Cultures of Fetishism (31 page)

There were many facets of human life in the bourgeois societies and capi- talist economies that caught Marx’s attention and clamored for written expression. He took elaborate notes on everything he saw. He filled up one notebook after another. And if the work, by chance or by Engels’ urgings, managed to find its way to a receptive publisher, Marx would subject the edited publisher’s proofs to endless re-writes.

If it were not for Engels’ encouragement, we might never have seen
Capital
, Vol. I, which might very well have gone on and on, way beyond its nearly 1,000-page manuscript, and remained unpublished. Certainly, there would not have been the second volume, which Engels, in the last years of his own life, constructed out of four separate drafts, each of more than 1,000 pages. And finally, Engels, assisted by two professional editors, went on to pub- lish the third volume, for which Marx had left only an incomplete first draft. The original plan for
Capital
was to have a fourth, fifth, and sixth volume. The fourth volume, extracted from twenty-three enormous notepads by Karl Kautsky, was finally transcribed and published as “Theories of Surplus Value.”
26
At Marx’s graveside, Engels said, “Marx discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production and the bour- geois society that this mode of production has created.”
27
Until recently, I had assumed that the special law of motion was the dialectical relationship between capitalism and the social relations that emerge from that mode of production. But there is more to Engels’ idea about “the special law of
motion
” than simple dialectics. Marx’s dialectic* was different from the traditional thesis,

* Explanations of the meaning of dialectics in Marxist theory can be as off-putting and impenetrable as some of Marx’s writings. My friend and colleague, the New York University Marxist scholar Bertell Ollman, wrote
Dialectical Investigations.
That volume begins with “An Introduction to Dialectics” and goes on to “Advanced Dialectics or the Role of Abstraction in Marx,” and, finally, concludes with a discouraging note: “Not all of the important questions associated with dialectics have been dealt with in this essay. Missing or barely touched on are the place and/or role within dialectical method of reflection, perception, emotion, memory, con- ceptualization (language), appropriation, moral evaluation, verification and activity, particularly in production.” In view of Ollman’s cautionary tale, it would seem presumptuously un-Marxian to offer a
brief
definition of Marxian dialectics.

antithesis, and synthesis. The fundamental law of motion that Marx discov- ered is a dialectic that entails the
process
of materializing. Things do not exist from the start. They materialize and come into existence through evolving forms. As the eminent Marxist scholar Bertell Ollman says: “Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality, by replacing the common-sense notion of a ‘thing’ that
has
a history, with notions of ‘process,’ which
contains
its history and possible futures, and ‘relation,’ which
contains
as part of what it is its ties with other relations.”
28

I came to an understanding of the possible meaning of Marx’s law of motion through my countertransference responses to Marx’s archive fevers. As this chapter evolved, it expanded and underwent what seemed like endless revi- sions. I watched with amazement and some degree of horror as my ideas about Marx and his theories kept assuming different forms and contents as they materialized.

When I told Ollman about my identifications with Marx’s archive fevers, he looked puzzled. I explained how some biographers, in their efforts to bring a subject to life, managed to smother the life energies of their subject under mountains of data. Didn’t he agree that Marx’s uncontrollable habit of writing mountains of words and theories could have the effect of draining his ideas of their life energies? Wasn’t Marx practicing against his preaching by endowing material things with living faculties and thereby stultifying human life? Ollman thought for a few moments and then replied, “It depends what you mean by life.”

He did not elaborate, and probably did not realize the effect his words would have on me. Naturally, I was defensive. I wanted to argue and defend my theory of Marx’s archive fever. But I decided to consider Ollman’s cryp- tic comment. He might not agree with the directions my considerations took me, nevertheless, soon after our conversation, I came to a new understand- ing of what Engels might have meant by Marx’s special law of motion. Because Marx’s theories were in a constant state of materializing and never settling down into precise meanings, they were perpetually mobile and alive. Perhaps the law of motion has to do with the living vitality of Marx’s abstractions?

Thinking about “It depends what you mean by life?” enabled me to settle into this chapter on Marx’s commodity fetishism. While I may have arrested the law of motion that had up until then allowed my ideas to achieve a cer- tain degree of mobility and flexibility, I also cured my archive fever. I was able to focus on the central themes of this chapter commodity fetishism and sur- plus labor value and how they are both supreme expressions of the fetishism strategy.

In one way or another, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is always addressing the inverted relation that exists between material things and sen- suous human beings. As suggested in Marx’s early papers on fetishism, money, and alienation, the deadening or reification of the human being goes hand-in-hand with attributions of life energy to material things.

By understanding the fetishism of commodities, we come to view the fetishism strategy from a new angle. For example, the necrophilic principle is here expressed as the vampire principle, in which dead capital grows rosy from feeding on the vitalities of the worker. A commodity, therefore, embod- ies within itself the life energies of the laborer who produced it.

How does a commodity differ from other material goods? Or, more to the point, we might ask, “Are all our material goods—our foods, our clothing, our homes, our household equipment, our beds and tables and chairs, our TV screens and computers and hi-fidelity set-ups, and so on—are these everyday, commonplace items inevitably and irrevocably commodities?” How could the essentials of food, clothing, and shelter, and all those objects that furnish and enliven our shelters, objects that are so practical and useful and necessary to our daily lives, be tainted by the fetishism of commodities? Human beings, in the very process of producing objects in a capitalist sys- tem of buying and selling, are creating commodities. By the time we purchase the simple useful goods that we put on our tables and the objects that furnish our homes and gardens, these useful things have long since been transformed

into the exchange values of commodities.

Here is where
surplus labor
—the vampire principle—enters the picture. If the capitalist paid every laborer involved in the production of his commodity the full value of their labor, he would have much smaller profits—or maybe, none at all. For example, if the worker works twelve hours, the capitalist will pay him a wage that is the equivalent of six hours of labor. The remainder, the
surplus
, or additional unpaid six hours, goes to plump up the voracious capitalist.

A commodity, by definition, is made up of the surplus labor of the worker. A commodity, by definition, is made up of the profits accumulated by the capitalist who underpaid for the labor that produced it. And it follows, there- fore, that there is one commodity that has an opposite trajectory. In a capi- talist economy, the laborer who produces the commodity is herself a commodity. Her value is not as a person with living desires but as an object that contributes to the exchange value of the product her labor has produced. A laborer and her work can be exchanged by the capitalist or the worker for a small quantity of diamonds, or one automobile or several pairs of Manolos. The personal dehumanization involved in the production of a commodity goes on to produce alienation. Alienation creates a longing for something that can restore a sense of inner aliveness—a diamond bracelet, an SUV, a pair of shoes, the latest
Bushido
tattoo. The fetishism of commodities is
not
the same as the consumer fetishism that inspires us to buy more and more elec- tronic equipment or the passionate longings that attach themselves to stilet- tos and other currently fashionable items. These familiar commercial products might legitimately be labeled as “fetishes” if the purchaser relates to

them as if they embodied a living essence.

Of course, knowing what we now know about vampire mentality, we could say that the commodity, since it contains within it the congealed sur- plus labor of the worker,
does
in fact embody a living essence. But this is not

what the woman is craving when she feels she must spend a week’s salary on that pair of shoes. In fact, she probably would be horrified if she knew about the congealed labor that composed the shiny straps of her stilleto.

No, the woman who must purchase the latest shoe style is not a vampire or a werewolf. Her appetites have been fueled by a different sort of craving. The passionate longings for certain consumer goods is motivated by the alienations that are bred and nurtured in a social world dominated by com- modity fetishism. A person who is alienated from her own inner life with all its wondrous range of human desires feels depleted and incomplete. She looks to the outer world to fill up her inner emptiness with things, with mate- rial objects, a pair of shoes, a fur coat, a hat, a chiffon scarf, an iPod, an SUV. Marx’s introduction to “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret”

is enlivened by a flourish of metaphorical animation as Marx creates visual images of a material object, a table, turning into a living thing imbued with human qualities. Wilson, who is often critical of Marx’s writing habits, also refers to him as “the poet of commodities.”
29
Marx captured the essential spirit of a commodity when he described an ordinary table, a functional piece of furniture that appears in many sizes and guises in most “civilized” homes, as a surface to dine on, as a desk to write on, as an accessory that we place next to our beds or armchairs to hold the candles that light up the books that we read. How could such a necessity, such a useful item as a table, be consid- ered a commodity? Isn’t a table sometimes just a table?

Marx would have agreed that a table, at first sight anyway, is a trivial thing, a useful thing intended simply to satisfy human needs and sensuous desires. However, Marx warned that when we stop to analyze the ordinary thing, we come upon a thing “that is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
30
An extraordinary statement with sub- tleties and niceties of its own.

Like Jonathan Swift, whose “modest proposal” became a model for some of Marx’s more inventive writings,
31
Marx could be ironic about matters that were deadly serious. And when he was, he often brought his theoretical abstractions to life. He gives his readers a vivid demonstration of how a table materializes in the world as a living thing. “As soon as it [a table] steps out into the world as a commodity, it changes into a sensible and supersensible thing.”
32
In other words, the table, as commodity, is no longer an immaterial substance made of wood, but a living thing made up of human parts and human sensibilities. “It not only
stands
with its
feet
on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its
head
, and evolves out of its wooden
brain
, grotesque ideas far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will (
itals.
mine).
33

The table comes to life as a human thing with human capacities because congealed within its essence is the worker’s unpaid labor. The table is endowed with the life forces that the vampire drained away from the worker. The vampire could never get its fangs into Marx. As a young man he pro- claimed to his parents, “The writer must earn money in order to live and write, but he must by no means live and write to earn money.”
34
Marx was a

workaholic who toiled at his writing every day of his adult life but who, except for a stint as a paid journalist for the
Daily Tribune
in the 1850s, never as a wage earner. Even after he married “Baroness” Jenny von Westphalen in 1843 and they went on to have six children (two boys and one girl died in childhood) and were living in dire poverty, hounded by debtors, he would not consider working for a wage. For twenty years, until 1864 when Marx inherited the estate of Wilhelm Wolff,
*
one of his long-time admirers, he and Jenny were always pawning their coats and linens. The heirloom silver given to Jenny on her wedding day spent more time in the pawnshops than in the bare cupboards of the Marx household.
35
When it came to profiting from the labor of others, Marx could be something of a vampire himself. He thought nothing of borrowing money from a neighbor to pay for the funeral of his one-year-old daughter. When Jenny was seriously ill with smallpox he was unable to pay the doctor’s bill. The neighbors, the doctor, the butcher, the baker, the tailor, the shoemaker could wait to be paid or never be paid while Marx gave himself the privilege of spending most of his days at the British Library studying books on money and credit. Marx even had the chutzpah to threaten to draw a banknote on his widowed mother’s income, a desperate gesture that resulted in a further estrangement between the forever money- wheedling son and the tight-fisted mother.
36
In his mature years, his motto was, “I shall not let bourgeois society make me into a money making machine.”
37

Wilson was bewildered by Marx’s reluctance to work for a wage: “It was one of the most striking contradictions of Marx’s whole career that the man who had done more than any other to call attention to economic motivation should have been incapable of doing anything for gain.”
38
Other German emigres had found work in London. “Yet on only one recorded occasion dur- ing the whole of Marx’s thirty years’ stay in London did he attempt to find regular employment.”
39
Wilson is referring to Marx’s attempt to apply for a job as a railway clerk. But he was saved from that ignominious fate by one of his other symptoms. His handwriting was so blotchy and illegible that his application had to be turned down.
40