Epistemology and Political domination in Marx’s Critical Theory
A Criticism of Marx’s Inferno
In Roberts’ Marx’s Inferno, he characterizes Marx as putting forth a theory of political domination, arguing that Marx puts forth a “tool for understanding the dominating form that these relations take.”(Roberts 102) These systems of domination are, for Roberts political, and as such, his project is to “identify the republican roots of Marx’s criticisms of the market.”(101) As such, he places himself in contradistinction to prior thinkers, most notably Lukacs and Postone, who took the view that Capital is “less a theory of forms of exploitation and domination within modern society, and more as a critical social theory of the nature of modernity itself.”(Postone, 4) Central to Roberts’ argument is his claim that “Fetishism is, on my reading of Marx, a political problem first and foremost, and an epistemic problem only derivatively.”(Roberts 85) In this essay I argue that this claim does not create quite as much of a difference between Roberts’ and Postone’s respective positions as Roberts seems to think it does, given that Postone sees the epistemological problem of Fetishism as being inherently tied to the political problem of neoliberal Capitalism.
To begin, we need to understand what commodity fetishism actually is for Marx. The theory of fetishism is, as Roberts rightly acknowledges, the basis of Marx's entire critique of Political Economy. Indeed, Marx observes that
“Political economy has indeed analyzed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value...”(Marx 174) This forms the main thrust of his critique of the political economists, and is entirely based upon Marx’s novel theory of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is, on its most fundamental level, the false view that a commodity itself has value in it, or that the social relations of exchange through which a commodity is determined, are inherent to the actual thing which is commodified. Fetishism, therefore, is inherently tied to commodification, which is how a thing becomes a commodity, or a thing being turned from a qualitative thing into a quantitative thing. Marx provides the following metaphor on this point: “The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless, the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends all sensuousness…”(164) Commodification takes a certain object or form, and gives it a new ontological value, it becomes something which is purely represented in terms of its value, which is relative to other commodities. This is the underlying logic of the equation which Marx provides later on in Capital, C-M-C. In C-M-C what we see is the transformation of quality into quantity and back into quality again. Dialectically, what we see here is a double negation, the commodity is negated by virtue of its being sold, it is made other, into money, which is of the type quantity, which is then itself negated back into the type of a quality. The commodity is that movement from C-M and is thus, prima facie, simply a mediating term between C and C’.
However, Marx makes explicit the fact that “the commodity form and the value relation of the products of labour within which it appear, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this.”(165) The commodity is the manifestation of a thing quantitatively on the market. Commodity fetishism then arises from the subjective impact of this process. The becoming of quality into quantity, of thing into commodity, is, as Roberts puts it “the market-goer’s decisive sensitivity to price signals… It is built into exchange on any large scale and becomes ‘visible and dazzling to our eyes’ in the form of the universal desire for money.”(Roberts 85) It seems quite clear here that commodity fetishism is fundamentally a force which mediates man’s sense of being, which “dazzles” and disconnects us epistemologically. We can therefore return to Marx’s attack on the political economists and re-examine exactly what he means when he asks “why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product[?]”(Marx 174) He is stating that labour is itself expressed quantitatively, as a commodity, and as a commodity, it is subject to fetishism. This analysis of labour can not possibly be given by the political economists because they are themselves dazzled by the commodity. it is not possible for them to know such a phenomenon.
What is important to take note of, is the fact that the political economists’ attempt to universalize a particular logic of the market left them unable to consider “why this content has assumed that particular form.”(174) Indeed, the “pre bourgeois forms of the social organization of production are treated by political economists in much the same way the Fathers of the Church treated Christianity.”(175) The political economists assume that they have discovered a universal logic of exchanges and values, when in reality they have merely been gawking at a particular moment of historical production, and project this gawkery backwards onto history. Marx, however, understands himself to be giving not “a universally applicable theory,” but “a critical theory specific to capitalist society,” which “recasts the question of the relation between culture and material life into one of the relation between a historically specific form of social mediation and forms of social ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity.’”(Postone 5) This is made clear by Marx’s own observation on Aristotle’s not having the necessary conditions available to analyze surplus value: “Aristotle therefore himself tells us what prevented any further analysis: the lack of a concept of value.”(Marx 151) Aristotle was incapable of analyzing precisely what lies at the heart of capitalism because his access to that knowledge was limited by his particular historical moment. Thus, Marx’s critique of political economy is wholly reliant upon an epistemological access to certain social structures, namely value, which Aristotle did not have. The political economists who were contemporary to Marx, likewise are incapable of penetrating precisely what lies at the heart of capitalism. But again, their failure is not because of history, as Marx claims it is for Aristotle, but because of the dazzling effect of the commodity. That is to say, they are epistemologically limited by the social form of the commodity and not the currents of history.
This, then, cannot be understood as an epistemological problem only derivatively and a political problem primarily, which Roberts defines as “the domination of people by people.”(Roberts 92) In the case of the political economists’ succumbing to fetishism, to the extent that domination is present, Marx explains that it is present in the form of “the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite.”(Marx 174-175) That is to say, it is precisely the domination of man by social structures, such as capitalism and ideology, and not people, which are at play here. Secondly, In Marx’s discussion of fetishism the most noticeable part of it is that it is largely devoid of any interrelationship between people, it is exclusively the relationship between commodities. Personhood does not play much of a role in Marx’s analysis of the commodity, it is entirely an analysis of the commodity as the freestanding commodities present themselves in capitalism. This is precisely the view which Postone seems to take of the social structures of postliberal capitalism, arguing that many recent developments within capitalism, such as “globalization and concentration of capital that has taken place on a new, very abstract level, far removed from immediate experience…”(Postone 12) In Marx’s own time, commodity fetishism presented a serious epistemological consideration, even if we grant that it was not the primary concern. However, with the advent of global neoliberal capitalism, which is incontrovertibly more complex than the liberal Capitalism, the political problems have become, as Postone points out, considerably more epistemological. For instance, the intricate details and implications of globalization are not immediately obvious to the average worker in Ohio, however, the results of deindustrialization are keenly felt. Indeed, a petit bourgeois plumber who owns his own plumbing business is arguably hurt far worse by deindustrialization than is a high end proletariat who works in a white collar New York Office job. Likewise, a miner in Mozambique is largely unaware of the intricate details of the international diamond market, a social relation, and yet is keenly in tune with the material reality of his situation, which is directly a result of this “abstract social relation.” Class relations themselves have become so obscured by neoliberal capitalist social relations, that in order to be able to understand the political problems, as Roberts does, we need to be keenly aware of the epistemological problems. This was, once again, certainly true during Marx’s time, this is why the direct relationship between people does not rear its head in Marx’s critique until the introduction of the process of Exchange, in which Marx introduces the formulation of “x commodity a = y commodity b”(Marx 181). This is where we uncover what Roberts describes as the “indirect or impersonal… domination of people by people,”(Roberts 92) as it is precisely the process of exchange which is unmasked as the qualitative value, labor value, which is hidden in the equation expressing the magnitude of relative value. The increasingly abstract tendency of capitalist social relations is precisely what Marx is outlining here.
Indeed, where something best approximates the immediate domination “of people by people,”(Roberts 92) which Roberts ascribes to, is found in Capital is in the later chapters describing in piercing detail the exploitation in large scale industry: “The worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him.”(Marx 482) Marx makes clear that “[Manufacture] converts the worker into a crippled monstrosity by furthering his particular skill as in a forcing-house…”(481). This crippling, furthermore, is intimately connected to the fact that, “the social productive power of the collective worker, hence of capital, is enriched through the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power.”(483) In the same way that the musculature of the worker is reshaped for his work, so is his mind, in order that he be converted “into an organ which operates with the certainty of a force of nature.”(467) Although this meets Roberts’ criteria of “domination of people by people,”(Roberts 92) Marx specifically places the epistemological destruction of the worker as being key to understanding the domination of manufacture, “In manufacture… capital is enriched through the impoverishment of the worker in individual productive power. “‘Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition…’”(Marx 483) This development of manufacture, of the fetishism of labor, of the worker being made one with machine, of labor being made pure quantity dominates the laborer precisely in the difference between labor prior to manufacture, in which “the labourer must adapt himself to the work, not the work to the labourer, a thing which would be unavoidable if the labourer carried on several trades at once, thus making one or the other of them subordinate.”(487 n) It is not a coincidence that Marx uses the language of domination when defining the relationship between worker, a person, and trade, a social relation. The domination of the worker which occurs in the factory, is entirely intertwined with the laborers epistemological relationship to labour. Division of labor cuts off the worker’s knowledge and ability to know the entirety of a trade, and in this sense, the trade comes to have mastery over him. This is precisely the point Postone is making when he states,
“[Marx’s] concept of the relations of production cannot be fully grasped in terms of capitalist class relations, rooted in the private ownership of the means of production and expressed in the unequal social distribution of power and wealth. Rather, that concept must also be understood with reference to the mode of producing in capitalism.”(Postone 23)
It is not enough to simply analyze the class dynamic between capitalist and proletariat, which is a purely political relationship, for two reasons. Firstly, the actual relationship itself has grown to such a level of abstraction, that the question of epistemology is inherently intertwined with the political question. Secondly, the problem of domination, and of the fetishism of labor, lie precisely in the qualitative form of the means of production. This epistemic loss is a necessary contributor to the domination of capitalism. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Marx here returns to the political economists, “Political economy, which first emerged as an independent science during the period of manufacture, is only able to view the social division of labour in terms of the division found in manufacture, i.e. as a means of producing more commodities with a given quantity of labour.”(486) It is the epistemological character of fetishism, which has led to the false consciousness of the prior political economists. They have been made just as ignorant as the worker by the constraints of their time.
Roberts then goes on to argue that,
“[Postone’s] argument, that ‘social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute,’ might have led to a real breakthrough if he had realized that domination, in order to be something we care about, must be domination by other people, and that, therefore, the constitution of a social structure by people must be understood as a mediated relationship among people. Domination mediated in this way is indirect or impersonal, but it is still the domination of people by people… domination here loses all reference to an arbitrary incontestable will, and becomes nothing more than a metaphor.”(Roberts 92)
Roberts’ argument here does not hold up particularly well. The abstract domination of the social relation which is the means of production is hardly a metaphor, globalization and deindustrialization are hardly metaphors. A problem’s being theoretic, or understandable theoretically, does not by any means make it “nothing more than a metaphor,” and indeed, Roberts’ own claims that the worker is a “slave of a slave, beholden to the market driven desires of the boss, ”(Roberts 103) presents precisely the domination of the labourer by an abstract social relationship, in this case, market driven desire. Although a slave of a slave is still a slave, and thus politically dominated, what else can the capitalist be beholden to besides abstract social relations? Marx makes it clear that it is the social relation of capital, M-C-M’ which creates limitless desire, “in buying in order to sell… the end and the beginning are the same, money or exchange-value and this very fact makes the movement an endless one.”(Marx 252)
It is written into the purely abstract formula of Capital that it creates the market driven desire by which the capitalist is entranced, indeed, as Postone puts it “Only when Marx’s explicit statements are understood with reference to the unfolding of his categories can the inner logic of his critique be reconstructed adequately.”(Postone 18) That is to say, Postone’s focus on commodity fetishism is a holistic project which specifically seeks to recontextualize Marx’s critique, as one that reaches into the underlying logic of modernity, as opposed to restricting Marx to, to use Roberts’ terms, “perhaps wrongheaded”(Roberts 102) economics which have in some respects grown more outdated to the postliberal capitalism which “has taken place on a new, very abstract level, far removed from immediate experience…”(Postone 12) Postone of course does not deny the political aspect of Marx’s critique, he only makes clear that the overcoming of capitalism must also involve “a transformation not merely of the existing mode of distribution but also of the mode of production.”(23) This is the essential difference which distinguishes Marx from his predecessors, and Roberts acknowledges this when he makes the case that
“The concrete facts of over work and abuse… direct us to the relations between this boss and these workers, in this place and time. But the theory of commodity fetishism as impersonal domination tells us that these particularities are consequential, not causal to the basic dynamics of the situation, and that any boss similarly placed would likely relate to any workers in a similar manner, but not because all bosses share a special psychology, but because the forces of the market dominate producers in certain ways.”(Roberts 123)
This is almost precisely the point which Postone makes, that it is the structure of the market which is the first and foremost cause of domination. Furthermore, Roberts’ criticism of Lukacs and Postone that they offer a “diagnosis of social domination… cut off from any articulable interest or political constituency”(Roberts 92) seems incredibly unconvincing in light of the prior excerpt. In what way is viewing the bosses as dominated by the structure of the market in tune with the proletariat’s political interest? The Socialist moralizers who preceded Marx may certainly have been on the wrong track, as Roberts claims, however they were far more adept than Roberts at motivating people to political action or, at the very least, outrage. It seems that, to put it quite simply, Roberts’ rejection of the epistemological primacy of commodity fetishism does not create a serious rebuttal to Postone’s structuralism, but at best only a distinction without a difference. At worst, it gives a less comprehensive analysis of capitalism, one which is quite frankly incapable of understanding the high level of abstraction involved in global neoliberal capitalism.
Marx, Karl, et al. Capital. Penguin, 2006.
Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Roberts, William Clare. Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Honoré Daumier, The Heavy Burden, 1850 - 1860