[Marxism] Re: Question on Marx " Fetishism of Commodities"

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Derek, in reply to your question:

Products of human labour do not possess value, except through human beings
who attribute value to them. This means that if products have value, that
this is a purely social-human attribution, a human construct, and not a
characteristic intrinsic to those products by virtue of their objective or
physical nature.

If products nevertheless appear to have a value of their own, which is
objective and exists independently of what particular people may think, and
not simply as a subjectively imputed value, this is primarily the result of
exchange (trade), which relates different products to each other, such that
X number of products A are worth Y number of products B. In this elementary
exchange relation, not just a quantity of products are related and equated,
but also the labor-time used to make them. Thus, behind the relation between
products exists also a relation between people, a social relation.

Specifically, the trade of A and B (abstracting fron consumption) involves
four types of relationship:

(a) between people themselves as producers (a social production relation:
people to people)
(b) between people as producers and their products (a technical production
relation: people to object)
(c) between people as traders and their products (a social exchange
relation: people to people)
(d) between products (a technical exchange relation: object to object)

As you can see, there are two social relations involved, namely a social
relation between people as producers (a production relation) and between
people as traders (an exchange relation). A social relation is defined as a
relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a social group, or a
relation between social groups, or a relation between an individual and a
social group. If for example Jack is in love with Jill, this is an
individual relation, an interpersonal relation. But it is also a social
relation, insofar as Jack and Jill are members of social groups (genders,
classes, institutions, ethnicities, kinships and so forth).

In a developed trading system, in which products circulate between producers
and consumers with the aid of intermediaries, the conditions of production
and consumption of products are disconnected from each other, through the
exchange process which mediates between them. Producer P hires labour from
L1 to produce product A, which is sold to distributor D who hires labour L2
to transfer A from P to retailer R, who hires labour L3 to sell A to
consumer C, and maybe there are even more intermediate steps in the process.
All of them are socially related, but you may not be able to deduce this at
all from looking at product A.

Consequently, (a), (b), (c) and (d) become separated from each other, and in
trading, all that remains relevant is relation (d), i.e. the knowledge that
X number of products A are worth Y number of products B, expressed either in
quantities of products or in money units. That technical exchange relation
(d) is objectified, because regardless of how people may subjectively value
A or B, those products will now in practice exchange only in definite
quantitative proportions, which beyond certain limits are non-negotiable (or
perhaps not negotiable at all, if they have a fixed price).

Thus, in trading in a developed market, people are confronted with an
objective, mind-independent structure of exchange-values (expressed as
systematically related prices) regardless of what their subjective
valuations may be. The effect is that the value of A and B seems to be
inherent in these objects themselves, an objective characteristic intrinsic
to those goods, rather than the result of an attribution by people - because
it does not matter anymore whether people subjectively value a good more or
less, or whether they think it is worth more or less; the fact is that
objectively they are worth what they are worth, never mind what anybody
thinks, end of story - they will exchange only for a certain equivalent
value or price, regardless of what one might wish.

Even if we know that X number of products A are worth Y number of products
B, expressed in quantities of products or in money prices, we may not know
at all how many labour-hours are being equated, and it may quite well be the
case that it is impossible to know that exactly. The reason is that
conditions (a), (b), (c) and (d) have been separated from each other, and so
in effect, when product A is related to product B, a whole structure of
price relativities involving all sorts of products is being related and
assumed. At best, we could verify the quantity of labour-hours involved only
after the product is sold to the final consumer, but this would itself be a
complex calculation, which would have to relate price averages to average
labour costs, which are themselves constantly changing.

Production of output and consumer demand adjust to each other through the
trading process (exchange), but for the purpose of trading, the conditions
of production and consumption themselves are irrelevant, and quite possibly
unknown or unknowable. Thus, why or how it came to be, that X number of
products A are worth Y number of products B, is no longer clear, and in
practice it does not even matter. The only thing that does matter is the
technical exchange relation (d). The reality that (d) presupposes (a), (b)
and (c) is obscured. Thus while we do know that A or B is worth a given
amount, and can compare the relative worth of products, we do not know why
or how they happen to be worth that.

This means that the labor-content of A and B is hidden, and if the price of
a car is consistently much higher than a bunch of carrots, at most we can
say is that this is due to relative production costs. The fact that these
production costs represent different fractions of the labour-time of an
economic community has become a philosophical nicety, because in exchange we
do not relate as producers or as consumers but as traders. This
philosophical nicety is itself irrelevant to trade. It is relevant only if
we want to understand what value is, and if we want to understand the
totality of (a), (b), (c) and (d) and how these are related to each other.

Jurriaan






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