Not reliable (2024)

Book Review from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. By Sven-Eric Liedman. Verso. 2018.

Liedman is a retired professor of the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg. This 700-page intellectual biography of Marx was first published in Swedish in 2015. As a description of the development of Marx’s ideas, linked to contemporaneous economic and political events and his changing personal circumstances, it is interesting and informative enough. When, however, it comes to discussing Marx’s economic theory it is far from reliable.

Liedman has Marx as a crude underconsumptionist who explained crises as resulting from the total market-price of what is produced inevitably exceeding, from time to time, total paying consumer demand, resulting in a glut which has to be cleared before production can resume, leading to the next glut. He also sometimes confuses ‘constant’ and ‘fixed’ capital and even ‘variable’ and ‘circulating’ capital.

As a historian of political philosophies Liedman is particularly interested in Marx’s theory of ‘the fetishism of commodities’ (his view that where there is widespread production of articles for sale — commodities — the producers come to be dominated by the movement of their own creation that commodities are) but a passing remark later shows that he hasn’t even understood that Marx envisaged the abolition of commodity-production:

‘Luxemburg can be said to have been correct on another point in relation to Lenin and his followers: in the future society Marx sketched out, there is a market for goods and not a completely regulated planned economy. But the market is equal, in contrast to the kind that characterised capitalist society’ (pp 426-7).

Marx as a ‘market socialist’! Incredible. In fact, the section of Capital on the fetishism of commodities appears before Marx introduces the concept of capital and capitalism; it assumes a market economy with no exploitation of the producers.

Luxemburg too envisaged future society as a ‘natural economy’ where there would be production directly for use and no longer for sale. He also has Rosa Luxemburg (p. 594) as a member of the Reichstag in 1914 when women in Germany didn’t even have the vote.

Adam Buick

Proper Gander: Temu’s temerity (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the market of online marketplaces, Amazon and eBay’s dominance has recently been challenged by young upstart Temu. Like its competitors, Temu offers a dizzyingly wide range of commodities such as clothing, household items and jewellery which can be delivered to your door in just a few clicks. Since its launch in September 2022, Temu has rapidly expanded to having half a billion users worldwide. A quarter of the British population has downloaded its app, encouraged by social media advertising and influencer recommendations.

Temu’s business model is to be a platform for thousands of other companies to sell their products direct from China to customers worldwide. It doesn’t have enormous depots like Amazon does, and therefore avoids associated costs, allowing it to charge less for its wares. Of course, this cheapness has come at a price. Complaints about the quality and safety of Temu’s products attracted the attention of Channel 4’s Dispatches, whose documentary aimed to tell The Truth About Temu. Predictably, the programme was too brief to give more than an outline of each problem, nor explain the wider context of how such companies fit with capitalism.

Reporter Ellie Flynn buys some items through Temu to check how they compare with the way they’re advertised. Some products come with false claims that they have been certified as safe by recognised organisations, and a baby walker harness purchased for £2.68 snaps within seconds when tested with a bag of sand. Flynn looks at news reports of people who have lived through tragedies after ordering items from Temu: a woman whose house burnt down due to a faulty Tablet and a girl who suffered burns from glue when applying fake fingernails. Flynn arranges for toxicology tests on some items she has bought, including a ‘gold’ necklace priced at £2.97 which is revealed to have twice the legal amount of lead and 27 times more cadmium than permitted. She also orders saw blades and BB guns without the website checking her age. Temu replies to these concerns with corporate-speak statements that it has withdrawn some products pending checks and that it maintains ‘rigorous quality controls’, although insufficient safeguards appear to be in place.

Hoping that low prices are enough of a distraction from risks isn’t the only approach used by Temu to manipulate us into buying. Its app is designed to entice us into spending more time, and therefore more money on the site. Flash sales, mini games, prizes and deals are jazzed up with colourful, cartoonish graphics. Emerging technology consultant Nina Jane Patel says that the app is ‘gamifying the shopping experience, but on steroids’. The aim is to make buying entertaining in a way closer to playing games and gambling than just swiping through a catalogue. Flynn arranges for her brain activity to be measured while using Temu’s app, and compares these results with what’s recorded while shopping from Amazon and playing a casino app. When using Temu, there were spikes of pleasure-related stimulation recorded, presumably when a particularly alluring bargain was found, a pattern with similarities to when the gambling app was being played.

This experiment shows how the capitalist system conditions our attitude to our possessions. In a society of scarcity and rationing through money, we’re likely to react with a buzz of satisfaction, even if it’s near-subliminal, when we acquire something, whether by shopping or gambling. Temu has exploited this learned response with lucrative results, but in a way which pushes at the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable practice, at least in the UK. Iain Duncan Smith, in his role as Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Gambling Related Harm has been investigating the implications of Temu being based on a gambling-like system, such as how this can lead to addictive behaviour.

In the documentary, Smith says that the personal data gathered when people buy through Temu has to be shared with the Chinese government under its National Security Law. This data would then be passed on to the state’s intelligence service to sift through for anything nefariously useful. Temu denies sending information to the Chinese government and says that its data policy is on its website, which Flynn can’t find.

How much notice will the Chinese state take of the UK’s regulations about the use of data? Similarly, the UK’s health and safety laws are difficult to enforce when products are coming in from overseas. While this demonstrates how national barriers add a layer of complications to how goods are distributed in capitalism, the issue isn’t only in China’s awkward relationship with Western countries. Although all the vendors selling through Temu are based in China, Temu itself isn’t wholly a Chinese business. Its parent company, PDD Holdings has its headquarters in South Korea and its ‘legal domicile’ is in Ireland. Despite any links to the Chinese state, Temu is not rooted in only one country, reminding us that its owners in the capitalist class sit above national borders.

And it’s the profit-hungry motives of the capitalist class which really drive Temu’s approach. Its products are sold as cheaply as possible to maximise the potential number of customers, lured in by marketing and held onto using gambling’s techniques. A profit margin can be maintained if costs are kept low by cutting corners during manufacturing and distribution. The quality or suitability of the end product isn’t an important consideration, nor is the waste of resources in shipping goods across continents, nor is the wellbeing of the staff involved. Temu represents some of the worst aspects of capitalist society, but this is what has made it a success, in capitalist terms: PDD Holdings is worth an estimated £170 billion to its owners and shareholders. To the rest of us, it’s an example of how capitalism turns what we need and want into shoddy commodities made to enrich the elite.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Splashing out on drip (2023)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wearing designer clothing and flashy accessories to show off wealth is nothing new; it’s the particular styles and favoured brands which come and go, along with the terminology used. The word ‘bling’ became as unfashionable as neon legwarmers once it picked up connotations of tackiness. Since around 2018, ‘drip’ has steadily come into vogue, meaning blatantly fashionable, proven only by owning eye-wateringly expensive clothes, shoes, jewellery or watches of the right brands. The term comes from ‘dripping’ with money, enough to fork out £5,500 on a Chanel bag, for example.

Presenter and comedian David Whitely, also known as Sideman, explores the ‘drip’ lifestyle in a documentary shown as part of Channel 4’s Untold strand. Addicted to Drip is aimed at viewers aged 16 to 34, those most likely to be attracted to the trend. The research liberally quoted throughout the show is from a study of 2,000 people in that age range carried out by financial coaching company Claro Wellbeing.

Addicted To Drip follows a usual template for documentaries, starting with a rapid round of clips from the show ahead, patronisingly expecting people not to stay tuned in unless they already know what they’ll be watching. The rest of the programme keeps to the familiar pattern of the presenter meeting people affected, serious points made by experts and occasional bouts of worrying stats. The presenter is expected to go on a personal journey while making a documentary like this, which is just Whitely finding out whether he becomes inclined towards a drip-fed lifestyle and deciding ‘no’.

One of the people Whitely talks with is Samantha, who says she tried ‘to fill some kind of void’ after bereavements with spending sprees on clothes and accessories using her inheritance money. When she reached the point of having thousands of pounds worth of designer gear but not enough funds to buy a train ticket, she came to believe she was wasting money and her life. Others have got into debt in order to buy into drip: one in ten young people are taking out credit at least monthly to fuel their spending on designer brands. Not all of the under-35s surveyed would have heard of the term ‘drip’, but regardless, almost half are in debt from purchasing luxury goods, and almost a third have less than £100 in savings. The kind of pressure this can involve causes problems beyond the fiscal. Although being in debt has been normalised, especially since prices shot up, 58 percent feel stressed about their financial situation. For some, the effects are worse: Whitely meets fashion influencer Michelle, whose mental health declined from trying to live up to the lifestyle to the extent of ending up in hospital.

Whitely also speaks with some of those who have done well for themselves financially through drip. Drew dropped out of studying medicine, realising he could make more money building up his business as an influencer with his own clothing brand. ‘Godfather of Drip’ Chiefer has a well-established and lucrative business selling jewellery to celebs. He says that most people who are into drip weren’t born into wealth, and wear designer clothes now because they weren’t able to have them when they were growing up. Being motivated to have an affluent lifestyle by wanting to escape from past hardship seems to be one of the characteristics of drip.

Drip-friendly brands tend to be pitched at younger people, especially those still living with their parents and who don’t have the financial commitments which come with having children. Once a drip product is launched, much of its promotion is put together and spread by its own customers, which is a capitalist’s dream come true. Those living the drip life market themselves and what they’re wearing through social media, aiming for an image which will be popular enough to bring in enough of an income.

The up-front role of omnipresent smartphones is what makes the drip lifestyle different to previous niche wealth-based groups, such as ‘sloanes’. As Stacey Lowman of Claro Wellbeing tells us, there’s a ‘perfect storm’ of social media, advertising strategies and online banking these days. Technology has been shaped to pair up products with customers, so that their money can easily move, largely upwards, with just a few taps on a screen. Some people have become rich and happy through this, others have suffered both financially and emotionally, as shown on Addicted To Drip.

Wanting to have nice things isn’t the issue in itself; problems lie with what drives this. In capitalism, ‘nice things’ get reduced to a series of wealth-related values. The people interviewed by Whitely may be bashful about how much they’ve spent on togs and trinkets, but the exorbitant prices are themselves a selling point, weirdly. Everything else in the process can also be boiled down to a monetary amount, from whatever wages those who make the commodities receive, to the spending power of customers following a social media influencer, to, ultimately, the amount of profit made by those at the top of the food chain. For them, the money’s coming in more like a flood than a drip.

Mike Foster

The illusion of ideology (1981)

From the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The theory of ideology forms an important part of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society. Ideology, in the end, is false consciousness, a system of false ideas about the nature of society but one which is the result of the way the capitalist mode of production appears to function. Appearances, Marx argued, were misleading as far as the nature of capitalism was concerned: a scientific analysis must go beyond appearances and lay bare what was really happening. As one example of the kind of discovery his own investigations had led him to, Marx observes:

The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is . . . a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. (Capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4) 

Here the true determining factor is masked by superficial factors.

The thinking of workers who accept and support capitalism is the consequence not primarily of the onslaught of bourgeois propaganda but of the conditions of commodity production. The very nature of the wages system gives the impression of fair exchange between employer and employee, without exploitation. Marxian economics teaches that wage-workers sell their labour-power to the capitalists, who force the workers to work for longer than is necessary to produce value equivalent to that of their labour-power (sufficient to enable them to maintain themselves and rear yet more workers). During this surplus labour, for which the workers do not receive payment, they produce surplus value, which is expropriated by the capitalists. The appearance, however, is that workers sell not their labour-power but rather their labour:

On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labour. (Capital, vol. I, ch. 19)

If it is assumed that the worker is selling his labour, there can be no room for surplus labour and surplus value, and the exploitative nature of the wages system is concealed:

The wage-form . . . extinguishes every trace of the division of the. working-day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour, (ibid.)

This illusory appearance makes the workers’ position appear freer than it really is, and is seized on by the economists who act as apologists for capitalism: 

we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists, (ibid.)

Thus one mystification engendered by capitalism is that the workers sell their labour and not their labour power to the capitalists, and this masks the fact that part of the workers’ labour is unpaid.

There is a second mystification, namely that the relations between the producers appear to them as relations between things, or between their products:

A commodity is . . . 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. (Capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4)

Once again, the surface appearance of capitalism obscures the underlying reality: 

It is . . . just this ultimate money-form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers, (ibid.)

In other words, commodities have exchange-value according to the amount of socially-nccessary labour time involved in their production. Value is not something which commodities have in and of themselves, but only as a consequence of human labour being expended on them. When commodities are exchanged, it is not their intrinsic properties that are measured, but properties they acquire because of the nature of capitalist production.

The classical political economists, according to Marx, regarded products as commodities by their very nature, thereby ignoring the fact that they become so only under certain modes of production, where producers relate to each other in historically specific ways:

The crude materialism of the economists, who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations, is at the same time just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them.'(Grundrisse, p. 687)

Fetishism is the imputing to something of powers which it does not in itself have. Commodity fetishism refers to the phenomenon whereby commodities appear to possess value and exchange-value in and of themselves; capital fetishism to that whereby capital appears to be productive itself, whereas in reality it is labour power alone that creates value.

We have emphasised that it is the essential features of commodity production, not of production as such, that are hidden from superficial inquiry. With regard to the feudal society of the European Middle Ages, Marx writes:

the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour. (Capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4)

Under feudalism, moreover, the division of the working-day into necessary and surplus labour was transparent. Feasants worked part of their time on their own holding, and part on the lord’s land, and it was clear to all that this latter labour involved working for another. Only under capitalism does it appear that the workers work all the time for themselves, so that the existence of surplus labour is concealed.

In socialism, though, there will be no mystification:

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan, (ibid.)

The nature of society will be transparent once there is no money, exchange commodities or classes.

Consequently there will be in socialism no need for social science to analyse the workings of society, since these will be perfectly open and clear to the people who live in that society. Socialism, then, involves not only the abolition of classes and money but of social science, and in particular economics.

Paul Bennett

Marxism, materialism and morality (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human thought is spontaneous and involuntary. We think because we are conscious and our consciousness consists of active thought. The capacity to think cannot be switched on or off. When we make statements like “I’m trying to think” or “I can’t think because of the noise”, we don’t mean what we say—we are not really complaining of being unconscious, for if we were we could not think and therefore could not say anything about our state of non-thinking. What is really meant by “I’m trying to think” is “I’m trying to think about a certain object of thought”.

The object of the thought of conscious human matter is our environment. Quite literally, we think about that which is about us. The universe which surrounds us, of which we are all a small part and each an even smaller part, existed long before there was conscious human life. According to religious thinkers, the universe was the product of a supernatural consciousness, but as they cannot tell us whose consciousness created the supernatural consciousness their argument is not a very strong one. The evolution of human life from the natural environment means that Nature bore us and consciousness is determined by it. Primitive people, the infants of Nature, were highly dependent on natural forces, but maturity — which is the cultivation of consciousness — has enabled humanity increasingly to dominate Nature. Society is the coming together of humans to satisfy our needs by producing and distributing wealth — not just crude wealth, but wealth in the sense of our fullest economic and cultural desires. Society is not simply a reflection of consciousness; on the contrary, social existence determines our consciousness. The essential conflict between materialist and idealist philosophy is over this point. The idealists put thought first and say, in the words of Descartes, that Man thinks and therefore he is. Materialists say that we are and therefore we think as we do. A slave in Ancient Greece did not think as a slave and therefore was one, but was a slave and therefore thought as one. History is like a conveyor belt and what you see around, behind and in front of you is not determined by what you want to think (so-called Free Will), but by where you happen to be placed. To the idealists, however, there are such concepts as historical absolutes, notions of right and wrong or good and bad. Throughout history human beings have only adopted such notions when it has been historically practical to do so.

Human beings have capacity to think in three ways: as themselves (sensually and emotionally), as a reflection of their society (morally or ethically) and — in a more obscure and infrequent way — as agents of history (dialectically). All of us spend much of our time thinking in the first way: as ourselves. Man is a sensual animal; we feel the objective world and it registers upon our brains in a profoundly emotional way. The richness of human feelings — which are not just nervous impulses but potential controllable forces — differentiates us from our older animal relations. It is sometimes mistakenly thought that materialists are against examining the emotional side of human activity, that we are somehow frightened of exploring that which makes humans laugh, cry, love and hate as well as what makes them hunger, thirst and seek shelter. (This view is derived from the mechanistic writings of vulgar materialists, most of whom were as much inhibited by their own emotional repression as that of the people they were writing about.) For Marxist materialists, the first law of materialism is to recognise that the real needs of humanity have a sensual and emotional origin. When we allow ourselves to be guided by our sensual and emotional needs wc are being self-interested, for we can sense only our own senses and can only speculate about other people’s.

To act morally is to reflect the needs of others in ourselves. The commonly stated moral maxim, “Thou shalt not kill" reflects the need of other humans and animals, who want to live. A conflict arises when the lamb wants to live and I want to eat it. Or when one group wants land and another occupies it. It is at such times that moralists are brought in to explain that what they really meant was “Thou shalt not kill unless . .". Since the decline of primitive communism, society has been dominated by various minority classes. Their domination has been secured by their having a virtual monopoly of the means of life. Throughout class society the ideas of the ruling minority have always been the ruling ideas in society. In short, the masters make the morals; those who pay the piper call the tune. Because all morality is class morality and because class arrangements are historically transitory, there can be no moral absolutes. What we find sensually desirable and what we are told is morally permissible are often in conflict, because what we desire is a class interest which is in antagonism with the class interest of the moral-making class. When our senses tell us that it is time to eat and the boss’s morality says that only those with sufficient money shall have access to food commodities, we experience a clear example of senses versus morals; self- interest versus the status quo.

Morality concerns values: is A better than B? Should I do C or D? We are often told that we should not lose our values. Not losing our values means not abandoning the values of the ruling class. Socialists are totally hostile to the property-based values of the capitalist system, but that does not mean that we have our own set of moral values to impose upon people in their place. Indeed, the whole idea of devising a new set of moral values is extremely problematic. Before we could begin to establish a materialist morality we would have to embark on a definition of the term “good". Philosophers have spent immense energies in defining “goodness” and it is worth considering the difficulties they have encountered. Some of them have used “good" as a descriptive term, such as “This bed is good". This is to use “good” as a first-order property, like “This bed is soft” or “big” or “green”. In this sense, the term “good” is a value which can be defined in relation to the capacity of objects to satisfy needs. The definition falls down because different people have different needs at different times and no object is intrinsically needable, regardless of the subjective perception of whoever may need it. Utilitarian philosophers say that what is “good” is what gives people pleasure, but this is hardly different from saying that what is needed is good (because it is hardly likely that things which are not needed are likely to bring people pleasure). The Utilitarians attempted to devise an objective table of what causes pleasure and what causes pain, but the exercise was doomed to failure because things which some people find pleasurable others find painful. Moral philosophers have found this problem so difficult to deal with that many of them have given up trying to define “good" descriptively and have defined it intuitively: “good" is what ought to be. This intellectual cop-out, often labelled as the naturalistic fallacy, was written about by David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature:

  In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulation of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable is how this new relation can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it. (Book III, part ii, section i).

Hume was quite correct in stating that it is fallacious to derive an ought from an is. If “ought" propositions could be intuitively derived from observing what is, then everyone would agree about what is “good" and the term would become redundant — as would the moral philosophers.

It was Karl Marx who first constructed a theory of value which could help to solve the problem of moral value. In Capital, Marx was writing about political economy and the economic values, but this was intended by him to be but the beginning of a mammoth philosophical investigation into the entire sphere of capitalist relationships. It is unfortunate that Marx died before his task could be completed. But it would be wrong to assume that the Marxian definition of value has no application in the field of morals. In chapter one of Capital, Marx elaborates upon two conceptions of value which were first pointed to by Aristotle in his Politics:

  The value of every possession are two, both dependent on the thing itself, but not in the same manner, the one supposing an inseparable connection with it, the other not; as a shoe, for instance, which may be either worn or exchanged for something else.

Marx, who saw value as a social relationship between people, rather than between things, pointed to the dual nature of value: for utility and for exchange. Use value is based on the descriptive definition of value referred to above: it is both desirable and desired. Our senses tell us that we need things and our senses tell us that what we need is a use value. As for exchange value, which can only exist where there is property to be bought and sold, Marx refers to this as “a form of social labour". It represents what society has put into it — the socially necessary labour time. Exchange value is more than an economic symbol: it is the reflection of the production — the social history — of an object. In economics, we quantify commodities in terms of what went into them. Does it not follow that if we want to respect “goodness" we must do it by respecting the social efforts of others while they respect ours?

Such mutual respect and proper recognition is made impossible in a capitalist society which is based on a division between passive consumption (the main role of the capitalists) and active production (the main role of the workers). To value the product of society in this sense involves a recognition by humans of what it is to have a need and also what it is to produce for the satisfaction of needs. Capitalist philosophy only views need from the alienated angle of passive consumption. Marx points out in The German Ideology that

  If you proceed from production you necessarily concern yourself with the real condition of production and the productive activity of men. But if you proceed from consumption . . . you can afford to ignore the real living conditions and the activity of men (p. 164).

Moralists spend much time talking about values — from the angle of the consumer — but are rather less eloquent or logical when it comes to the question of the relationships of value production. To understand these relationships requires us to look at them historically, as objects which did not emerge as ready-made values, but which exist due to the conscious actions of human beings on the environment. Oscar Wilde once spoke of a society where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. How accurately this describes the ethics of capitalism, where social parasites can talk with their cheque books and get the gold they want without ever thinking about — or valuing —the sweated labour of the goldminer who has toiled to produce it. And why should the capitalists care about the workers who create values for them? They have paid us the price of our labour power (always less than the values we create) and have no more concern for us beyond our function as profit-producing wage slaves. Marx was obsessively concerned about this consumptive conception of value which he described as “the fetishism of commodities". To see any phenomenon only as it is rather than as it once was or as it could be, is to fetishise a social relationship of the present — to turn it into a thing rather than a man-made relation. Working class acceptance of capitalism is a fetishism of the historical stage we are living in, which sees it not as an historically evolved system, but as an absolute and unalterable way of life.

In a property society ethics are based on the economic structure. Capitalism’s morals, which we are taught in schools, preached about in churches, and persuaded towards by the media, political leaders and the family, are predominantly related to commodity exchange. Rights are based on commodity contracts, not inalienable liberties. But the relations of production have for many years been in conflict with the forces of production — the way we organise ourselves does not harmonise with the productive possibilities of our world of abundance. Under such conditions morals weaken. As Engels wrote in the Preface to The Poverty of Philosophy:

  If the moral consciousness of the mass declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it has done in the case of slavery or serf-labour, that is a proof that the fact itself has been outlived, that other economic facts have made their appearance, owing to which the former has become unbearable and untenable (p. 13).

Is this not what is happening now, as young workers increasingly reject the morals of their bosses? What the ruling class calls a moral crisis, socialists see as the path to the emancipation from morals. Engels fully recognised how moral indignation can represent “the future interests of the oppressed" (Anti-Duhring, p. 109). This does not mean that Marx or Engels were moralisers. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx says that “communists preach no morality at all”. In short, Engels is saying that moral indignation and rejection of the ethics of capitalism are important prerequisites of socialist consciousness. (There are plenty of examples in history of people who have professed a socialist consciousness, but have in fact never rejected the sickening morals of capitalism.) But Marx is arguing that moral concern — concern for others — is not enough. Once moral outrage has been converted into socialist consciousness it will cease to be either purely selfish or sensual or purely caring or moral and will become dialectical, will be seen from both directions, from the angle of the historical process. Instead of workers saying “I wish I was better off than I am” or “I wish they were better off than they are”, the dialectical understanding of social values leads one to say “I wish that they were better off, for I am one of them and I wish I could do better for myself so that they would be better off.” Dialectical materialism means seeing the whole (society) rather than the part (oneself): it is genuinely selfish, selfless mutuality. In a socialist society mutual aid would become a practicality, not an imposed moral precept. In socialism we will all cherish what we are, what we make and what we could be. Until we create that society, harmony will remain an ideal and therefore socialists cannot preach to our fellow workers about being nice to one another. In a rat race the biggest, most vicious rats win. As Marx says about communists preaching no morality:

  They do not put to people the moral demand: Love one another, be not egoists, because they know very well that egoism is under certain conditions the necessary form of the individual’s struggle for survival.

The rotten morality of the profit system which justifies the production of weapons to blow us all up; which has herded millions into gas chambers and sold their flesh as soap: which lets millions starve while food rots; which robs every worker of the fruits of their labour; which leaves even the most apparently secure of wage slaves always but a short time away from propertyless destitution —provides socialists with countless reasons to shout our message to everyone and anyone who will listen. For we must urge workers to forget about their “brotherly love” for the capitalists and steal from them the world and everything in it and on it.

Steve Coleman

Proper Gander: Hoard Today, Gone Tomorrow (2013)

The Proper Gander Column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like school kids cheating in maths class by copying the person next to them, TV producers are always on the lookout for a formula which someone else has made work. The BBC’s response to the popularity of ITV’s Downton Abbey was an already-forgotten re-commissioning of Upstairs Downstairs, whose original run was itself the template for Downton. And hot on the heels of The Hoarder Next Door (Channel 4) comes BBC1’s Britain’s Biggest Hoarders – a title which implies it’s a competition. Why should hoarding, of all things, be the subject of two near-identical primetime programmes?

Both shows state that compulsive hoarding is a growing problem. The Hoarder Next Door says that 1.2 million people in the UK hoard, while Britain’s Biggest Hoarders more than doubles this to 3 million. Whatever the true figure, hoarding has TV appeal not because of its prevalence, but because it’s a mental health condition more visual than, say, depression. The symptoms of hoarding are there in the piles of rusting car parts, unopened boxes of trinkets and bags of tin cans. The sight of a hoarder’s packed home gives the kind of voyeuristic jolt documentary makers want. Although, as presenter Jasmine Harman says, ‘you live with it all around you and you stop seeing it.’

The programmes focus more on the gradual tackling of the stockpiles than they do with counselling, giving the simplistic impression that the mental health issue is cured when the hoard is tidied away. Clearing out the clutter also gives the producers the opportunity to resurrect the genre of home makeover shows, defunct since the recession. This kind of programme wouldn’t be complete without an emotional reveal of the renewed house underneath. The formulaic approach in both shows gives the uneasy feeling that a mental health condition and its treatment are being moulded to fit a TV programme’s format. Hoarding is more complicated and personal than that, although the condition is shaped by the society we live in. In a world which makes commodities both scarce and fetishised, it’s understandable that some people will find a kind of security in stockpiling as many as they can, even to the extent of it taking over their lives. A programme looking at hoarding from this angle would be more revealing.

Mike Foster

Confessions of a Fetishist (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Given the context of this essay only a minority of readers will have any misconceptions about the content. It was Karl Marx that first defined what we now know of as ‘Commodity Fetishism’. He meant by this the inherent power that a commodity has over its producer in contrast to any rational relationship between mankind and the products of its labour. This occurs because of the alienated nature of production within capitalism where profit is the goal rather than human need. If a profit is not created then production is considered ‘useless’ and thus the labour involved is likewise considered a waste. The commodity has become the master of labour and production itself. Entering the market of exchange for profit the product is divorced from the labour and the people that created it. It becomes ‘fetishised’ in that it appears independent of the producers and confronts them only as an object of consumerism. The need that this commodity serves can be entirely dependent on the need for social status i.e. jewellery, expensive clothing, electronic gizmos and, the one that this essay will focus on – cars.

The automobile has become a ‘paradigm’ of fetishised commodities. In terms of ‘status symbols’ it would be hard to find a better example; from Minis to Rolls Royces they all represent a statement about the owner. Or, more precisely, a statement that the owner wants to socially broadcast. My friends rarely fail to notice any perceived inconsistency between my lifestyle and my ‘principles’ as a socialist. My love of racing cars is one example. For many seasons I was to be found trackside enjoying my favourite sport – Drag Racing. My love of ‘hot rods’, ‘muscle cars’ and dragsters goes back to the summer of 1973 when, as a teenager, I got my first whiff of nitro methane. Since then I have been addicted to power, speed and, let’s be frank, the glamorous aesthetic of racing cars. What follows will not be a defence, but rather an attempted explanation of a sometimes uncomfortable love affair. It will also explain my hatred of Ferraris.

In contrast to the European tradition in motor racing the American experience was generated by working class, or as they say in the US ‘blue collar’ culture. After the end of World War 2 the returning GIs had to fill the vacuum of a return to civilian life with some form of excitement. Many chose, especially on the west coast, motor racing. Given the relatively cheap price of gasoline and production cars they began to modify the chassis and tune the engines to acquire more speed. Races were held on Bonneville salt flats to test these ‘hot rods’. Clubs were formed and illegal street races (drag races) began to take place all over America. Because of the danger to all involved a group called the National Hot Rod Association started to try and organise these races at unused Air Force bases where the runways were perfect for quarter mile side by side racing.

This hot rodding counter culture was soon noticed by the Detroit car manufactures and in an attempt to cash in on this new youth market they started making ‘muscle cars’. Dodge Barracudas, Ford Mustangs and Chevrolet Camaros were seen on the drag strips every weekend competing for the dollars in the pockets of these new performance consumers. Massive v8 engines were crammed into street legal coupes and saloons and you could drive one of these monsters straight out of the showroom onto the race track with 11 second 100+ mph quarter mile performances. The kids went crazy! Of course it couldn’t last and by the time I was beginning to enjoy the English version of hot-rodding (mid 70s) the hey-day was coming to an end courtesy of rising oil prices.

Drag racing was held in contempt by the ‘motor racing’ establishment in this country. Hill climbers, sports car racers, rally car drivers and, of course, the holy of holies, Formula One looked down from a great height on the lowly working class hotrodders. But this suited my personality perfectly and only served to reinforce my love of the culture. The fact that a mildly tuned Chevy v8 in a mildly modified Chevelle would out-accelerate any Ferrari or even an F1 car gave me immense satisfaction even before I understood it as part of the cultural ‘class war’ in this country.

So I ‘identified’ with the hotrod culture of late 60s to late 70s America. To me any one who could virtually build his own performance car from the chassis up was superior to a rich man who would simply buy his Maserati or Aston Martin from the dealer without any involvement in its production. This was how I rationalised my love of American muscle cars but, of course, there is more to it than that. I like to think that on some level it was a reaction by American youth against consumerism. They took Detroit’s alienated products and humanised them – made them ‘real’ as products of the labour of their class and then of themselves as non-alienated individuals. The car lost its power as a fetishised commodity and became what it really is – a product of social and individual labour.

Unfortunately, or some would say, inevitably corporate America soon subsumed the culture and turned it in to a meaningless symbol of ‘Americana’. TV shows like ‘American Hotrod’ and ‘Wrecks to Riches’ are examples of the corruption of hotrod culture where a rich ‘customer’ walks into the workshop and orders a hotrod like it’s a steak or a Ferrari. The subsequent struggle of the production staff to meet ‘deadlines’ is an archetype of alienated labour creating a fetishised commodity which is the very antithesis of hotrod culture.

Occasionally I still attend drag races but although the performances are truly staggering (4 second quarter miles with 330mph top-end speeds) all the fastest cars have corporate sponsors and I miss the ’Golden Age’ when a guy could turn up with a dragster built in his shed and still have a chance to win. Recently a reaction against the ’big show’, as corporate drag races are now called,  has spawned something called ‘Nostalgia Racing’ where engines and bodies/chassis are restricted to 1970s technology making it possible for a low budget racer to be competitive. I enjoy these races but, as the name implies, there’s something reactionary and non-progressive about it all. It seems to be part of the retro culture of post-modernism where sport takes its place alongside music and the other arts as part of the bankrupt capitalist culture of the 21st century. When humanity finally gets around to progressing once more (after the revolution) I wonder if they’ll let me fire up my Chevy occasionally at weekends?

Wez

The Fetishism of Money

The following piece, written by the late Pieter Lawrence, is the eleventh chapter of his 2006 work, 'Practical Socialism - Its Principles and Methods'.

Link to Chapter 10.

Chapter 11

The Fetishism of Money

In Anthropology the word ‘fetish’ came to mean “an inanimate object worshipped on account of its supposed magical powers.”  This also defines the “fetishism of money.” In some tribal cultures fetish objects took the form of amulets, a practice that still continues.  In our more developed society this is dismissed as superstition.  However, despite our modern, technical culture ‘fetishism’ is a deeply entrenched part of the way we think: we worship the supposed magical powers of money.  Because our main political parties are wholly committed to the administration of the market economy the fetishism of money dominates political thought.

In Marxian theory the ‘fetishism of commodities’ is the illusion that in buying and selling the values being exchanged are part of the physical make up of the commodities themselves.   If this were true it would mean that buying and selling and the economic tyrannies of the profit system could never be removed.   In fact, the values of commodities result from particular economic relationships and in no way are they part of the goods themselves.  Beyond the relationships of wage labour/capital and the market system, in a society based on co-operation, the commodity form of goods together with their exchange values will disappear.  

Similarly, fetishism is a strong element in religion. Gods in all their great variety are products of the human imagination endowed with superior powers. This again diminishes our human powers and was well expressed by Karl Marx in the preface to “The German Ideology.”   “The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands.   They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.   Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.”  

But fetishism does not end with imagined Gods.  In our more secular society we have tended to replace gods with the fetishism of money. This also attributes powers to an alien force that dominates our lives.   The fetishism of money is the illusion that money brings happiness, fulfilment, has its own productive powers and has an existence independent of human beings that is able to get things done.   Particularly in politics money is given the power to solve problems.   This illusion is so strong that it is commonly thought that without money we have no powers of social action. This leaves us alienated from our real human powers, from each other, and is the basis of much social neurosis. The idea that we should be liberated from such self destructive illusions has a very modern ring.

How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources” when what is meant by resources is always “money”.  Every day politicians give lack of money as a reason why we cannot provide better health care, or the many other public services that are in urgent need of improvement.   Not just in Whitehall and  Westminster but in Borough, District and Parish Councils throughout the country the same mantra is chanted week in and week out, year after year,  “if only we had more money something could be done”.   This ignores the fact that productive resources are materials, industry, manufacture, transport, energy, communications, in other words, all the things through which goods and services are produced and distributed.  In turn all these resources depend on one single resource which is labour.   These are the real resources on which the lives of communities depend.   The idea that our   “resources” are inadequate is entirely false. In fact we have is an abundance of talents, skills and labour to provide for needs. 

At times throughout the world there may be many millions of unemployed people, factories standing idle, goods and unused materials being stockpiled but politicians still repeat, “we do not have the resources.”   They are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds remain trapped within the illusion that only money resources count.   They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money.   They imagine that human beings can only function as economic automatons which can only be activated by injections of money.   The opposite is the truth.   The powers of the community to solve problems can only be fully released with the relationships of co-operation and the abolition of money relationships.

As part of the dogma of market economics the imagined powers of money run through every social problem.  For example, in the past two general elections the Labour Party made a commitment to reduce child poverty.  For this, they hope to use money.  “The chosen means is also clear:  a new form of child support which starts in 2003.   But it will be costly, as the budget will reveal for the first time”.  (Economist 23 Feb 2003).

“Poor children are defined as those living in households whose income, after housing costs, is below 60% of the median – the income in the exact middle of the income distribution.”  Poverty is of course relative and this degree of poverty in Britain is not as severe as the poverty of children in undeveloped countries where 40,000 children die in poverty every day.   In Britain, child poverty generally means substandard housing, poor conditions in the home, cultural deprivation, exclusion from benefits enjoyed by better off contemporaries, and poor diets (fats, sugar and carbohydrates).

That any kind of child poverty exists is a disgrace and would be easily removed in a sane society.  According to the Economist, under the Labour Government’s market system, “Progress has so far been slow.  In 1996/7, the year before Labour took office, the number of children living in poverty was 4.4 million.   By 1999/2000, this had declined only to 4.1 million. A more substantial decline to 3.5 million is expected for 2001/2 as reforms such as the working families tax credit (WFTC), introduced in October 1999, take full effect.  But this will still mean that the Government has failed to meet its earlier pledge to remove more than a million children out of poverty in Labour’s first term.   To cut the number of poor children by around a million would cost as much as £6.1billion. The pledge to remove child poverty is proving to be an expensive one”.

Clearly, the pledge is not just expensive.  Because the money available to Governments in the form of various taxes depends on the state of buying and selling, which is at best unpredictable and incapable of being rationally directed, going by experience, the hope of any Government ending child poverty is to say the least uncertain.  Reforming governments have been making this pledge for over a century and they have all failed.

Over any period, throughout the country both nationally and locally, arguments about the state of our social services are reported in the media.   What we find is that these arguments are almost entirely about money.   For example a selection of local newspaper reports from the Croydon (South London) on health services in the the late 1990’s is typical.

“As well as putting views on meetings residents get two chances to vote:  *On which patients should face cuts in services: a straight Yes or No vote on whether there should be cuts in each of the four areas of care: acute services (at Mayday and similar hospitals), mental illness, mental handicap and community health services.  Savings in the four areas adding up to almost £1 million are needed to meet a shortfall between what must be done and what there is money for.”  Croydon Advertiser 2 Jan 1998.

“The spokesman continued:  “The health authority is saying it needs to save money to balance the books and this was one of the only areas it felt it could make cut backs.   And although it is not saying there won’t be consequences it is the least harmful option.  Cutting community health services is seen as the lesser of several evils.”

“Last month it emerged that Croydon Health Authority was reducing its community health funding by four per cent despite its best efforts to keep the budget cuts at a minimum.   The cash crisis has arisen despite Croydon receiving a one off £1 million payment to help it cope with emergence admissions this winter.”  Croydon Guardian 14 Jan 1998.

“Tears for children in need and jeers for National Health Service managers in receipt of large salaries dominated the agenda when 120 residents crammed into a meeting to hear Croydon health bosses present a £2million NHS cuts package.” Croydon Advertiser 23 Jan 98.

“Outraged parents will descend on Croydon Health Authority’s (CHA) offices on Monday to protest against possible cuts to “vital” children’s health services.”  …  “Health watchdog (which monitors) the Community Health Council has already branded the proposals short sighted and warned of the serious long term consequences of cuts in preventative community services.   At the same time it recognises the CHA’s predicament and described any efforts to meet the £500,000 cash shortfall as a ‘damage limitation exercise’”.   Croydon Guardian 21 Jan 98.

Under the headline, “Five health centres face axe in bid to save £1.4million,”  the Croydon Advertiser (6 Feb 98) reported, “The trust is even looking at selling its own headquarters to reduce its £1.4ml overheads.   Over and above the threat to the five centres, the trust has also been told it must save £300,000 on services because of proposed cut backs in Croydon Heath Authority.”

A sub heading in the Croydon Advertiser  (2 Oct 98) reported, “Immediate cuts mean school nurses must reduce the services they offer to youngsters.”   This was followed a few weeks later by a report (CA 13 Nov 98) “More than half of Croydon’s school nurses have quit in protest about cuts but the health trust insists there is money available to replace them.”

A few months later the Croydon Guardian (17 Mar 99) reported, “After months of consultation and horse trading, Croydon Health Authority has finally settled on its list of haves and have-nots for this year’s funding priorities  - leaving health watch dogs and children’s campaigners ‘bitterly disappointed’.   Of the 39 schemes considered for funding, only 20 have been guaranteed a slice of the £8.5million cake – leaving the have-nots needing a miracle windfall of new money if their services are to be funded this year.”

A year later it appeared that the Government was willing to provide more money.  The Croydon Guardian (6 April 2000) reported, “Good news for patients as Croydon gets $4.4million.”   “Health services are in line for a major shot in the arm after the Government announced that £4.4million would be flowing into the borough”.   “This is absolutely brilliant news – beyond our wildest expectations,” said the chief officer of Croydon’s patient’s watchdog, the Croydon Community Health Council.   “Patients have had to put up with some real shortages in Croydon with some services being cut to the bone. There is now no excuse for not plugging these gaps.”

But it appears that the sense of relief was short lived. Soon after the news of more money the Health Authority was again criticised for lack of investment.  The same spokesperson was reported as saying, “There was tremendous good news in the March budget of huge extra funding for Croydon.  But there is growing frustration that in spite of this, no decisions have yet been made about addressing even the most glaring of Croydon’s gaps and shortfalls.   In terms of what really matters – the services which local people get from their National Health Service – it is a mixed story of good overall progress marred by significant shortfalls.”  Services that needed urgent improvement were the Accident and Emergency Department of Croydon’s main hospital, outpatient services, diagnostic testing and neurology, children’s health services and health care provision for old people.  It was also pointed out that some 2,000 adults suffered when a physiotherapy service was suspended.

According to “Croydon’s Health Improvement Programme 2000/3” for the year 2000/1, its Health Authority planned to spend £211million on its health services.  It said that Croydon  “… expects to continue to be able to maintain financial balance, with small levels of growth available from the Comprehensive Spending Review.   However, the position will remain tight and hard choices will need to be made.   A number of priority areas are being considered for the use of Health Authority development funds.  These are: *Improving mental health.   *Modernising community nursing services for children.   *Urgent hospital and community health care.   *Tackling health inequalities.   *Improving services for people with cancer.   *Improving services for people with diabetes.  *Drugs and youth offending.   *Coronary heart disease.”

The choices that doctors and local Health Authorities must sometimes make are about priorities of care based on available money. This means having to decide that one patient may benefit from a particular treatment but, depending on costs, another patient may be denied a treatment. This is when doctors and surgeons see themselves as “acting as god.”

Whilst there is no gain in repeating examples we should note that whilst the Croydon Health Authority was battling with its tight money constraints the same battle was taking place in education.   The front page headline of the Croydon Advertiser for 23 May 2003 was, “CASH CRISIS: NOW PUPILS SUFFER”.     “Sad day; Edenham High School’s headteacher tells the media on Wednesday how a desperate shortage of money forced him to send children home.”    “More than 700 pupils were sent home from school as Croydon’s funding crisis reached new heights – and more closures are set to follow.”   “Edenham’s £500,000 funding gap is one of the biggest faced by a Croydon school.”   

In calling for the resignation of the Government Minister (a futile gesture), the editorial said, “Resign now, minister.  Enough is enough.   The Government can no longer pass the buck over the cash shortage that is throttling the life out of the borough’s schools.   The news that 720 Edenham High School pupils had to be sent home on Wednesday because there was no one available to teach them comes as a sickening confirmation of all our worst fears.  Edenham may be the first forced to take such action.   But it is unlikely to be the last.” 

Given that these reports are typical nationwide, they show how the debate that is ongoing in every locality on health, education and other services is focussed almost entirely on the provision of money.   From this, it is perhaps understandable that we are seduced into thinking that it is money that actually provides our vital services.  This illusion then becomes fixed in our minds as the only way to address our problems. One result is that we are separated from the real powers we have to provide for our needs. In reality it is people that provide health care, education and our important services, not money.

The magical powers of money to solve problems dominates the thinking of not just the world of reformist politics, it also rules the thinking of the many charities that constantly appeal for money.   A recent example is an appeal run by Oxfam on TV:  “What do we dream for our children?  Health, happiness, success?  A safe place to sleep at night? A drink of water that won’t kill them?  Never to be hungry again?  We all want the best for our children.  For some people that starts with such simple things.  All they want is a better world for them to grow up in.  It’s not much to ask and all we are asking of you is £2 a month.”

“In over 70 countries Oxfam is helping people to work themselves out of poverty.   They never give up and neither do we.  Will you stand alongside us too?  With your £2 a month we can help them with seeds, tools – help them build wells with clean, safe water, give children an education so that they can have a chance of having a real future free from hunger and pain. All people want is a better life for their children.  Please do something remarkable today and help make a dream a reality.  Telephone Oxfam today and give £2 a month”.

It is not intended here to criticise those who wish to help others in desperate need. Such willingness to help is admirable and provides hope for the future.  At the same time, the brutal facts have to be faced that during the past 25 years, during which time Oxfam and similar organisations have been appealing for money to solve problems, the numbers of seriously under nourished people has, according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) almost doubled from 435 million in 1974/5 to over 800 million in 2000.   In view of this it is right to point out that when Oxfam claim to be in over 70 countries “helping people to work themselves out of poverty,” so far as the general problem is concerned the statement is misleading.   If the members of Oxfam and its supporters were to also work for a system in which we all cooperate to provide directly for the needs of people this would be a significant step forward.  Surely this is what they claim to want.

Following the volcanic eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in Congo the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast its Goma Crisis Appeal (25 January 2002).  This included what given amounts of money could do.  For example, “£30 will treat 18 people for severe malaria - £100 will provide clean water to 4,000 people for a week.

We may not go as far as Oscar Wilde when he wrote, “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”  But it does remain true that appeals for money to alleviate suffering tend to perpetuate the system that causes the suffering.  Moreover, the idea that such suffering results from natural causes is not always the case. The main reason why communities suffer from extreme natural events is economic. For example, cheaply constructed buildings that cannot withstand earthquakes. Most dangers are known and a sane society would not need to leave communities exposed to them. This would avoid many disasters.  Where they do happen contingency plans using instant response team could exist throughout the regions and at a world level for the relief of any catastrophe.  Emergency supplies such as food, clean water and medical supplies would be maintained at strategic points whilst machinery, equipment and helpers could move quickly to any area of crisis. Appeals for money are a sad and wholly inadequate substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom of communities to make free use of them.

Nationally, the archpriest who presides over this all pervasive fetishism of money is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who does so from his Temple of Money, HM Treasury. It is in the budget that “money” is equated with “powers of action” which are set out in money terms. In the 2003 budget the Government expected to spend a total of £456billion.   Regardless of our real human resources, this amount of money set the limits on what we could do as a country. What we could do for housing and the environment was set at £20billion; what we could do for education was set at £59billion; what we could do for transport was set at £15billion; what we could do for national health care was set at £72billion; what we could do for personal and social services was set at $17billion, and so on.

This parliamentary ritual called “the budget” has its own liturgy expressed as incantations of faith that the market economy with well managed public finances can solve our problems and deliver the promised land.  This is the endless pursuit of a holy grail, the perfect capitalist system. The language of the budget is illusory.  Under the heading, “Building a fairer society” the Government’s 2003 budget leaflet said, “A flexible and dynamic economy must go hand in hand with a fairer society so that everyone has chance to fulfil their potential. The Government is committed to eradicating child poverty and tackling pensioner poverty, providing support for families with children and ensuring security for all in old age.   It is also creating a modern and fair tax system which raises sufficient revenue for public services and ensures that everyone pays their fair share of tax.”  

Perhaps we should trust that chancellors are sincere people, in which case such lessons are delivered whilst sublimely unaware that the work they do is opposite to their moral intentions.   When a chancellor administers a tax system and distributes money to public services this is nothing less than the imposition of an economic straightjacket on all our abilities to provide for each other’s needs.  It happens in a system that is founded on putting money and profit before the welfare of the whole community. 

The fetishism of money is part of the ideology of the market system which claims uncountable victims across the world.  In the pre Colombian societies of South America, in homage to their gods, human sacrifice was widely practised.  For example, this was a cruel and gruesome ritual amongst the Aztec people in what is now Mexico. “In the heart of Tenochtitlan the pyramid rose as an architectural fetish, charged with the powers of all the offerings, and the blood from thousands of sacrificed human beings.   The structure was the terrifying centre of the Aztec world.”  (‘The Aztecs’, Richard Townsend).

Many of the sacrificial victims were children and we think of this as barbaric.  Perhaps for this reason we now prefer to keep out of our minds that because of the constraints of the market system, on a world scale we sacrifice many more children’s lives than the Aztecs could ever manage.  We sacrifice them to the god of money, on the altar of the capitalist system.

Pieter Lawrence

Link to Chapter 12.

The Fetishism of Money (2002)

From the April 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word “fetish” came to be used by anthropologists to mean “an inanimate object worshipped by savages on account of its supposed magical powers.” Often such objects took the form of amulets and in some cultures this practice still continues. In our more developed society this is dismissed as superstition. But whilst the wearing of amulets may not be that common, despite our technical culture “fetishism” is a deeply entrenched part of political thought. 

In Marxian theory the “fetishism of commodities” is the illusion that in buying and selling the values being exchanged are part of the physical make-up of the commodities themselves. If this were true it would mean that buying and selling, and the tyrannies of the profit system, could never be removed. But in fact, the values of commodities result from wage labour as part of the economic relationships of the capitalist system. In socialism, with people co-operating to produce directly for needs, the commodity form of goods will disappear leaving the community with free access to simple articles of use.

In religion, gods are products of the human imagination given powers to dominate the lives of those who create them. The destructive effects of religion are evident in the many conflicts that divide people throughout the world but this does not end with subservience to imagined gods. There is also the fetishism of money. This also attributes powers to an alien force that dominates our social affairs. Part of the fetishism of money is the illusion that money has its own productive powers. Particularly in politics, money is fetishised as having the power to solve problems because without it nothing can be done.

How often do we hear it said, “we do not have the resources”? What is meant by resources is always money. Every day politicians give lack of money as a reason why we cannot provide better health care or safe reliable trains or the many other public services that are in urgent need of improvement. Not just in Whitehall and Westminster but in Borough, District and Parish Councils throughout the country the same mantra is chanted week in and week out, year after year, “if only we had more money, something could be done”. This ignores the fact that productive resources are materials, means of production, transport, energy, communications and networks of infrastructure through which goods and services are produced. And all these depend on one single resource which is labour. These are the real resources on which the lives of communities depend and there is an abundance of labour to provide for needs.

At times there may be millions of unemployed people, factories standing idle and unused materials being stockpiled but capitalist politicians still repeat, “We do not have the resources.” They are unable to see the availability of real resources because their minds are pre-occupied by the illusion that only money resources count. They imagine that real resources can only be brought into use by money, whereas the opposite is the truth. The powers of the community to solve problems can on be fully released with socialism and the abolition of money.

Reliance on the imagined powers of money runs through every social problem. For example, in the last two elections Labour made a commitment to reduce child poverty. For this, they hope to use money. “The chosen means is also clear: a new form of child support which starts in 2003. But it will be costly, as the budget will reveal for the first time.” (Economist, 23 February)

“Poor children are defined as those living in households whose income, after housing costs, is below 60 percent of the median – the income in the exact middle of the income distribution.” Poverty is of course relative and this degree of poverty in Britain is not as severe as the poverty of children in undeveloped countries where 40,000 children under five die in poverty every day. In Britain, child poverty generally means substandard housing, poor conditions in the home, exclusion from benefits enjoyed by better off contemporaries, and poor diets (fats, sugar and carbohydrates).

Any kind of child poverty is a total disgrace and would be easily removed in socialism within a very short time. Under the Labour governments there has been a marginal improvement. According to the Economist,

“Progress has so far been slow. In 1996/7, the year before Labour took office, the number of children living in poverty was 4.4 million. By 1999/2000, this had declined only to 4.1 million. A more substantial decline to 3.5 million is expected for 2001/02 as reforms such as the working families' tax credit (WFTC), introduced in October 1999, take full effect. But this will still mean that the government has failed to meet its earlier pledge to remove more than a million children out of poverty in Labour's first term. To cut the number of poor children by around a million would cost as much as £6.1billion. The pledge to reduce child poverty is proving to be an expensive one.”

Socialists would say not just expensive. Because it relies on the uncertainties of the market system and the use of money, the hope of any Labour government ending child poverty is impossible. Labour and Tory governments having been making the same promise for many years and they have all failed.

Appeals for money

But the magical powers of money to solve problems dominates not just the world of reformist politics, it also dominates the many charities that constantly ask for money. A recent example is an appeal run by Oxfam on TV:

  “What do we dream for our children? Health, happiness, success? A safe place to sleep at night? A drink of water that won't kill them? Never to be hungry again? We all want the best for our children. For some people that starts with such simple things. All they want is a better world for them to grow up in. It's not much to ask and all we are asking of you is £2 a month. 

In over 70 countries Oxfam is helping people work themselves out of poverty. They never give up and neither do we. Will you stand alongside us too? With your £2 a month we can help them with seeds, tools – help them build wells with clean, safe water give children an education so that they can have a chance of a real future free from hunger and pain. All people want is a better life for their children. Please do something remarkable today and help make a dream a reality. Telephone Oxfam today and give £2 a month.”

It is not the purpose here to criticise those who want to do something to help others in desperate need. In a way, their willingness to help provides a hope for the future. But the brutal facts have to be faced, that during the past 25 years during which time OXFAM and similar organisations have been appealing for money to solve problems, the number of seriously undernourished people has, according to the FAO, almost doubled from 435 million in 1974/5 to over 800 million in 2000. In view of this we are bound to point out that when OXFAM claim to be in over 70 countries “helping people to work themselves out of poverty,” so far as the general problem is concerned this statement is misleading. If OXFAM and its supporters were to also join the work of organising for socialism, that would be a significant step forward. What could be their objections to a world organised solely for the needs of people? Surely this is what they claim to want. By working for socialism they could see an end to the need to make appeals for money.

Following the volcanic eruption of Mt. Nyiragongo in Congo the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast its Goma Crisis Appeal (25 January). This included what given amounts of money could do. For example, “£30 will treat 18 people for severe malaria – £100 will provide clean water to 4,000 people for a week.”

We may not go as far as Oscar Wilde when he wrote, “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.” But it does remain true that appeals for money to alleviate suffering tend to perpetuate the system that causes the suffering. Moreover, the idea that such suffering results from natural causes is not always the case. Most natural dangers known and socialism would not need to leave communities exposed to them. This would avoid many disasters. Also, contingency plans would exist throughout the regions and at a world level for the relief of any catastrophe. Emergency supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies would be maintained at strategic points whilst machinery, equipment and helpers would be moved quickly to the area of crisis. The present appeals for money are a pathetic substitute for the availability of real resources and the freedom that communities in socialism would have to immediately use them.

The fetishism of money is part of the ideology of the profit system that claims uncountable victims across the world. In the Pre-Colombian societies of South America, in homage to their gods, human sacrifice was widely practised. For example, this was a gruesome ritual amongst the Aztec people in what is now Mexico. “In the heart of Tenochtitlan the pyramid rose as an architectural fetish, charged with the powers of all the offerings, and the blood from thousands of sacrificed human beings. The structure was the terrifying centre of the Aztec world” (The Aztecs, Richard F. Townsend).

Many of the sacrificial victims were children and we think of this as barbaric. Perhaps for this reason we now prefer to keep out of our minds the fact that every day we sacrifice many more children's lives than the Aztecs could ever manage. We sacrifice them in homage to the god of money, on the altar of the capitalist system. 

Pieter Lawrence

THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES - or is Adidas cooler than Nike?

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