self-reproduction) of capital. The agency of capital as an autonomous subject independent of human control and “their conscious individual action”[xxvi] lies at the heart of Marx’s theory of value. Driven by the internal logic to self-valorise, capital also induces the illusion of permanence. And just like workers and producers remain unaware of the culmination of value as a process, humans also start conceiving capital as a perpetuity. This is the magic of capital for Marx: humans not only remain oblivious to the un-naturalness of value and exchange, but they also, unconsciously, elevate capital to the level of permanence and omnipotence.

Unlike what the vulgar economicist interpretation of Marx’s theory of value suggests, the theory of fetishism is not peripheral but central to the theory of value, as I. I. Rubin rightly argues in his Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Value would fail to re-produce itself without its automatic movement, its self-valorisation and spell-binding character. And this is what is remarkable about the capitalist mode of production: it has reversed the entire history of the subject-object relationality. Capital, being a subject, turns humans into objects: “Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand.”[xxvii]

Not tired of reductionist realism, certain Marxist economists might still insist that anything philosophical in Capital I is a distraction from, or at best an addendum to, Marx’s theory of value. That commodity fetishism is a philosophical offshoot of the theory of value, a Hegelian jargon that drifted toward spectral thinking. Without arguing that philosophy and economics are not necessarily inconsistent, the emphasis here is that the theory of fetishism is an internally consistent argument. From the conditions of commodity-form (atomistic labour and exchangeability) to the phenomena the commodity conceals (social characteristics of labour as objective characteristics of commodities; social relations as relations between commodities) to its very enigma, capital as a process is always geared toward the fetish, its logical conclusion. Moreover, the theory of fetishism is neither a philosophy devoid of social relations nor an economic theory separated from sociality: it fully reflects the mode of production that turned the subject-object upside down. In this context, Marx leaves little room for ambiguity when he considers that “the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds…commodity production, vanishes…as soon as we come to other forms of production,” including both the historical pre-capitalist modes and the imagined/proposed post-capitalist mode of production.

But there is more to it. Situated at the crossroads of pasts and futures, negotiating between pre- and post-capitalist modes of production, the theory of commodity fetishism is a broad framework speaking reflectively to many of the ongoing crises, the most glaring of which is the ecological crisis. The commodity fetish has gone so far that it has not only created a rift between humans and use-value but has also shifted the meaning of use-value from a wholesome belongingness to an alienated disposability. Capital has reduced the planet to a site of exchange and disposability. With technological fixes to the crisis becoming the “natural” solutions, we are confronted with the magical power of another form of commodity fetishism, techno-scientific fetishism. Just like the appetite for populist politics grows stronger in times of crisis, the veil of commodity fetishism thickens even further when the crisis calls for unveiling.

Notes:

[i] Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 184.

[ii] Ibid., 185.

[iii] Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” 186.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Karl Marx, Capital I (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 132.

[vii] Ibid., 130.

[viii] Ibid., 179.

[ix] Ibid., 163.

[x] Ibid., 167.

[xi] Ibid., 165.

[xii] Ibid., 164.

[xiii] Ibid., 164.

[xiv] Ibid., 165 (emphasis added.

[xv] Ibid (emphasis added).

[xvi] Ibid.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Marx, Capital I, 166.

[xix] Ibid., 167.

[xx] Ibid., 169

[xxi] The workers and the consumers (and, for that matter, humans in general) think that it is natural for things to have value and exchangeability.

[xxii] Marx, Capital I, 255 (emphasis added).

[xxiii] Ibid., 256.

[xxiv] Marx, Capital I, 128.

[xxv] Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” 186.

[xxvi] Marx, Capital I, 187.

[xxvii] Marx, Capital I, 772.