Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Marxism] Query on fetishism Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 18:36:35 -0400 (EDT) From: RAUNHAAR at aol.com Reply-To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu> To: marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu, derek.schumacher at uleth.ca
First of all for English spoken people it would be the best choice to have a look at Moishe Postone's book "Time, Labor, and Social Domination" (Camebridge University Press)
In Germany, the fetishism is the starting point for the so-called "Wertkritik" (value critique) to be found on the homepages of exit-online.org, krisis.org and numerous other web sites.
Value critique has travelled a path different from a positivist reading of the Marxian theory: back to the critique of political economy but not in the traditional sense given it by what might be called a "workers' movement Marxism." Rather we have concerned ourselves with that dimension of Marxian theory that was either completely ignored by the left, or that a minority trend of progressive theoretical reflection banished, at best, to a realm of abstract "philosophical" reasoning, postponing the matter of this theory's practical efficacy to an imaginary future: with the critique of modern fetishism, of commodity production as a system. This opens up a new perspective that is no longer limited to the merely sociological opposition of the "classes" constituted by wage labour on the one hand and the representatives of capital on the other, but that sets its sights on the common frame of reference encompassing them both. Whereas a traditional Marxism of class struggle was concerned only with the appropriation of the surplus value by capitalists, value critique (the critique of fetishism) makes an issue of value itself, the social form constituting the basis of capitalist society.
From this viewpoint, the historical trajectory traced by what has heretofore constituted left social critique can be read off as immanent in a capitalistic sense. Such critique did not move beyond the historical formation of capitalism but was in essence part of a process of laggard modernisation. In this sense the October Revolution can, in a manner of speaking, be grasped as the "French Revolution of the East." It was not the abolition of the commodity producing system that was at issue here, but, on the contrary, its "belated" social implementation, the state-capitalist methods of enforcement resembling those used in the West a few centuries earlier. Later on, the national liberation movements of the Third World followed suit. This interpretation must not be reduced to its scientific-technological aspect in the sense of a laggard industrialisation. Rather the process concerned the enforcement of the social forms of a commodity producing system, that is, the replacement of personal obligations by a monetarization and economization of all social relations, the transition from agrarian traditions to the bourgeois forms of the subject and of right.
The emancipatory horizon of this process was confined to the "struggle for recognition" intrinsic to capitalist ontology, namely the recognition of the peripheral and dependent regions as independent national subjects of the world market. In the end, the same is true of the workers struggle in the West. The latter was not about national recognition but social recognition, the juridical recognition of wage labourers as formal subjects within the commodity producing system, achieved through the freedom to organize, universal suffrage etc. The October Revolution, national liberation, and the Western workers' movement were in essence forms of appearance of inner-capitalist competition, charged with the still pending tasks of capitalist development. The concept of "socialism" in all its past and present varieties can be traced back to the "juridical surplus" of this historical inner-capitalist "struggle for recognition". The conclusion drawn by value critique from this re-interpretation of the history of modernisation results in a corresponding reformulation of Marxian crisis theory. All crises up to now were crises of the implementation and enforcement of capitalist social relations, insofar as the latter had a historical and developmental course still to run. As long as this was the case, modern social movements were able to insert themselves in a positive sense within each successive phase of accumulation and were not driven to a categorical critique of social forms. Their socialism was a "socialism of adjectives": by merely garnishing the positivistically misunderstood categories of capitalist social reproduction (value, commodity, money, "labour", market, state, politics, nation, democracy etc.) with the epithet "socialist", these movements thought to endow such categories with a supposedly different social function and a different mode of social mediation. With the "third" industrial revolution in microelectronics, however, capital runs up against what Marx had predicted to be its absolute internal limit. The capitalist process itself renders "abstract labour" (Marx) as the substance of capital superfluous to such an extent that all mechanisms of compensation, past and present, cease to be viable. It is for exactly this reason that traditional Marxism, together with its object of critique, undergoes a crisis of a qualitatively new kind. For the first time, the crisis of the objective categories of capitalism itself demands a categorical critique, and a Marxist line of thought still entangled in the ideology of modernisation finds itself unprepared for the task.
Until now, value critique has elaborated its new theoretical approach along three main lines. First, in reference to Marxian theory itself, is the latter's determinate source in what is, so to speak, a "re-doubled" Marx. According to this notion, two different and contradictory lines of argumentation can be found in Marx's works: on the one hand a positive theory of modernisation that grasps capital as a "necessary" but still incomplete process of development to which Marx goes so far as to attribute a "civilising mission"; and, on the other, a critical theory of modern fetishism, that is, of the complex of social forms upon which the capitalist social dynamic rests. The workers' and the national liberation movements could only make sense of the first, "positivist" Marx, the Marx, himself cloaked in capitalist categories, of a still-to-be completed modernisation. Meanwhile, these same movements allowed the second Marx-the categorical critic whom they had little inclination to understand-to virtually disappear.
Secondly, value critique has concretised the critique of capitalist ontology by centering this critique on the category of "labour" ("Arbeit"). The abstract term "labour" is nothing, in the end, but Marx's category of "abstract labour", that is, both the very substance of capital and its general form of activity. Inasmuch the "valorisation of value" (Marx) is an irrational end in itself, "labour" too is an end in itself, indifferent to any content. This interpretation is in blatant contrast to the traditional viewpoint of a "workers' movement Marxism," one that deemed "labour" to be a trans-historical condition of human existence and its "liberation" to be the platform from which to undertake to overcome capitalism itself. The current world crisis stemming from the third (microelectronic) industrial revolution, however, is, for the first time, a crisis of labour itself and, for this reason, marks the objective historical limit to the capitalist mode of production. Given the high level of the productive forces achieved through the micro-electronic revolution, capital becomes permanently incapable of absorbing sufficient quantities of "labour," and thereby loses its very substance. The concept of "labour" itself becomes, in its abstract determination, a dubious one.
Thirdly, this theoretical approach has been the springboard for a feminist interpretation of "value critique" that no longer grasps patriarchal domination as an extrinsic sociological relation but as a problem of the fetishized social form itself. Whether pertaining to private life or to openly social relations, all moments of social reproduction that cannot be squared with the abstract logic of value, have, in this view, been "split off" (abgespalten) from the world of economy and politics and thus defined as "female". Capital is therefore not only the integrated complex of its own categorical forms but also and simultaneously a process of "splitting off". The value-relation is at the same time a social relation that segregates determinate moments of human life as well, and only when both moments are considered is it possible to develop a critical conception of modern society. Value and its subject (i.e. the human being subjected to the social form of value) are anything but neutral; they are structurally determined as male. This means that--to think beyond Marx--the modern gender relation becomes an integral part of the concept of capital and no longer a merely subordinate appendage.
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