William J. Blake: An American Looks at Karl Marx
At this point it is necessary to take stock. The sinuous path of economic theory in Marxian form (which we are only beginning), already leads us to something like the serried scholastic propositions of St. Thomas Aquinas on essence, being, incarnation, or the other counters of his lively mind. Nothing emerges as what it seems to be. There is a hidden aspect to every appearance. Superficially it would seem as though there were a mystic in Marx, a man who preferred the inner explanation of everything to the outer.
The next question is, is it so difficult? Millions of persons have followed Marx. True, not more than a small percentage could explain the distinction, say, between use-value and value. But there must have been a natural language in Marx that corresponded to a common perception.1 If his theory of fetichism, which we shall soon study, is correct, then his widespread following must avail themselves of their practical experience in identifying his discoveries and so recognizing them as revealing reality. And the third query is, is the difficulty in Marx or in the society whose economic activity he analyzes? Is the complexity theirs?
Here Marx and his critics diverge completely. For Marx the difficulty is in the social structure; for his opponents, such as Böhm-Bawerk, it rests in his “mistaken assumptions.”
Marx states that a commodity, at first sight, appears trivial, easily understood. But under examination it shows astonishing metaphysical subtleties and niceties. But we can hold this miserable business in our hands, supposing it to be a pencil, let us say. How does all this subtlety enter the wretched pencil? As a pencil, having the utility of writing, there is no mystery. What it does and what it is is as plain as can be. Nor is it mysterious as a product of labor, for surely someone had to make it. Nor is its quantity and quality strange, for they are easily distinguished. Nor the fact that it is produced and distributed by men working together. There is nothing mysterious there, either, for men work together before everyone’s gaze and the job is seen for what it is. That it is a social product is evident. And yet that pencil has given birth to a series of equations that stretch out like Banquo’s descendants.
The Mystery of the Commodity Form
The mystery lies in the form itself. Because:
(a) The equality of human labor is expressed not as this equality but as the equality of distinctly different commodities, such as, say, catnip and encyclopedias, as equivalent values.
(b) The quantity of social labor-time put into each commodity is not expressed in a direct comparison of time but by the indirect mode of equal quantities of value.
(c) The mutual relations of producers are expressed only by the exchange of their products, and it is this exchange that is the only nexus uniting them as workers. My co-operation with the grocery-store owner is by way of his selling me apricot cans and mine in handing him money, the equivalent of the apricot cans or of any other commodity. We are related by the commodities, and by them alone.
(d) The social character of labor, that is, its relation to total human output, appears as something else, as the value relation of a host of commodities to one universal equivalent (now money).
(e) Every commodity therefore is a compound of a material factor, utility, and an immaterial factor, value; it consists of attributes that the senses can detect, such as weight and shape, and of a social substance that cannot be detected, value. This value, which is the social relation, due to our form of property relations, is assumed to reside in the things that are exchangeable, instead of in society itself. This transformation of the nonmaterial aspect of the commodity into an attribute, like weight and shape, is a fetichism, that is, an assumption that a figment of the brain is a reality and can act on its own account.
Commodities are, in other words, as fabulous as the centaur, half-man and half-horse. The anatomy of such a creature would have been complex indeed.
Since production is private, the producers necessarily can have no contact except by their products. In a social state, they would not have to exchange these respective products. They might send all of their products to a common warehouse: they might receive consumption goods through co-operatives on a basis entirely unrelated to what they produced. They would all know that they were producing together, that they were consuming together. But no one would have to exchange his product against another in order to keep going.
This system might not appeal. That is not the point. Its existence (and there have been a great many societies on this basis)2 shows that the realization of value of the product by way of another product is due not to the inherent nature of the products but to the conflict in the social character of production; to wit, that it is of no use to product unless goods fulfill a social want, and yet their private production is not for social use, but for exchange, for profit. That is why the relations of commodities are direct, by purchase and sale, or more primitively, by exchange, while those of men are indirect (based on property relations which, in turn, are based on men’s relation to commodities).
Now we see why Marx took up the study of a single commodity like the pencil. It is, as has been stated, the germ-cell of all commodities, of the structure of commodity society. In that one pencil is united every contradiction of value and use-value, of social production and private enterprise, of abstract labor (value) and concrete labor (the utility prior to an object becoming a commodity). The two types of labor are the keys to the twofold nature of commodities.
Labor-Time the Implicit Basis of Exchange
The fact that we do not see that we are always exchanging labor-time does not mean that we do not do this unconsciously. Consciously we see that we are exchanging them against money. But actually, when we have to compare one commodity to another, and exchange more for one than the other, we recognize their labor-time, indirectly, by means of the quantity of value realized in exchange. Value, says Marx, carries no label saying “I am social labor-time.” It carries rather a social hieroglyphic, “I am five dollars’ worth.”
Perception Is Not Analysis
That this perception does not affect behavior is still beside the point. We still think we are breathing a simple affair, air, instead of a complex of gases. It will always feel like one substance when breathed. That does not change its chemically composite nature. But as early as 1670 economists developed a naïve theory of labor as the cause of value because it was more and more forced on their attention that there must be a common denominator back of different exchanges. But so long as they thought that use-value was the same as value they continued to attribute the quality of value to goods as they did its weight or its chemical composition.
Reflection Reverses History
Man’s reflections on life, says Marx, have to go the opposite way of history. He takes every finished result of a development for granted and then painfully penetrates it, so as to restore the factors that followed each other in its evolution. He wends his way back from money to exchange and from exchange to production and from that to labor, and later discovers how labor has changed in character with the social growth of industry, how it can now be considered as a social mass. So at first he takes the complex results to be simple and natural, and is shocked by the complexity of analysis when what he is really doing is to get down from the complex to the simple, natural constituents. Marx’s indictment of all other schools of political economy is that they are forced to disregard all contradictions and act as though the surface phenomena, which for him are the inversion of truth (that is, the exact opposite of political economy), are “economics” itself.
Value Not an Intrinsic Quality
For example, certain economists debate as to what part Nature has in producing value, whereas value is social labor-time. But back of this question lies a fetichism. It is the belief that pearls are valuable because they are lovely, and diamonds because they are brilliant, and gold because it glistens, and that loveliness and brilliancy and glistening are inherently more valuable than sweetness in cheap sugar, pungent smell in cigars, etc. Perhaps orchids are inherently more valuable than common roses. Who knows? The fact that if gold could be produced by a new process or that if carbons like coal could be crystallized into diamonds, the diamonds would fall to the value of coals, indicates how fetichistic this is. The sun glitters more than does a billion ounces of gold; it has no value, it is free to all comers. A view of Vesuvius presents more colors and smoke-forms than the convolutions of all the orchids ever raised and every Neapolitan beggar has it for nothing. Sometimes the glistening of gold is worth twelve times that of the sheen of silver, and sometimes sixty times. What happened to their “natural value”? A change in labor-time in their production.
Only one school of bourgeois economists has seen that the value of goods was not in the goods themselves, and that is the Austrian, or marginal utility, school. Their theory has other defects, but not this one. But the Marxians hold that when their theories are worked out, they too must participate in the fetichism of commodities because they do not understand the nature of value as due to class division, and against utility itself.
No chemist has ever found value in a commodity.
If, too, value is an attribute of goods, if it is all as simple as it looks, what is the cause of headlong crashes in price during a crisis? It is the rough-and-tumble alignment of exchange values to the labor-time that is hidden by the exchange operations.
Every commodity’s value has been expressed by another commodity. It had appeared as though it was the owners of the commodities (the buyers and sellers) that determined their exchanges. But their helplessness in a crisis shows that, like a house’s falling due to gravitation, values are pulled down to the imperative demands of labor-time. Relative values can never stray far from their basis. The values were not inherent in the commodities. The mode by which this alignment is made is called “supply and demand.” But this is another fetichism, that of its means of expression being transfigured into the situation itself.
Fetichisms Are Discarded
Society does outgrow certain fetichisms. For example, the mercantilists held that gold and silver alone were wealth. The criticisms of Adam Smith annihilated those childish ideas. He replaced the apparent wealth of the world, money, with the real wealth, goods that money represented. But the followers of Smith attributed to capital the same material properties they had ridiculed in gold! So long as Marx’s study of the twofold character of labor is not heeded, he holds, so long will it be impossible to create a science of political economy. So long as economic activity is based on the difference between appearance and reality, its study will require the patience of Job to penetrate the veil.
1. Anyone who has taught Marxist economic theory to British coal miners knows that they grasp its intricacies more easily than do Oxford dons.
2. The Jesuits in Paraguay, Janissaries in Turkey, monastic orders, Filibuster communities (seventeenth century), etc.