Capitalism is a Fetish

Its survival depends on foreclosing imagination to an alternative by perpetually remaking and concealing social relations and presenting them as natural and unchanging realities.

Cover: Winston Smith, via https://www.winstonsmith.com/

Ryan Ward || In 1989, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote an article entitled “The End of History?”. In it, he argued that with the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the USSR, and the turn of China to capitalism in the 1980s, it was clear that western liberal democracy had won out over all other political orders, and that its defeat of fascism and communism signaled the end of world history and a settling into a post-historical liberal world order.

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

For Fukuyama, liberalism had bested all its competitors, or as he puts it “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” He argued there were no alternatives or systemic features of Western liberalism that would pose a threat to its long-term hegemony.

This language recalls that attributed to Margaret Thatcher, who famously referred to there being “no alternative” to liberal capitalism. The neoliberal reforms which she championed produced a social and economic order which ironically led Fukuyama to state a few years ago that history, had not in fact ended, and that the gutting of the social safety nets along with the emergence of a focus on identity politics that was a direct result of neoliberalism posed a serious potential threat to Western liberalism.

Many of us, myself included, have grown up in an era of capitalist apologism, even denial. In the US, where I’m from, most people don’t even question the logic, sufficiency, or inevitability of the capitalist system. Anyone who begins to question this will swiftly be denounced as a socialist, someone who hates America, or a tyrant who wants to round all conservatives up and throw them into gulags. If you’re lucky, someone might say that capitalism is the worst economic system besides all the other ones. This is usually said as a way to deflect any serious conversation. When the evils of capitalism are acknowledged, they are attributed to its victims, the market playing the role of God in demonizing those who fail to obey its rules.

This stubborn insistence on capitalist superiority despite so many indicators to the contrary reflects a fundamental aspect of capitalism itself. As in Fukuyama’s “end of history” and Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” rhetoric, capitalism is presented by its defenders as a natural end of human nature, the inevitable culmination of free will and agency. When humans are left to their own devices and not encumbered by the state, the free exchange of goods and services guarantees the best material outcomes for all. We must therefore trust ourselves and our livelihoods to the immutable laws of supply and demand. These economic realities, much like the laws of physics, cannot be changed, they can only be understood and followed. Those who resist must be subjected to market discipline by the state.

Commodities, social relations, and capital

Examining Marx’s concept of the fetish can help us to understand the way that capitalism has become so all-encompassing in the minds of modern liberal society. Marx invoked the idea of a fetish (a religious object thought to contain mystical or magical properties; not a sexual obsession) when discussing the way that capitalism conceals the relationship between labor, social relations, and material goods. Speaking of what has since become termed “commodity fetishism” he said

The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally valued; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products.

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. –Karl Marx, Capital Vol 1, 1867

What Marx is saying here is that no matter the differences in time of labor, physical exertion, coordination of effort, and others, the only indicator of value in a commodity is its price. Equivalent prices present themselves as equivalent labor values despite the vast differences in the time or character of labor required to produce different commodities. The commodity itself, then, though it requires the labor and social relations of and between workers—and the overall exploitative relation between workers and capitalists—conceals those relations. It instead produces a new form of social relation, the relation between different commodities.

The concept of commodity fetishism was so important for Marx’s formulation of capitalism that he introduced it in the first chapter of Capital.1For Marx’s analysis, it is the social relations between things that are important, not things themselves. One of his most crucial insights was that capital itself was not a thing, as in machines, tools, and other means of production. Capital is a social relation mediated by these things.

Capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character. –Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, 1939.

If capital is a social relation mediated by things, then, by this logic, capitalism is an ism, or a set of beliefs, a system, or ideology that is characterized by this foundational aspect of social relations being mediated by things. Crucially, this mediation conceals the social relations behind these things and presents these things as self-evident realities.

Lukács and Reification

The concept of commodity fetishism was extended by György Lukács in his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”. For Lukács, the central nature of the concealing of social relations inherent in commodities provides the key to understanding capitalism itself.

IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure… That is to say, the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them.

Lukács proceeds from Marx’s analysis of the commodity and shows how “the commodity structure [has] penetrate[d] society in all its aspects and… remould[ed] it in its own image.” For Lukács, this penetration, where commodities conceal the social relations and labor behind them, has resulted in a society where

the relations between men that lie hidden in the immediate commodity relation, as well as the relations between men and the objects that should really gratify their needs, have faded to the point where they can be neither recognised nor even perceived.

For that very reason the reified mind has come to regard them as the true representatives of his societal existence. The commodity character of the commodity, the abstract, quantitative mode of calculability shows itself here in its purest form: the reified mind necessarily sees it as the form in which its own authentic immediacy becomes manifest and – as reified consciousness – does not even attempt to transcend it.

Here Lukács is saying that the abstract nature of commodities, which mediate and conceal the social relations that generate them, have been reified, or made concrete, in the minds of bourgeois society. He further argues that this reification permeates capitalist society due to the way that capitalism leads to the commodification of everything

Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man.

This reification leads to a situation where capitalism becomes the status quo, the lived reality. It passes by unnoticed while dictating all social and material relations and conditions; “the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society.” All of the social relations that dictate and constrain material realities in society are abstracted and we are left with reified entities such as “the market”, “the economy”, “the state”, and “society” that are viewed as being above, removed from, and independent of social relations. Neoclassical economic theories have completely abstracted social relations from an analysis of commodities, prices, and wages, thus perpetuating the reification of these as separate entities from the social relations that dictate and govern them.

The fetish and the end of history

All of this leads us to the conclusion that capitalism, itself, is a fetish. As both a socio-economic system and a reified concept, it is thought of as an entity that is separated and abstracted from the social relations of which it is made and on which it depends. But despite its reification as a static system which merely reflects the embodiment of human entrepreneurship and freedom, it is also a system that acts in history, shaping and reshaping society according to its own changing material conditions. These changes are then themselves reified into an updated capitalist fetish in the minds of society. In this way, capitalism continually makes and remakes social relations while concealing the fundamental role of these very social relations in perpetuating its existence. Ironically, Margaret Thatcher was right when she said “there is no such thing as society” though not in the manner she meant.

Capitalism, then, appears as a totalizing whole, a natural system which had no beginning and which will have no end. Western liberalism, being synonymous with capitalism, constitutes the end of history itself. The social and material relations being constantly made and remade are subsumed and reified into a post-history fetish.

Fukuyama’s original claim that history had come to an end was confirmation of this fetishism of capitalism. He failed to see that the success of Western liberalism was due to the imposed failures of liberal capitalism on the “undeveloped” world, preferring instead to write off these countries in his consideration

Clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come. But let us focus for the time being on the larger and more developed states of the world who after all account for the greater part of world politics.

Here we see the product of capitalist fetishism, or if you will, liberal fetishism, clearly apparent. Fukuyama has failed to see that the very success of the liberal order that he champions is due to the exploitation and subjugation of the so-called Third World. For him, the social relations that dictate the material and political forces remain entirely concealed, and the reification of Western liberalism as a benevolent ideal has infused itself deep into his consciousness. He fails to see that the fascism he decries is contained in the seed of the liberalism he loves, waiting only for the nurturing of capitalist crisis to flower. All that remains for him is the idealism of freedom, rule of law, and democracy.

It is this idealism regarding both capitalism and liberalism that has to be fought if we are to successfully bring to pass socialism. The reification must be broken at every available opportunity and the social relations inherent in all material conditions made clear. Fukuyama’s withdrawal of his certainty regarding the end of history, and tying it directly to neoliberalism, is evidence that the cracks are beginning to appear, or at least to those who have not been aware of them, to be apparent. We need to exert our energy to pointing out the myriad ways that capitalism has changed social relations and concealed those changes. History has not ended, nor is its trajectory inevitable. Our urgent responsibility is to shepherd it towards the realization of socialism, a society in which our social relations are shaped so that all can flourish.

Footnotes

1. It’s worth noting here that Marx’s own concept of a fetish, a crude religious icon associated with “uncivilized” peoples, was a product of his own ignorance of the social and material relations which dictated the “superstitious” behavior of these people. See J. Lorand Matory, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make.