1 What Labour Debate?
1.1 Class and Classification: Against, In and Beyond Labour

JOHN HOLLOWAY1

This paper explores a simple question: if fetishism is understood as a process of fetishisation, what are the implications for the concept of class?

Fetishism and Fetishisation

The distinction between fetishism and fetishisation is crucial for a discussion of Marxist theory. It is the difference between seeing the world in terms of domination and seeing it in terms of struggle.

Marx’s discussion of fetishism is at the centre of his whole theory. It is at once a criticism of what is wrong with capitalism, a critique of bourgeois thought and a theory of how capitalism reproduces itself. It points at once to the dehumanisation of people, to our own complicity in the reproduction of power, and to the difficulty (or apparent impossibility) of revolution.

The theme of dehumanisation is constantly present in Marx’s discussion of fetishism in Capital and elsewhere. In capitalism there is an inversion of the relation between people and things, between subject and object. There is an objectification of the subject and a subjectification of the object: things (money, capital, machines) become the subjects of society, people (workers) become the objects. Social relations are not just apparently but really relations between things (between money and the state, between your money and mine), while humans are deprived of their sociality, transformed into ‘individuals’, the necessary complement of commodity exchange: ‘In order that this alienation be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners, and by implication as independent individuals’ (Marx, 1965: 87).

In the long and detailed discussion of conditions in the factory and the process of exploitation, the emphasis is constantly on the inversion of subject and object:

Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman who employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality’ (Marx, 1965: 423).

It is not only for the physical misery that it brings, but above all for the inversion of things and people that Marx condemns capitalism: for the fetishisation of social relations in other words.

Inextricably linked with the condemnation of the inversion of subject and object in bourgeois society is the critique of bourgeois theory which takes this inversion for granted, which bases its categories on the fetishised forms of social relations: the state, money, capital, the individual, profit, wages, rent and so on. These categories are derived from the surface of society, the sphere of circulation, in which the subjectivity of the subject as producer is completely out of sight and all that can be seen is the interaction of things and of the individuals who are the bearers of these things. It is here, where social subjectivity is hidden from view, that liberal theory blooms. This sphere of circulation is ‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx, 1965: 176). The whole three volumes of Capital are devoted to a critique of political economy, that is, to showing how the conceptions of political economy arise from the fetishised appearances of social relations. Political economy (and bourgeois theory in general) takes for granted the forms in which social relations exist (commodity-form, value-form, money-form, capital-form and so on). In other words, bourgeois theory is blind to the question of form: commodities and money (and so on) are not even thought of as being forms, or modes of existence, of social relations.

Bourgeois theory is blind to the transitory nature of the current forms of social relations, takes for granted the basic unchangeability of capitalist social relations. Bourgeois thought, however, is not just the thought of the bourgeoisie, or of capitalism’s active supporters. It refers rather to the forms of thought generated by the fractured relation between doing and done (subject and object) in capitalist society. It is important to see that the critique of bourgeois theory is not just a critique of ‘them’. It is also, and perhaps above all, a critique of ‘us’, of the bourgeois nature of our own assumptions and categories, or, more concretely, a critique of our own complicity in the reproduction of capitalist power relations. The critique of bourgeois thought is the critique of the separation of subject and object in our own thought.

The fetishism which is so highly elaborated in the work of the political economists and other bourgeois theorists is equally the basis of everyday ‘common-sense’ conceptions in capitalist society. The assumption of the permanence of capitalism is built into the daily thought and practice of people in this society. The appearance and real existence of social relations as fragmented relations between things conceal both the basic antagonism of those relations and the possibility of changing the world. The concept of fetishism (rather than any theory of ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’) thus provides the basis for an answer to the age-old question, ‘why do people accept the misery, violence and exploitation of capitalism?’ By pointing to the way in which people not only accept the miseries of capitalism but also actively participate in its reproduction, the concept of fetishism also underlines the difficulty or apparent impossibility of revolution against capitalism.

Fetishism is the central theoretical problem confronted by any theory of revolution. Revolutionary thought and practice is necessarily anti-fetishistic. Any thought or practice which aims at the emancipation of humanity from the dehumanisation of capitalism is necessarily directed against fetishism.

There are, however, two different ways of understanding fetishism, which we can refer to as ‘hard fetishism’ on the one hand, and ‘fetishisation-as-process’, on the other. The former understands fetishism as an established fact, a stable or intensifying feature of capitalist society. The latter understands fetishisation as a continuous struggle, always at issue. The theoretical and political implications of the two approaches are very different.

The more common approach among those who have emphasised the concept of fetishism is the ‘hard fetishism’ approach. Fetishism is assumed to be an accomplished fact. In a capitalist society, social relations really do exist as relations between things. Relations between subjects really do exist as relations between objects. Although people are, in their species-characteristic, practical creative beings, they exist under capitalism as objects, as dehumanised, as deprived of their subjectivity.

The constitution or genesis of capitalist social relations is here understood as a historical constitution, something that took place in the past. Implicitly, a distinction is made between the origins of capitalism, when capitalist social relations were established through struggle (what Marx refers to as primitive or original accumulation), and the established capitalist mode of production, when capitalist social relations are in place. In the latter phase, fetishism is assumed to be established in a stable condition. In this view, the importance of Marx’s insistence on form is simply to show the historicity of capitalist social relations. Within this historicity, within the capitalist mode of production, fetishised social relations can be regarded as basically stable. Thus, for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism involved a struggle to impose value relations, but it is assumed that, once the transition has been accomplished, value is a stable form of social relations. Value is seen as struggle only in relation to the transitional period; after that it is regarded as simply domination, or as part of the laws which determine the reproduction of capitalist society.2

There is a central problem for those who understand fetishism as accomplished fact. If social relations are fetishised, how do we criticise them? The hard understanding of fetishism implies that there is something special about us, something that gives us a vantage point above the rest of society. They are alienated, fetishised, reified, suffering from false consciousness, we are able to see the world from the point of view of the totality, or true consciousness, or superior understanding. Our criticism derives from our special position or experience or intellectual abilities, which allow us to understand how they (the masses) are dominated. We are implicitly an intellectual elite, a vanguard of some sort. The only possible way of changing society is through our leadership of them, through our enlightening them. If it is taken that social relations really are fetishised in this sense (if fetishism is seen as an established fact), then Marxist theory and practice become elitist: we, the enlightened, think and act on behalf of the unenlightened. The idea of revolution as the self-emancipation of the workers then becomes nonsensical, as Lenin quite logically pointed out.

The second approach, what we called the ‘fetishisation-as-process’ approach, maintains that there is nothing special about our criticism of capitalism. As theorists or Marxists, we occupy no privileged position above the throng, but simply have a peculiar way of articulating our participation in the conflict in which all participate. If that is the starting point, however, then there is no way that fetishism can be understood as ‘hard fetishism’. If fetishism were an accomplished fact, if capitalism were characterised by the total objectification of the subject, then there is no way that we could criticise fetishism.

The fact that we criticise points to the contradictory nature of fetishism (and therefore also to the contradictory nature of our selves), and gives evidence of the present existence of anti-fetishism. The point is made by Ernst Bloch:

Alienation could not even be seen, and condemned of robbing people of their freedom and depriving the world of its soul, if there did not exist some measure of its opposite, of that possible coming-to-oneself, being-with-oneself, against which alienation can be measured (Bloch, 1964: 113).3

The concept of alienation, or fetishism, in other words, implies its opposite: not as essential non-alienated ‘home’ deep in our hearts, but as resistance, refusal, rejection of alienation in our daily practice. It is only on the basis of a concept of anti-alienation or anti-fetishism that we can conceive of alienation or fetishism. If fetishism and anti-fetishism coexist, then it can only be as antagonistic processes. Fetishism is a process of fetishisation, a process of separating subject and object, always in antagonism to the opposing movement of anti-fetishisation, the struggle to reunite subject and object.

Once fetishism is revealed as process of fetishisation, the hardness of all categories dissolves and phenomena which appear as things or established facts (such as commodity, value, money, the state) are revealed as processes. The forms come to life. The categories are opened4 to reveal that their content is struggle.

Once fetishism is understood as fetishisation, then the genesis of the capitalist forms of social relations is not of purely historical interest. The value-form, money-form, capital-form, state-form etc. are not established once and for all at the origins of capitalism. Rather, they are constantly at issue, constantly questioned as forms of social relations, constantly being established and re-established (or not) through struggle. The forms of social relations are processes of forming social relations. Every time a small child takes sweets from a shop without realising that money has to be given in exchange for them, every time workers refuse to accept that the market dictates that their place of work should be closed or jobs lost, every time that the shopkeepers of São Paolo promote the killing of street children to protect their property, every time that we lock our bicycles, cars or houses – value as a form of relating to one another is at issue, constantly the object of struggle, constantly in process of being disrupted, re-constituted and disrupted again.

All of those apparently fixed phenomena which we often take for granted (money, state, power: ‘they are there, always have been, always will, that’s human nature, isn’t it?’) are now seen to be raging, bloody battlefields. It is rather like taking a harmless speck of dust and looking at it through a microscope to discover that the ‘harmlessness’ of the speck of dust conceals a whole micro-world in which millions of microscopic organisms live and die in the daily battle for existence. But in the case of money, the invisibility of the battle it conceals has nothing to do with physical size, it is the result rather of the concepts through which we look at it. The banknote we hold in our hand seems a harmless thing, but look at it more closely and we see a whole world of people fighting for survival, some dedicating their lives to the pursuit of money, some (many) desperately trying to get hold of money as a means of surviving another day, some trying to evade money by taking what they want without paying for it or setting up forms of production that do not go through the market and the money-form, some killing for money, many each day dying for lack of money. A bloody battlefield in which the fact that social relations exist in the form of money brings untold misery, disease and death and is always at issue, always contested, always imposed, often with violence. Money is a raging battle of monetisation and anti-monetisation.

Seen from this perspective, money becomes monetisation, value valorisation, commodity commodification, capital capitalisation, power powerisation, state statification, and so on (with ever uglier neologisms). Each process implies its opposite. The monetisation of social relations makes little sense unless it is seen as a constant movement against its opposite, the creation of social relations on a non-monetary basis. Neoliberalism, for example, can be seen as a drive to extend and intensify the monetisation of social relations, a reaction in part to the loosening of that monetisation in the post-war period and its crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. These forms of social relations (commodity, value, money, capital and so on) are interconnected, of course, all forms of the capitalist separation of subject and object, but they are interconnected not as static, accomplished forms, but as forms of living struggle. The existence of forms of social relations, in other words, cannot be separated from their constitution. Their existence is their constitution, a constantly renewed struggle against the forces that subvert them.

Fetishisation and Class

All that I take as a starting point. The question to be addressed here is what implications this understanding of fetishisation as a process has for our understanding of class.

Most discussions of class are based on the assumption that the fetishised forms are pre-constituted. The relation between capital and labour (or between capitalist and working class) is taken to be one of subordination. On this basis, understanding class struggle involves, firstly, defining the working class and, secondly, studying whether and how they struggle.

In this approach, the working class, however defined, is defined on the basis of its subordination to capital: it is because it is subordinated to capital (as wage workers, or as producers of surplus-value) that it is defined as working class. Indeed it is only because the working class is assumed to be pre-subordinated that the question of definition can even be posed. Definition merely adds the locks to a world that is assumed to be closed. Once defined, the working class is then identified as a particular group of people, who can then be made the object of study. For socialists, ‘working class’ is then treated as a positive concept and working class identity as something to be prized. There is, of course, the problem of what to do with those people who do not fall within the definitions of working class or capitalist class, but this is dealt with by a supplementary definitional discussion on how to define these other people, whether as new petty bourgeoisie, salariat, middle class or whatever. This process of definition or class-ification is the basis of endless discussions about class and non-class movements, class and ‘other forms’ of struggle, ‘alliances’ between the working class and other groups, and so on.

All sorts of problems spring from this definitional approach to class. Firstly, there is the question of ‘belonging’. Do we who work in the universities ‘belong’ to the working class? Did Marx and Lenin? Are the rebels of Chiapas part of the working class? Are feminists part of the working class? Are those active in the gay movement part of the working class? In each case, there is a concept of a pre-defined working class to which these people do or do not belong.

A second consequence of defining class is the definition of struggles that follows. From the classification of the people concerned there are derived certain conclusions about the struggles in which they are involved. Those who define the Zapatista rebels as being not part of the working class draw from that certain conclusions about the nature and limitations of the uprising. From the definition of the class position of the participants there follows a definition of their struggles: the definition of class defines the antagonism that the definer perceives or accepts as valid. This leads to a blinkering of the perception of social antagonism. In some cases, for example, the definition of the working class as the urban proletariat directly exploited in factories, combined with evidence of the decreasing proportion of the population who fall within this definition, has led people to the conclusion that class struggle is no longer relevant for understanding social change. In other cases, the definition of the working class and therefore of working class struggle in a certain way has led to an incapacity to relate to the development of new forms of struggle (the student movement, feminism, ecologism and so on).

Defining the working class constitutes them as a ‘they’. Even if we say that we are part of the working class, we do so by stepping back from ourselves and by classifying ourselves or the group to which we ‘belong’ (students, university lecturers and so on). On the basis of this definition, it is possible to pose the question of their class consciousness and to study it. What consciousness do they have of their class position and their class interests? Is this consciousness what it ought to be? Is it a true consciousness or a false or limited (trade union) consciousness? If, as is usually argued, it is a false or limited consciousness, then the conclusion is usually that the revolutionary transformation of society is impossible or that it must be led from outside, by a Party or by intellectuals.

The fundamental problem is that if the working class is defined on the basis of subordination – and there is no other way of defining it – then the theoretical circle is closed: there is no way out except by complementing a fictional objectivity with a fictional subjectivity.

If, on the other hand, we do not start from the assumption of the fetishised character of social relations, if we assume that fetishisation is a process and that existence is inseparable from constitution, then how does this change our vision of class? The argument in the first part of this paper would suggest that class, like money, like state, like value, has to be understood as a process, as a process of class-ification. Capitalism is the ever renewed generation of class, the ever renewed class-ification of people. Marx makes this point very clearly in his discussion of accumulation in Capital:

Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation: on the one side the capitalist, on the other, the wage-labourer (Marx, 1965: 578).

In other words, the existence of classes and their constitution cannot be separated: to say that classes exist is to say that they are in the process of being constituted.

The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of subject and object. Capitalism is the daily repeated violent separation of the object from the subject, the daily snatching of the object–creation–product from the subject–creator–producer, the daily seizure from the subject not only of her creation but of her act of creation, her creativity, her subjectivity, her humanity.

The violence of this separation is not characteristic just of the earliest period of capitalism: it is the core of capitalism. To put it in other words, ‘primitive accumulation’ is not just a feature of a bygone period, it is central to the existence of capitalism. The violence with which the separation of subject and object, or the class-ification of humanity, is carried out suggests that ‘reproduction’ is a misleading word in so far as it conjures up an image of a smoothly repeated process, something that goes around and around, whereas the violence of capitalism suggests that the repetition of the production of capitalist social relations is always very much at issue.

Class and Classification

The understanding of class as classification5 has implications for all aspects of the discussion of class.

(1) Class struggle is the struggle to class-ify and against being classified at the same time as it is, indistinguishably, the struggle between constituted classes.

More orthodox discussions of class struggle tend to assume that classes are pre-constituted, that the subordination of labour to capital is pre-established, and to start from there. In the approach suggested here the conflict does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted; rather, it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. The conflict is the conflict between subordination and insubordination, and it is this which allows us to speak of insubordination (or ‘dignity’, to borrow the Zapatistas’ phrase) as a central feature of capitalism. Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle. This leads to a much richer concept of class struggle in which the whole of social practice is at issue. All social practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection of practice to the fetishised, perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-beyond those forms. There can thus be no question of the existence of non-class forms of struggle. Class struggle, then, is the unceasing daily antagonism (whether it be perceived or not) between alienation and dis-alienation, between definition and anti-definition, between fetishisation and de-fetishisation.

We do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being working class, against being classified. It is the unity of the process of classification (the unity of capital accumulation) that gives unity to our struggle, not our unity as members of a common class. Thus, for example, it is the significance of the Zapatista struggle against capitalist classification that gives it importance for class struggle, not the question of whether the indigenous inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle are or are not members of the working class. There is nothing positive about being members of the working class, about being ordered, commanded, separated from our product and our process of production. Struggle arises not from the fact that we are working class but from the fact that we-are-and-are-not working class, that we exist against-and-beyond being working class, that they try to order and command us but we do not want to be ordered and commanded, that they try to separate us from our product and our producing and our humanity and our selves and we do not want to be separated from all that.

(2) We are/are not working class. To say that class should be understood as classification means that class struggle (the struggle to classify us and our struggle against being classified) is something that runs through us, individually and collectively. Only if we were fully classified could we say without contradiction ‘we are working class’ (but then class struggle would be impossible).

We take part in class struggle on both sides. We classify ourselves in so far as we produce capital, in so far as we respect money, in so far as we participate, through our practice, our theory, our language (our defining the working class), in the separation of subject and object. We simultaneously struggle against our class-ification in so far as we are human. We exist against-in-and-beyond capital. Humanity is schizoid, volcanic: everyone is torn apart by the class antagonism. We are self-divided, self-alienated. We who struggle for the reunification of subject and object are also we who produce their separation. Rather than looking to the hero with true class consciousness, a concept of revolution must start from the confusions and contradictions that tear us all apart. There is no pure, revolutionary subject. The linking of the purity of the subject with revolution, very clearly in the case of Lenin’s idea of the Party, but also in the case of Negri’s ‘multitude’, is part of the tradition of the left, part of its tendency towards puritanical authoritarianism.

Does this mean that class distinctions can be reduced to a general statement about the schizoid character of humanity? No, because there are clearly differences in the way in which the class antagonism traverses us, differences in the degree to which it is possible for us to repress that antagonism. For those who benefit materially from the process of class-ification (accumulation), it is relatively easy to repress anything which points against or beyond classification, to live within the bounds of fetishism. It is those whose lives are overturned by accumulation (the indigenous of Chiapas, university lecturers, coal miners, nearly everybody) in whom the element of againstness will be much more present. It remains true, however, that nobody exists purely against or against-and-beyond: we all participate in the separation of subject and object, the classification of humans. Notions of class composition, decomposition and recomposition should be understood, therefore, not as the changing position of different groups but as the changing configuration of the antagonism that traverses all of us, the antagonism between fetishisation and anti-fetishisation, between classification and anti-classification.

(3) Is work central to classification? Yes-and-no.

Work is an ambiguous term. It can be understood either as labour (alienated work) or, more broadly, as purposive, creative activity. To avoid the ambiguity, we shall refer to labour as doing rather than to ‘work’. Labour is the production of capital and the production of capital is the production of class, classification. The production of capital is at the same time the production of surplus-value, exploitation. If there were no exploitation, there would be no production of class.

However, the statement ‘labour is the production of capital’ is tautologous and misleading in so far as it assumes the pre-constitution of labour, the prior abstraction of human doing. The argument so far suggests that we cannot understand capitalism simply in terms of the conflict between labour and capital for, to do so, is to start from pre-constituted categories, from an assumed existence-in-abstraction-from-constitution. Exploitation is not just the exploitation of labour but the simultaneous transformation of human doing into labour, the simultaneous desubjectification of the subject, the dehumanisation of humanity. This does not mean that doing, the subject, humanity exist in some pure sphere waiting to be metamorphosed into their capitalist forms. The capitalist form (labour) is the mode of existence of doing/ subjectivity/ humanity, but that mode of existence is contradictory. To say that doing exists as labour means that it exists also as anti-labour. To say that humanity exists as subordination means that it exists also as insubordination. The production of class is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordination. Exploitation is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordinate doing. The suppression of doing does not just take place in the process of production, as usually understood, but in the whole separating of subject and object that constitutes capitalist society.

Thus: labour produces class, but labour pre-supposes a prior classification. Similarly, production is the sphere of the constitution of class, but the existence of a sphere of production, that is the separation of production from human doing in general also presupposes a prior classification.

The answer, then, to our question about the centrality of work is surely that it is not labour that is central but doing, which exists in-against-and-beyond labour. To start from labour (as in ‘labour studies’ or ‘the labour debate’) is to enclose oneself from the beginning within a fetishised world, such that any projection of an alternative world must appear as pure fancy, something brought in from outside.

In–Against–Beyond

Underlying this discussion of class is an attempt to understand the current development of capitalism. Capitalism is in overt crisis in most of the world and in a situation of fragility in the rest, a situation in which the open outbreak of crisis is deferred through the ever-increasing expansion of credit. The crisis of class domination, however, does not correspond in any obvious way to a surge in the strength of the working class. This is a central question for anti-capitalist theory: if the world is a world of class struggle, how is it that when one side (labour) is weakened, the other (capital) is nevertheless in crisis? Elsewhere,6 Werner Bonefeld and I have suggested that credit expansion brings about a temporal dislocation between the surge of struggle and the manifestation of crisis (as in 1917–1929, 1968–1974, 1999–). The discussion here suggests a second approach: the weakness of capital is the result not of the strength of labour (as constituted class, as movement), but of the strength of anti-classification, of non-identity.

Capital accumulation is voracious. It requires an ever more complete subordination of humanity, an ever more profound classification of existence. This is surely the significance of Marx’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: if exploitation and the dehumanisation which it implies is not intensified, there is crisis. Crisis then is the result not of the strength of the working class or of the labour movement, necessarily, but of the strength of the general resistance to capital’s drive for an ever more profound subordination of humanity (dignity, as the Zapatistas say).

That in us which exists against-and-beyond capital is not our existence as working class but our struggling against being working class. We are the anti-class, those who are in-against-and-beyond being working class. That is what we need to explore and articulate.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1991), Negative Dialectics, Routledge, London.
Bloch, E. (1964), Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Bd. 2), Suhrkamp, Frankfurt.
Bonefeld, W. (n.d.), ‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on Class and Constitution’, Unpublished paper.
Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (eds) (1991), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London.
Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (eds) (1995), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Macmillan, London.
Bonefeld, W., R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds) (1992), Open Marxism, Volume I: Dialectics and History, Pluto Press, London.
Gunn, R. (1987), ‘Notes on Class’, Common Sense, no. 2. pp.
Holloway, J. (1991), ‘Capital is Class Struggle (And Bears are not Cuddly)’, in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London..
Jessop, B. (1991), ‘Polar Bears and Class Struggle: Much Less than a Self-Criticism’, in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds), Post-Fordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London.
Marx, K. (1965), Capital, Volume I, Progress, Moscow.

• 1In writing this, I have had two other papers very much in mind: Richard Gunn’s ‘Notes on Class’ (1987) and Werner Bonefeld’s chapter in this book [‘Capital, Labour and Primitive Accumulation: On Class and Constitution’]
• 2For examples of this approach, see Bob Jessop (1991); for a critique, Holloway (1991).
• 3Adorno makes the same point (1990: 377–378): ‘Greyness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbour the concept of different colours, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole.’ But he immediately gives the point a pessimistic, reactionary twist quite different from Bloch by adding, ‘the traces always come from the past and our hopes come from that which was or is doomed.’ The different colours do not come from the past: they come from present resistance.
• 4This is the core of the approach often referred to as ‘Open Marxism’: see Bonefeld W et al. (1992).
• 5Is classification the same as classification in general? I think so, but this is an argument that would take us beyond the bounds of this paper.
• 6On this, see Bonefeld W and Holloway J 1995.

1.2 Class Struggle and the Working Class: The Problem of Commodity Fetishism
SIMON CLARKE

As my contribution to The Labour Debate, I would like to disagree with the basic positions put forward by John Holloway, and with the interpretation of Marx on which he bases those positions. The focus of my remarks will be John’s interpretation and critique of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

First, I would like to stress that I agree absolutely with John that we must start from a view of labour as an active subject of the reproduction of capitalist social relations and so as the actual or potential agent of the transformation of those social relations and even of the transformation of the form of society itself or, in simpler terms, that capitalism is based on class conflict.1 I also agree that any democratic socialist politics that does not take the actually existing subjectivity of the working class as its starting point is bound to be self-defeating. So I agree with John’s rejection of a view of the working class as a social grouping which is constituted as the passive object of capitalist exploitation, ignorant of its true interests, lacking a consciousness of its historical role, perhaps even happily integrated into capitalist society.

John’s point in drawing this distinction is to develop an argument about the role of the intellectual in late capitalist society, and this is where I disagree most fundamentally with him. John argues that ‘we [intellectuals] occupy no privileged position above the throng, but simply have a peculiar way of articulating our participation in the conflict in which all participate’. John rejects the attribution of any special privileges to the intellectual, because he bases his rejection of capitalism not on a critique of capitalist exploitation but on a romantic aspiration to reclaim creativity from capitalist labour. From this perspective the intellectual is just a worker like any other, robbed of his or her creativity in just the same way as is an agricultural worker or an assembly line worker. John refuses the privileges of an intellectual, but at the same time he abdicates the responsibilities of the intellectual.

The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof

John starts by stressing the pivotal role of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, but then he disagrees quite fundamentally with what Marx actually wrote. Before we look at John’s criticism of Marx, let us review Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism.

One component of Marx’s youthful theory of alienated labour was a romantic critique of commodity production on the grounds of the dehumanising impact of the division of labour and the reduction of human creativity to labour-time. This was the basis on which Marx initially condemned Ricardo’s political economy for its ‘cynicism’, and it is the element of Marx’s work on which Marxist romanticism, including that of John, has focused.2 Marx continued to see labour, in the sense of self-conscious productive activity (John’s creativity), as the practice that distinguishes humans from animals, but the starting point of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is not this idea of labour as creativity, but the concept of social labour, the idea that every society is based on some form of social production in which the members of society are not self-sufficient but in which they meet their needs by participating in co-operative labour.

The interdependence of the producers is articulated through the social relations within which the various members of the society produce and distribute their products, but the character of those social relations differs from one society to another. Social relations of production may be organised co-operatively or they may be organised hierarchically, they may be organised self-consciously or with little conscious co-ordination. In fact, Marx distinguished a number of typical modes of production based on typical forms of the social relations of production: two co-operative and self-conscious forms of organisation of production: primitive communism and communism, and four modes of production based on hierarchical production relations: the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production. In the analysis of a particular mode of production it is essential not only to identify the typical form of the social relations of production, but also to consider the form of the reproduction of the material forces and the social relations of production.

The organisation of social production involves the allocation of the labour of individual members of society to different activities, which is associated with the allocation of a part of the social product to the members of society to enable them to reproduce themselves. The social product may be allocated in accordance with need, or it may be allocated in accordance with social status, or it may be allocated in accordance with the contribution of the individual to production, or a part of it may be appropriated by non-producers. Allocation on the basis of the contribution of the individual to production might take the form of allocation on the basis of the amount of labour-time expended, but different kinds of labour might be judged to make qualitatively different contributions to social production and rewarded accordingly. The allocation might take place through a centralised system of distribution, it might take place on the basis of a decentralised system of reallocation or it might take place on the basis of custom and habit. There are lots of different and perfectly conceivable ways of organising a system of social production. But any society must have some means of allocating social labour and distributing the social product in such a way as to secure the reproduction of its individual members and of the material forces with which and the social relations within which they produce.

In a hypothetical society of petty commodity producers, such as formed the starting point of Adam Smith’s model, commodities are exchanged between producers as the products of labour on the principle of the equalisation of the returns to the expenditure of labour-time in different activities, the social presupposition of which is the mobility of labour between occupations and the indifference of the labourer to the content of the labour, presuppositions which, Marx argued, do not in fact pertain in a society of petty commodity producers since they are fully developed only in a mature capitalist society. Nevertheless, on these assumptions, commodities would tend to exchange in proportion to the labour-time expended on their production, so that the labour theory of value is appropriate to the conceptualisation of the quantitative regulation of the social relations of such a form of commodity production.

With the systematic exchange of the products of labour as commodities, one commodity assumes the form of universal equivalent, becoming the money commodity, so that the value of each particular commodity is expressed in its exchange ratio with the money commodity. The division of labour in such a society is then regulated by the exchange of commodities for money through which the expenditure of private labour by each producer is commensurated with the labour time socially necessary for the production of the commodity in question and social labour is allocated between the production of different commodities in appropriate proportions.

The social character of the labour of the individual is then quantitatively expressed in the exchange ratio between the product of that labour and the money commodity. The participation of the individual in social labour is realised in the actual sale of the commodity for money, which provides the means with which the producer can buy the means of production and subsistence required for his or her social reproduction.

It was this analysis of the social form of commodity production that Marx summed up in his theory of commodity fetishism, according to which ‘the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Capital, I: 73).

Fetishism and Fetishisation

This is the passage with which John is in disagreement. John says that it appears that Marx ‘is describing the social relations of capitalist society as they really are. It appears, in other words, that he is describing the fetishism of social relations as an established fact, as something that is’. I think that John is wrong, both in his characterisation of what Marx is saying and in his disagreement. It is very important to be clear exactly what Marx is saying, and exactly what is his theory of commodity fetishism before we start to apply it, criticise it, develop it or generalise it.

First, Marx is not describing the social relations of capitalist society at all in this passage. At this point in Marx’s analysis capital and capitalism do not exist: it is the analysis of commodity production. As we shall see in a moment, the theory of commodity fetishism is applicable in a capitalist society to the relations between capitalist commodity producers, but the working class does not participate in capitalist society as a commodity producer, so that the theory of commodity fetishism has no immediate application to the capitalist class relation.

Second, Marx is not describing all social relations or social relations in general, or social relations in a commodity-producing society, but only the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest. Third, the social relation to which Marx refers is not the relation between the individuals exchanging those things. In his analysis of the value-form, Marx shows very clearly that the exchange relation is not the relation of barter between two private individual producers that Smith described, it is an asymmetrical relationship in which one commodity appears in the relative form of value, as the product of the private labour of the individual producer, but the other commodity stands in the equivalent form, not as the embodiment of the labour that went into its own production, but as the representative of social labour. Thus the social relation which appears in the form of a relation between things is the relation connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest, it is not the relation between two private individuals, but between one individual and society as a whole. The social character of the exchange relation is immanent even in the elementary form of exchange, but becomes obvious in the sale of commodities for money. That is to say, a particular commodity enters exchange as the product of the private labour of its producer, the money commodity as the embodiment or representative of social labour.

Fourth, it should be obvious by now why these relations cannot be direct social relations between individuals at work. On the one hand, there are no such direct relations because individual commodity producers work quite independently of one another. On the other hand, these are not relations between individuals, but a relation between the individual and society. Thus Marx is quite unambiguously, and quite correctly, saying exactly what he appears to be saying, that these relations really are ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’, the form of which he has just expounded at considerable length. Thus, what Marx shows is that the relationship between one individual producer and all other producers only exists in the form of material relations between persons and social relations between things. This is their only reality, it is only through the purchase and sale of the products of labour as commodities that the concrete labours of individuals are brought into relation with one another as component parts of the labour of society. The fetishism of social relations becomes an established fact when one commodity is detached from all the others to serve as the universal equivalent.

Capital and the Proletariat: The Only Really Revolutionary Class?

Commodity fetishism, as the theory has been developed so far, pertains to the relations between commodity producers. To understand the social relations of capitalist production we have to move beyond the analysis of the commodity-form. ‘The real science of modern economy only begins when the theoretical analysis passes from the process of circulation to the process of production’ (Capital, III: 447).

The presupposition of the capitalist mode of production is, on the one hand, the development of generalised commodity production, which makes available the means of production and subsistence as commodities, and, on the other hand, the separation of the labourer from the means of production and subsistence.

The separation of the labourer from the means of production and subsistence, which is the basis of the class relation between capital and the working class, is both the historical presupposition and the constantly repeated result of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, as the capitalist emerges from the circuit of capital with a larger capital, while the worker emerges with nothing but his or her labour-power. At the same time, the expanded reproduction of capital leads capital continuously to destroy the livelihoods of petty commodity and subsistence producers on a world scale. In seeking out new markets, capital first lures subsistence producers into the embrace of the market and then undermines their livelihoods as petty commodity producers by undercutting their prices. Where land and natural resources have not come under capitalist control, they still use the traditional means of enticement, force and fraud to dispossess the direct producers, so that, as Werner Bonefeld forcefully reminds us in his chapter in this book, the violence of capital lies not only in its origins, but is repeated in various forms at every stage of its expanded reproduction.

The productive forces unleashed by capital are incomparable in scale with those commanded by petty and subsistence producers, so that even a small capital employing a small number of wage-labourers can displace a vastly disproportionate number of petty producers. The same is true of the dispossession of backward by more advanced capitalists. This phenomenon was expressed by Marx in his ‘absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’, that the more rapid the growth of capital, the more rapid the growth of the relative surplus population and the pauperisation of a growing mass of the world’s population. Thus, while capital increases the productive power of labour to an unprecedented degree and constitutes the mass of the world’s population as potential labour-power for capitalist exploitation, it actually employs only a proportion of those whose labour-power it sets free. The intensification of labour and the relative sophistication of the means of production mean that only some of the dispossessed can meet the requirements of capitalist production: the young, the old, the infirm, the insubordinate, those with inadequate or inappropriate skills have little hope of selling their labour-power to capital at any price. Others, such as those celebrated by John, may refuse to pay the price of subordination to capital and scratch a living by some other means. Nevertheless, all of the dispossessed are potential wage-labourers for capital, and in that sense are members of the working class whose existence presupposes and is presupposed by its opposition to capital.

The concrete forms in which that opposition is or is not translated into class conflict are, of course, dependent on the concrete forms of the relationships established between labour and capital in the course of the expanded reproduction of the capital relation. In this respect we can introduce an immediate distinction between those members of the working class who enter into a relationship with a particular capitalist by selling their labour-power and those who do not. It is clear that, even if in the most abstract sense the two have a common interest as members of the working class, the concrete forms of their perception and the modalities of their opposition to capital, will differ.

Frustration with the limitations of the organised labour movement, which has always had its roots in the organisation of those relatively privileged members of the working class who are able to sell their labour-power to capital, has frequently led socialists to look to relatively more marginalised groups and strata, particularly the unemployed but also peasants and petty commodity producers, young people, ethnic and national minorities, as the source and/or political base of a more radical opposition to capital. However, the repeated experience of attempts to harness such forces, including those of the 1960s and 1970s, has shown that such forms of opposition remain fragmented, isolated and ephemeral unless they are integrated into a broader labour movement, the only secure base of which has proved to be the trade union organisation that develops out of the struggle over the terms and conditions of wage-labour, which cannot by any means be reduced to organisation on the basis of the sectional interests of particular groups of wage-labourers. This was the lesson that Marx drew from the defeats following the revolutions of 1848 and the lesson that many people drew from the defeats following the ‘revolutions’ of 1968. At the same time, the organised labour movement has also repeatedly learned through bitter experience the dangers of exclusivity so that since the 1980s the priority has been to broaden the base and advance the unity of organised labour on a national and international scale. Thus the situation today is very different on both sides from that of the 1960s and 1970s.

The limitations of the organised labour movement were explained in the 1960s and 1970s in terms of various theories of false consciousness, according to which the organised working class failed to understand its truly revolutionary interests either because of its relatively privileged position, or because of its absorption by bourgeois ideology on the basis of the mystification of the wage form. This could lead socialists to the quasi-Leninist position, that John condemns, according to which the task of the intellectual is to bring leadership and enlightenment to the organised working class, or it could lead to the position to which John seems to have returned of proclaiming the revolutionary role of marginal strata, although John rejects any ‘structural’ definition of such strata, the opposition being identified on the basis of its subjectivity: the force of non-identity, which can unite the unemployed, the peasant of Chiapas, the intellectual and even the trade unionist in a romantic rejection of capitalism. But all of this is based on the idea that the workers who are at the base of the organised labour movement are the victims of fetishism or at least, in John’s ameliorated form, fetishisation. John does not reject the theory of false consciousness, what he rejects is the quasi-Leninist idea that people cannot overcome false consciousness by their own efforts, on the basis of a recovery of their subjectivity and their creativity. So let us return to the theory of fetishism.

The Fetishism of Capital: Are Workers Victims of Fetishism?

On the basis of the capitalist class relation, capitalists purchase labour-power as a commodity. Thus the relation between capitalist and worker at this point in the circuit of capital assumes the form of the purchase and sale of a commodity. However, this is not a relationship in which ‘the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear…as… material relations between persons and social relations between things’. The social relation between workers as potential wage-labourers, and between wage-labourers and capitalists, is not a relation between commodity producers, because labour-power is not produced as a commodity. The labour of one individual is connected with that of the rest in a completely different form.

There is no confrontation of the private labour of the individual with social labour in the form of money. The wage is a sum of money which is paid to the worker by the capitalist in exchange for the power of command over the labour-power of the worker for a particular amount of time.3 Thus the money paid as a wage is not money in the form of the universal equivalent, but money as the means of purchase, on the one side as means of purchase of labour-power, as a part of money capital, and on the other to provide the means of purchase of the worker’s means of subsistence.

This does not mean that the wage relation is transparent. Marx discusses at some length the illusion of the ‘wage form’, which is the representation of the wage not as the payment for command over the worker’s labour-power but as payment for that labour itself, an illusion that led political economy into confusion because it led to labour apparently having two values, one corresponding to the wage and the other corresponding to the labour expended by the worker. This illusion Marx himself only dispelled for the first time in the Grundrisse by making the distinction between the concepts of labour and labour-power: ‘What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs’ (Capital, I: 771). The idea that the wage represents the value of labour is absurd, since labour is itself the source of value, but such ‘imaginary expressions, arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy’ (Capital, I: 769). The appearance that is expressed in the wage form arises from the fact that the wage paid really does correspond to the amount of time that the worker is at the disposal of the employer, and the fact that the wage is normally only paid after the labour has been performed. The illusion is compounded by the use of piece-rate payment systems, where the wage is represented as a share in the product. Nevertheless, ‘that which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power’ (Capital, I: 769).

Although we are no longer dealing with the fetishism of commodity production, the fetishism of the commodity is a special case of a more general theory of fetishism, according to which the social qualities acquired by things are attributed to their physical characteristics – the ‘fetishism peculiar to bourgeois Political Economy, the fetishism which metamorphoses the social, economic character impressed on things in the process of social production into a natural character stemming from the material nature of those things’ (Capital, II: 303). In the case of the fetishism of the commodity, it really is the case that social relations between people are constituted by relations between things. The fetishism consists in believing that this power is inherent in the things themselves, rather than being impressed on those things by the character of the social relations of production. The mystification of the wage form, however, is a pure mystification: the reality is that the capitalist pays the worker for the command of his or her labour time, the idea that this is a payment for the worker’s labour is a pure mystification.

The wage is a social phenomenon, in that the wage only exists as the content of the social relation under which the labourer is employed by the capitalist as wage-labour, which is a social relation specific to a particular mode of production, yet in the wage form the wage is attributed to the physical productivity of labour. Marx goes further than this, and characterises the illusions of the wage form, like the fetishism of commodities, in terms of a contrast between the phenomenal form and the essential relation that has to be uncovered by science:

For the rest, in respect to the phenomenal form, ‘value and price of labour,’ or ‘wages,’ as contrasted with the essential relation manifested therein, viz., the value and price of labour-power, the same difference holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum. The former appear directly and spontaneously as current modes of thought; the latter must first be discovered by science. Classical Political Economy nearly touches the true relation of things, without, however, consciously formulating it. This it cannot, so long as it sticks in its bourgeois skin (Capital, I: 776).

But to what extent are we dealing here with a ‘phenomenal form’ and an ‘essential relation’ that is its ‘hidden substratum’? The wage might well appear spontaneously to the capitalist as a payment for labour: this is how it is represented in his accounts, it is what he actually had to pay for the labour that he used, and it certainly serves his ideological purposes to represent the labour that he has used as being fully paid for. But is that how it appears to the worker? Marx did not seem to think so. In the imaginary dialogue between capitalist and worker in which the two sides debate their rights as commodity owners in relation to the length of the working day, the worker is very clear as to the true character of the wage relation. As Marx has the worker say to the capitalist, ‘the commodity that I have sold to you differs from the crowd of other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power’ (Capital, I: 336–7). The essential relation may be hidden from political economy and even from the capitalist, but it is by no means hidden from the worker.

This is not to say that the worker necessarily perceives the wage relation in its true colours. The worker may perfectly well be deceived, not least by the propaganda of his employer, into believing that he or she has participated in an equal exchange and has been fully remunerated for his or her labour, particularly if the wage relation is conceived not in relation to the production of surplus-value under the domination of the capitalist, but in relation to the exchange of commodities between free and equal citizens. Thus

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 (Capital, I: 774).4

The illusion of the wage form is the illusion that the labourer has been paid in full for her contribution to production. This immediately implies that the remainder of the product must be due to something else. For the Physiocrats it derived from the fertility of the soil, for Adam Smith from the enhanced productivity due to the greater division of labour, but for vulgar economy from Say to today it is due to capital, and particularly to the productivity of the means of production. This is an illusion that arises out of the social form of the capitalist labour process.

When it comes to the labour process too, however, it is not clear whether things appear the same to the worker and to the capitalist. On the one hand, the worker knows full well that she is the active agent of production, that the productivity and profitability of the production process depends on the intensity and duration of her labour. Nor does the capitalist neglect to remind her of the fact, leading to the struggle over the length of the working day and over the intensity and conditions of labour that Marx chronicles at length in Volume I of Capital. From this perspective, there is no fetishism and no mystery: the theory of surplus-value is not a metaphysical theory of a different, even an unobservable, order of reality, but no more than the systematic expression of the experience of the workers that the capitalist appropriates the full product of their labour and that the amount of surplus-value that is appropriated by the capitalist is determined by the extent to which he can intensify the labour and extend the working day of his employees. In that sense, the theory of surplus-value as the difference between the length of the working day and the working time necessary to produce commodities equivalent in value to the wage is the theory of value appropriate to social production on the basis of capital.

On the other hand, Marx notes that in the capitalist form of production the powers of social labour appear to be the powers of capital. The increases of productivity achieved by the factory system are a result of the economies of scale, the greater division of labour and the application of science that is possible when a large number of workers are brought together to work co-operatively. However, co-operation on a large scale was not the result of the collective organisation of the workers, but of the purchase of their labour-power by the capitalist, so that the powers of collective labour appear to be the power of capital:

Their union into one single productive body and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, are matters foreign and external to them, are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings and keeps them together. Hence the connection existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims.…On entering that process, they become incorporated with capital. As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they are but special modes of existence of capital. Hence, the productive power developed by the labourer when working in co-operation, is the productive power of capital. This power is developed gratuitously, whenever the workmen are placed under given conditions, and it is capital that places them under such conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, and because, on the other hand, the labourer himself does not develop it before his labour belongs to capital, it appears as a power with which capital is endowed by Nature – a productive power that is immanent in capital (Capital, I: 476, 478).

In exactly the same way, the increase in the productivity of labour that is made possible by the application of machinery appears to be a product of the power of capital.

It is this increase in the productivity of labour that is apparently made possible only by the power of capital that serves as the basis for the fetishism of capital, according to which profit is not seen as the product of the surplus labour time of the assembled wage-labourers, but corresponds in some way to the productivity of capital. This illusion is compounded by the fact that, when it comes to the realisation of the surplus-value produced, commodities are sold not as the products of labour, but as the products of capital, and so not on the basis of the equalisation of labour-time but on the basis of the equalisation of the rate of profit. This transformation of values into prices of production means that wages and profits appear to comprise independent parts of the selling price of the commodity: wages appear as the payment for the labour employed, alongside all the other costs of production, profit appears as a percentage return on the capital laid out.

The ultimately fetishistic form of capital is that of money capital, in which no social relations at all intervene in the expansion of capital: The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. We have here M – Mʹ, money creating more money, self-expanding value, without the process that effectuates these two extremes. In merchant’s capital, M – C – Mʹ, there is at least the general form of the capitalistic movement, although it confines itself solely to the sphere of circulation, so that profit appears merely as profit derived from alienation; but it is at least seen to be the product of a social relation, not the product of a mere thing (Capital, III: 520).

The fetishistic illusion is summed up in the ‘trinity formula’, discussed at the end of Volume III of Capital. The illusion of the trinity formula is based on the identification of the three physical factors of production, labour, land and means of production, whose co-operation is necessary to produce in any society, as the sources of the three revenues, wages, rent and profit. The illusion of the trinity formula corresponds to the practical consciousness of the capitalist, but it does not arise spontaneously. It had to be elaborated theoretically by political economy, its most developed form being that expressed in John Stuart Mill’s radical separation of production relations, which are the co-operative relations between the factors of production, and distribution relations, which are the historically specific forms within which the shares in the product attributed to the particular factors of production accrue to the owners of those factors.

This illusion corresponds to the practical apprehension of the capitalist, and to the transformed forms in which capitalist social relations appear as a result of the realisation of commodities as the products of capital on the basis of the equalisation of the rate of profit. From this point of view it really is the case that wages correspond to the quantity of labour that the capitalist has employed, rent is related to the amount and fertility of the land, and the realised profit is assessed in relation to the normal rate of return on capital. It is also clearly an illusion that corresponds to the capitalist’s ideological interests.

Marx criticises this account as irrational, in deriving social phenomena characteristic only of one particular form of society from universal, natural categories, and presents his own alternative theory based on his analysis of the social form of capitalist production, within which alone social production is organised on the basis of capital and the social product is distributed in the form of wages, rent and profit. Within the capitalist social form of production, the worker sells his or her labour-power to the capitalist, who sets that labour-power to work with his means of production and then appropriates the entire product, the increased value that has resulted from the extension of the working day beyond the time socially necessary to produce commodities equivalent to the labourers’ means of subsistence constituting the surplus-value, which is then distributed among the capitalist class in the form of profit, rent and interest.

As we have seen, Marx presents his account as the essential relation, that he contrasts with the phenomenal form in which the essential relation is misrepresented in the consciousness of the capitalist. But once again we must ask, what about the workers? Does capital present itself to the workers’ spontaneous consciousness in the same way as to that of the capitalist? Or does it present itself to the workers in a form corresponding to the essential relation?

We can turn this question the other way around and ask, how does Marx discover the essential relation? How does he know what is the social form of capitalist production? As soon as we pose the question this way around the answer is obvious. Marx discovers the essential relation by viewing the capitalist mode of production from the perspective of the experience of the worker. The worker knows full well that she is selling her labour-power and knows full well that the more the capitalist can intensify labour and extend the working day, the greater will be his profit. This is not by any means to say that the capitalist mode of production is transparent to the worker, it is only to say that the characterisation of the social form of capitalist production, on the basis of which Marx was able to build his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, is based on and validated by the experience of workers, selling their labour-power to capitalists and labouring, however reluctantly and recalcitrantly, under the direction of the capitalist.

We have seen that there are two dimensions to Marx’s theory of fetishism. On the one hand, Marx’s theory of the social form of commodity production in which social relations between people in the ‘social division of labour’ only exist in the form of relations between things, so that social production is dominated by forces beyond human control. On the other hand, the more general theory of fetishism, according to which social relations are misperceived and social powers attributed to things. The first aspect is a theory of social forms, the second is a theory about the perception of social forms. The problem with John’s account is that he reduces the theory of social forms to a theory of perception.

The theory of commodity fetishism is a theory of the form of existence of the social relations of the capitalist production of commodities. The fact that social relations have this form is quite independent of our apprehension of those relations:

The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.…The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place (Capital, I: 107–109).5

While it is true that we can fight against the fetishisation of social relations, in the sense of their perception as natural, eternal and unchangeable, it is not true that merely to perceive the social forms of capitalist commodity production differently will change them in any way, which is perhaps why John is led by his critique to rejection rather than transformation. But the point is not merely to understand the world, the point is to change it, and what Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism showed was that the only force that could change the world was the self-organisation of the direct producers who would abolish the production of commodities based on capital and bring social production under conscious social control. We do not have to go so far as Bernstein, who argued that the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing, but without the movement the ultimate aim is just so much hot air.

Elitism and Spontaneity

Marx’s critique of political economy is a critique of a theory elaborated on the basis of the practical consciousness of the capitalist from the perspective of a theory elaborated on the basis of the everyday experience of the working class. But although these theories are elaborated on the basis of two distinct class perspectives, the critique of political economy cannot be reduced to a class struggle in theory. The elaboration of the two theories is not simply a matter of the articulation of spontaneous consciousness: both required a great deal of intellectual labour to develop them to the highest possible degree of consistency and coherence. Marx does not criticise political economy from the basis of a particular class position, but on the ground of reason and reality: the theories of political economy are irrational, their concepts do not correspond to anything in reality. On any normally accepted canons of scientific practice, Marx is right and political economy is wrong.

John is concerned that if we adopt Marx’s theory of fetishism then a distinction is immediately established between the consciousness of the agents of commodity production and the intellectuals who ‘are able to penetrate the fetishised appearances and understand their reified relations as the historically specific form or mode of existence of relations between people’. This indeed is precisely both the purpose and the import of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, although he applied his critique not so much to the spontaneous consciousness of the agents of commodity production as to the theoretical elaboration of such a spontaneous consciousness in the form of vulgar economy and political economy. It is hardly necessary to quote the famous footnote to Chapter 1 of Volume I of Capital: ‘It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange-value’ (p. 116). This failure of classical political economy was not a wilful deception: it was because the form of value is not immediately obvious, because its discovery requires a considerable amount of intellectual labour, and because an idealist conception of value as being a universal property of the products of labour is a barrier to identifying the historically specific character of the commodity-form. Marx himself had spent over twenty years, on and off, breaking his head over it before the version that was published in Capital. So his claim to have a better understanding of the value-form than did political economy, to say nothing of the vulgar apologists for capitalism, has some foundation.

The whole point and the whole purpose of Marx’s critique of political economy was to penetrate the misconceptions, the false consciousness even, that are fostered by the illusions that can arise on the basis of immediate reflection on the forms of appearance of commodity relations:

If, as the reader will have realised to his great dismay, the analysis of the actual intrinsic relations of the capitalist process of production is a very complicated matter and very extensive; if it is a work of science to resolve the visible, merely external movement into the true intrinsic movement, it is self-evident that conceptions which arise about the laws of production in the minds of agents of capitalist production and circulation will diverge drastically from these real laws and will merely be the conscious expression of the visible movements. The conceptions of the merchant, stockbroker, and banker, are necessarily quite distorted. Those of the manufacturers are vitiated by the acts of circulation to which their capital is subject, and by the levelling of the general rate of profit (Capital, III: 414).

Vulgar economy actually does no more than interpret, systematise and defend in doctrinaire fashion the conceptions of the agents of bourgeois production who are entrapped in bourgeois production relations. It should not astonish us, then, that vulgar economy feels particularly at home in the estranged outward appearances of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and perfect contradictions appear and that these relations seem the more self-evident the more their internal relationships are concealed from it, although they are understandable to the popular mind. But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided (Capital, III: 1094–1095).

It is not the fact that ‘we’ are intellectuals that gives us some privileged understanding of the social relations of a capitalist commodity producing society. After all, the vulgarisers, the systematisers of the deceptive appearances of capitalist social relations, the dissemblers of contradiction and inconsistency, the apologists of the capitalist system, are intellectuals: the social position and social role of the ‘intellectual’ in this sense, as opposed to the scientist, is precisely to articulate the bourgeoisie’s own world view. It is the fact that we, whatever our social origin or social function, adopt a scientific view of the world and engage in arduous and rigorous intellectual work that enables us to develop a more adequate understanding.

Marx was not necessarily distinguished from the best of political economists in his dedication to intellectual work or his commitment to the values and procedures of science. I have argued that Marx was able to develop a more adequate theory of the capitalist mode of production because he took as his starting point the experience of the working class. This is why Marx’s work was able to speak to the experience of the working class, why Marxism, in one form or another, became the theory of the international working class movement, why workers could read and understand and apply the analysis of Capital, while bourgeois intellectuals could barely get beyond the first page.

Workers do not need intellectuals to come and tell them where their interests lie. Workers have to combat capitalist exploitation and capitalist domination every day. But while the immediate object of the struggle of those in employment is the employer, the social form of commodity production means that it is not immediately apparent to workers who or what is their ultimate enemy and how they can most effectively channel their opposition to capital, and even more is this the case for those who do not have a job and so stand, at least temporarily, outside the capitalist system. Intellectuals have the training and the resources that enable them to penetrate the mysteries of the fetishism of the commodity, to produce knowledge of the workings of the capitalist system and so to inform the practice and programmes of the labour movement, whether this be in developing spontaneous local struggles or in confronting capital with a working class alternative on a global scale. If we happen to have well-paid jobs as intellectuals, then surely we have not only the ability but also the responsibility to put our skills and resources at the disposal of those who do not have such privileges, as Marx and Engels did when a group of German workers they met in a Brussels pub asked them to draft a Communist Manifesto, or when the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party asked them to comment on its party programmes. But why did these workers ask a couple of dishevelled intellectuals to write or amend their party programmes? Because the workers knew perfectly well that they were being exploited, but because they also knew that they did not have a thorough understanding of how they were being exploited or what they could do about it. There was nothing elitist or undemocratic about this. Having asked Marx and Engels for their views, the workers were by no means obliged to take any notice of them.

The problem of labour today is not a problem of a lack of consciousness or the lack of a desire to change the world. The problem is how to change a world which is, to a greater degree than ever before, driven by anonymous forces, dominated by the movement of money as the alienated form through which alone ‘the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear’. This is a problem that confronts the millions of people without work and without any hope of work; that confronts those driven to work for wages that do not even cover their subsistence in conditions that threaten their health and life; that confronts those who may be well-paid but whose work is increasingly insecure and subject to the ever-greater intensification of labour. It is a problem that is being posed within the labour movement which, for all its faults, is the only collective expression of the interests and aspirations of labour, in hundreds of different ways, at every level and in every part of the world. In this situation progressive intellectuals have a responsibility to supplement the intellectual resources of the labour movement, to help to broaden its understanding and its horizons, to analyse the movements of capital, to contribute to the critique of the modern forms of vulgar economy, to find and learn from new ways of organising and new forms of struggle so that the labour movement can begin to reverse the setbacks and defeats of the last twenty years. It is only when the subordination of labour to the production and appropriation of surplus-value has been abolished that the potential to minimise the burden of labour that has been created by the capitalist development of the forces of production can be realised. It is only when the labourers have recovered their free time from capital that they will be transformed into a different subject, free to discover the creative powers of their labour, which in all previous societies has been the privilege of a few, whose own freedom rested on the forcible appropriation of the products of the labour of others.

References
Marx, K. (1961) Capital, Volume I, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. Marx, K. (1957) Capital, Volume II, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.
Marx, K. (1962) Capital, Volume III, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

• 1I leave aside the fact that John does not want to start from labour, which ‘is to enclose oneself from the beginning within a fetished world’, but rather from creativity, ‘which exists in-against-and-beyond labour’. But that is because John, like the young Marx, wants to reserve the term labour for alienated labour (Chris Arthur, Dialectics of Labour, Blackwell, Oxford, 1986).
• 2The implication of this critique is that the distinguishing feature of socialism would be the recovery of the creative power of human labour. But in his later works Marx sees capitalism as preparing the way for socialism by developing the forces of production to an unprecedented degree, so as to minimise the amount of labour time necessary to meet the reproduction needs of the labourer. Under capitalism this minimisation of necessary labour is associated with the intensification of labour, the extension of the working day and the enforced idleness and pauperisation of a growing mass of the population. Under socialism it will be the means to shorten the working day and maximise the amount of time free from labour. ‘The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back on the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power…It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like…Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the production process as this different subject’ (Grundrisse: 711–712).
• 3Marx takes over from classical political economy the idea that labour-power has a value that corresponds to the labour-time necessary to produce the means of subsistence required to reproduce the labourer, criticising political economy only for not distinguishing the labour-power, command over which the worker sells to the capitalist, from the activity of labour. Marx is here not sufficiently radical in his critique of political economy. Labour-power is not produced as a commodity, so there is no reason why it should tend to sell for a wage corresponding to its value, as defined by Marx.
• 4Note that in this passage the actual relation is not inherently invisible: it is the phenomenal form that makes it invisible.
• 5It is not clear what are the conditions under which it is possible to penetrate the illusions of the commodity-form. At one point Marx notes that commodity production makes its appearance at an early date in history, though not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as now-a-days, so that ‘its Fetish character is comparatively easy to be seen through’ (Capital, I: 119–120). On the other hand, however, Marx also notes that ‘it requires a fully developed production of commodities before, from accumulated experience alone, the scientific conviction springs up, that all the different kinds of private labour, which are carried on independently of each other, and yet as spontaneously developed branches of the social division of labour, are continually being reduced to the quantitative proportions in which society requires them’ (Capital, I: 108).

1.3 The Narrowing of Marxism: A Comment on Simon Clarke’s Comments
JOHN HOLLOWAY

All of Simon’s comments are directed towards narrowing the scope of Marxism and the understanding of class struggle. The central thrust of Simon’s argument is to limit the significance of the concept of fetishism. He does so by making a distinction between the theory of commodity fetishism and ‘the more general theory of fetishism’. The former refers to the fact that the relations between commodity producers really exist as relations between things (their products); this does not affect the working class, which does not participate in capitalist society as a commodity producer. According to the latter, ‘social relations are misperceived and social powers are attributed to things. The first aspect is a theory of social forms, the second is a theory about the perception of social forms.’ Thus, for example, the idea that the wage is a payment for the worker’s labour (as opposed to labour-power) is ‘a pure mystification’. This is offered as an argument against my claim that the (real and perceived) fetishisation of social relations is pivotal to Marx’s critique of capitalism.

The limitation of the scope of fetishism is related to Simon’s defence of a restricted concept of class struggle. Although ‘all of the dispossessed are potential wage-labourers for capital, and in that sense are members of the working class’, nevertheless experience has shown that the only secure base of the labour movement ‘has proved to be the trade union organisation that develops out of the struggle over the terms and conditions of wage-labour.’ It is in this context, then, that Simon argues that the working class is not subject to commodity fetishism, nor, it would seem, to the ‘more general theory of fetishism’ either.

Thirdly, Simon would limit the meaning of Marxist scientific work. Marxist intellectual work does not, apparently, involve the critique of fetishism (since this is of limited relevance) but consists rather of ‘arduous and rigorous intellectual work to develop a more adequate understanding’ which can be put ‘at the disposal’ of those who do not have the same ‘skills and resources’ and so ‘inform the practice and programmes of the labour movement’.

Why do I insist on the centrality of the concept of fetishism? The most important reason is that it gives us a much richer concept of class struggle as including every aspect of human existence, and hence an understanding of our existence as an existence-in-struggle.

I see no ground at all in Marx’s work for making the distinction between commodity fetishism and the more general theory of fetishism. Such a distinction leads to a peculiar separation, quite foreign to Marx’s method, between social forms and the perception of social forms. Where does the perception of social forms come from if not from the forms of social relations themselves? And how can one have social forms that do not give rise to perceptions?

The core of Marx’s critique of capitalism is surely that it dehumanises humans, that it deprives us of control of our activity (and ‘what is life but activity?’), that it transforms (really and not just in our perception) relations between people into relations between things. This is a constant theme in the writings both of the young and the mature Marx (whereas the mature Simon seems to adopt the Althusserian conception of a rupture which the young Simon criticised so strongly). The young Marx speaks of ‘alienation’, the older Marx speaks of fetishism, but both concepts refer to the same objectification of the subject.

Dehumanisation is not a cultural malaise: it is not something that floats in the air. It arises from the material organisation of the activity of people as a process of exploitation, from the existence of human doing as value and surplus-value production. However, to limit Marx’s critique of capitalism to a critique of exploitation (as Simon seems to do) is to weaken Marx’s theory considerably.

If we understand the critique of capitalism as the critique of dehumanisation, then it is clear that every aspect of our existence is involved. Every moment of living is a struggle against dehumanisation: it is from there that our understanding of the possibilities of revolutionary change must begin. Obviously the struggle at the place of work is an extremely important aspect of this: I have never, as Simon claims, proclaimed the ‘revolutionary role of the marginal strata’. But why should anyone want to restrict class struggle to ‘struggle over the terms and conditions of wage-labour’? Why restrict it at all, when all existence is the struggle against capital?

If we understand the critique of capitalism as the critique of dehumanisation, then it is clear that every moment of our existence is contradictory.

The concept of fetishism points to the fact that capital does not stand outside us: it is a social relation that permeates us. Our existence and our perceptions are contradictory, whether we are workers in the factory or workers in the university. There is no pure, innocent subject, no one who stands outside the real and perceived fetishisation of human existence (not even the labour movement!) To say that existence is contradictory is to say that it is in movement, that there are no established facts, that fetishism can be understood only as fetishisation, as constant struggle.

Fetishism points to the ubiquity of struggle. Intellectual work is part of that struggle. It is not just ‘arduous and rigorous’ work on behalf of the labour movement, but part of the constant struggle against the fetishisation of social relations, against the transformation of relations between people into relations between things. Marxist intellectual work cannot be just the digging up of ‘facts’ that are useful to the labour movement. We are not advisers to the class struggle. Our daily doing (teaching, writing) is inevitably part of that struggle. Marxist intellectual work is part of the struggle against the dehumanisation of social relations. Its method is critique, the critique of fetishisation, the critique of all that negates the presence and the force of human social practice. Marxist intellectual work is part of the struggle of that which exists in the mode of being denied against its own denial.

Why does Simon want to narrow the scope of Marxism? I do not know. His argument is a critique of my alleged ‘romanticism’, presumably in the name of ‘realism’. What is at issue here is surely the understanding of the failure of communist revolutions in the twentieth century. Simon’s implicit argument (the argument of ‘realism’, I suppose) seems to be that in the past revolutionary demands were pitched too high, that we must tone down our expectations, forget all that nonsense about creating a society based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, that we must focus on ‘democratic socialist politics’ (what is that?), that our struggle must be centred on the ‘struggle over the terms and conditions of wage-labour’. As the last phrase suggests, the realism which Simon would hold up against my alleged romanticism is quite simply the realism of capitalist reality.

My argument is just the opposite: we need to take revolutionary theory far further than the revolutionaries of the past. Revolution has failed in the past not because revolutionaries set their sights too high, but because they set them too low. Capital, and therefore class struggle and therefore revolution, penetrate every aspect of human existence. The more we see struggle as an aspect of everyday life, the more radical our concept of struggle has to become. Our struggle is the struggle of that which does not even appear in ‘realistic’ accounts of capitalist reality. That is why we must break with the ‘realist’ logic of capitalist reality. This is what the critique of fetishism, and therefore Marxism, is all about.