The following piece is a transcript of a talk that was given at the Socialist Party of Great Britain's 1998 Summer School, 'Marxism Revisited', which was held at Fircroft College in Birmingham, England. It is reproduced from the pamphlet of the same name. The audio of the talk can be heard at the following link.
The Socialist
Party must as a scientific organisation constantly re-examine its principles
and practice. I intend to re-examine this afternoon a small part of Marx’s Das
Kapital (published in 1867). This is a mere 12 pages long and is
entitled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.’ I intend to
show:
1. This is a
major insight into how society operates;
2. This
fetishism explains many modern social developments;
3. Why a
non-commodity producing society is our goal.
Major
Insight
According to The
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “fetish”
is of French derivation, first used in 1613 and defined as, “Any object used by the Negroes of the
Guinea coast and neighbourhood as an amulet or means of enchantment, or
regarded by them with dread.” and further, “Any inanimate object worshipped by savages…”
A fetishism is
defined as, “The worship of fetishes, or
the superstition of which this is the feature.” Why did Marx use such a
term for value in a commodity-producing society? In his own words:
“There it is a definite 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.”
Marx is here
showing that what appears to be a relationship between things is in fact a
relationship between the producers of those things. Marx viewed everything
historically. For him the capitalist mode of production disguised the value
relationship so that it appears as a relationship between things instead of
between producers. In his own words:
“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. It is only by being exchanged that the products
of labour acquire, as values, one uniform social status, distinct from their
varied form of existence as objects of utility.”
For Marx,
capitalism was distinct from all previous modes of production because wealth
took the form of commodities. Articles that were produced and reproduced for
the purpose of sale or exchange on the market with a view to realising a
profit.
Previous
societies had produced commodities but inside capitalism commodity production
was the prevailing form of production. In order to analyse how capitalism
operated it was necessary for Marx to take an historical approach or, as he
writes:
“Man’s reflection on the forms of social
life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a
course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He
begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to
hand before him. The characters that stamp products as commodities , and whose
establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities,
have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social
life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his
eyes they are immutable, but their meaning.”
With the market
economy of capitalism established, this circulation of commodities does indeed
seem to be “natural, self-understood”
but behind this apparent relationship between commodities what is actually
being compared is the abstract human labour embodied in these commodities.
Frederick
Engels in his book On Capital shows how
in pre-capitalist society the relationship was obviously one between producers
and not products:
“The peasant of the Middle Ages therefore
knew fairly accurately the labour time requisite for producing the things he
obtained by exchange. The blacksmith and the wagoner worked in his sight, as
did the tailor and she shoemaker who, in my own youth, went from hut to hut
among our Rhenish peasants making clothes and shoes from home-made cloth and
leather. Both the peasant and those he purchased from were themselves
labourers: the articles exchanged were the products of their own labour. What
did they expend to produce these objects? Labour and only labour; for the
replacement of working tools, for the production of raw material and for its
working up they expended nothing but their own labour power; how could they
then exchange these products otherwise than in proportion to the labour
expended on them? Not only was the labour time expended on these products the sole
appropriate measure for the quantitative determination of the magnitudes
involved in the exchange, but any other measure was unthinkable. Or does anyone
believe that the peasant and the artisan were so foolish as to exchange a thing
that took ten hours’ labour for something that took only one labour hour?”
Here Engels
explains how in a pre-capitalist economy the role of abstract human labour was
self-evident. In modern society with all the complexity of the market this
relationship is more difficult to grasp. Modern pundits talk glibly about “the
dictates of the market”, forgetting that markets are human products, or
possibly because they lack an historical view, not even knowing it.
Like modern day
savages human beings worship at the feet of capitalism’s markets, while the
high priests of Madison Avenue tell us we can only be truly human if we consume
the products that they are advertising. The sum total of human possibility has
been reduced to how many designer labels we can purchase, and we are assured by
the inner sanctums of Whitehall that the “invisible
hand of the market” deems this or that policy necessary. In 1998 the
worshippers of the fetishism of commodities are everywhere.
Modern
social developments
This fetishism
of commodities explains many modern developments. It touches every human
activity, even those apparently divorced from it. Sport, education, arts,
science and politics are affected by it. At present we have the World Cup
Tournament in France with 32 of the world’s best football teams competing, but
this is more than a sporting event. According to the American magazine ‘Adbusters’:
“But the fiercest battle of all will be
the one waged off the pitch between Stripes and Swoosh, the boot wars between
the sportswear manufacturers Nike and Addidas.”
The Adidas
spokesman, Steve Martin, is quoted as saying:
“Youths wear 75 to 80 per cent of our
products for leisure, while only 20 to 25 per cent wear it for sport.
Sportswear sales have grown at a phenomenal rate in the past five years. Football
is the only truly global sport; control that and you’ve got the cornerstone of
a $30 billion global sportswear industry.”
If any football
supporter wondered why Brazil were playing all over the world prior to the
World Cup , here is the answer:
“For the 1994 World Cup, held in the US,
not one national team was sponsored by Nike. In France it will have six,
including World Champions and favourites, Brazil, who’ve been signed on a
ten-year deal for $400 million. Part of Brazil’s deal requires them to play
five matches a year for Nike, which the company promotes and owns the TV rights
to.”
In the USA
sport is dominated by advertisers and manufacturers of commodities. American
football (grid-iron) is played on television around the advertising slots and
it is not difficult to see why. According to the San Francisco Examiner
(18.1.98):
“Over the eight years of a contract that
will amount to at least $17.6 billion. Each of the 30 NFL teams will get an
average of at least $73.3 million; less at the beginning, more at the end. This
season they’re getting $40 million each from television.”
Sport in a
pre-commodity society was a healthy, enjoyable pastime. Inside capitalism it
has become a vehicle for selling commodities.
When we look at
education, the pervasive influence of the commodity is even more awful. Rather
than engender a spirit of enquiry and wonder in the young, capitalism sees only
another potential market. In the same issue of the San Francisco Examiner we
learn of Channel One TV, owned by Whittle Communications:
“Beaming news and commercials into 12,000
of the nation’s secondary schools, the programme reaches 8 million teenagers.
In California, the telecast is delivered to 180 schools. In return for
broadcasting the Channel One program—broken up into 10 minutes of news briefs
and 2 minutes of flashy, MTV-style ads for companies such as Pepsi and
Reebok—schools receive free TV monitors for each classroom, VCRs, satellite
dishes and wires.”
The
exploitation of the classroom is not peculiar to the USA. McDonalds has got its
greasy paws on the kids in Britain. The Observer of 26.6.98 reports:
But since 1993 the company has offered
teachers in all schools ‘resource packs’ which could take the place of elusive,
expensive textbooks. History, one pack recommended, should be taught by getting
the children to ‘explore the changes in the use of McDonald’s site’. Music
teachers were advised to encourage pupils to ‘make up words for “Old McDonald
had a store” to the tune of “Old McDonald had a farm”. The English pack includes such literary tasks as identifying the words
“Chicken McNuggets”.
Opera doesn’t
escape the dead hand of big business. The thinking seems to be that if
businessmen, the modern high priests of commodity worship, know about markets
then they must know about everything else. Commenting on the growing
involvement of capitalists with the arts, ‘The Observer’(18.1.98) reported:
“The new and dominant values were vividly
expressed in te withering words with which Gerald Kaufman [in June 1998] forced
the resignation of the entire board of the Royal Opera House: ‘We’d prefer to
see the House run by a philistine with the requisite financial acumen than by
the succession of opera and ballet lovers who have brought this great and
valuable institution to its knees.”
The popular
arts fare no better at the hands of the commodity worshipper. The same paper
commented on Hollywood’s thraldom to the fetishism. The production of the film Godzilla cost about $120 million, but
the marketing cost an additional $60 million.
“Moreover, Godzilla was released to such
a monstrous flood of tie-ins—cameras from Kodak, tortillas from Taco Bell,
watches by Swatch and beer by Kirin—that Robert Levin, Sony’s marketing chief,
remarked: “We aren’t launching a movie, we’re launching a franchise.”
It is when we
turn to the world of science that we find the commodity fetishism at its most
hellish. Here one would imagine is the one field of human endeavour and
achievement above the sordid cash nexus of capitalism. Alas, this is far from the
truth. More and more the perversion of commodity worship has distorted the idea
of a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. One of the world’s leading
geneticists, R.C. Lewontin, in his book The Doctrine of DNA, explains the
role of science in capitalism:
“Science uses commodities and is part of
the process of commodity production. Science uses money. People earn their
living by science, and as a consequence the dominant social and economic forces
in society determine to a large extent what science does and how it does it.”
The idea of
disinterested devotees of science is knocked on the head by his further
disclosure about some of his fellow scientists:
“No prominent molecular biologist of my
acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.”
Perhaps the
maddest example of commodity fetishism is reported in ‘Adbusters’ magazine, where Pepsi Cola are reported as possibly
seeking a copyright for the shade of blue they use on their cola cans. This
isn’t as unlikely as it seems:
“In 1995, the United States Supreme Court
ruled that a colour can be registered as a trademark provided there’s evidence
that shows the colour has become associated with a particular product.”
Nor does Keith
Hughes, the Pepsi Cola spokesperson, rule out their attempting to copyright
Pepsi Blue:
“We’re reviewing the possibilities. We’ve
got some exciting plans, but I couldn’t really address that question at this
point. I think we already do own that colour of blue, in the beverage market
anyhow.”
In 1848, Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels saw how capitalism was turning once revered human
occupations into mere wage slaves; they stated in the Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo
every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science
into its paid wage labourers.”
Prophetic as
these words were, it is unlikely that even Marx and Engels could have imagined
a statesman like Mikhail Gorbachev, head of state of the USSR, ending up as the
lackey of a western capitalist company. According to The Guardian (5.12.97) he was a major world figure:
“Ten years ago Mikhail Gorbachev was a
name with which to move mountains. When he spoke to the UN offering unprecedented
troop cuts in Eastern Europe, this newspaper’s Washington correspondent said
that one could “almost feel the earth shifting inside the building.””
So there you
are. A great man. What’s he doing now? Working for Pizza Hut! Not serving
behind the counter but advertising for them on television:
“Mr Gorbachev will be paid more than
£100,000 for the adverts, more than Pizza Hut paid to Pamela Anderson.”
Our
Goal
Inside a
socialist society all wealth will be produced solely for use. There will be no
need for markets. Men and women will produce only use values. There will be no
need for the duplicity brought about by the insane worship at the shrine of
commodities. Education will be free of the hucksters and con men of advertising
and can become free to inform our children of all the wonders of the world.
Science
liberated from the market place can become humanity’s crowning achievement. Sport
can once again become an enjoyable, healthy pursuit. Dramatists, poets and
artists can depict the real world with all its natural beauty and portray human
existence in all its splendour and drama.
Best of all, we
can become fulfilled human beings, no longer mere consumers worshipping
commodities. We will not be blinded by the market system but able to look at
the world clear-eyed and clear-headed.
Richard Donnelly
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