Carrol
******* Fredy Perlman, "Introduction: Commodity Fetishism," in I.I. Rubin, _Essays on Marx's Theory of Value_, tr. Milos Samarddzija & F. Perlman (Detroit: Black and Red, 1972), pp. xxii-xxiii:
Rubin outlines Marx's transition from the concept of alienation to the theory of commodity fetishism in the following terms: "In order to transform the theory of 'alienation' of human relations into a theory of 'reification' of social relations (i.e., into the theory of commodity fetishism), Marx had to create a path from utopian to scientific socialism, from negating reality in the name of an ideal to seeking within reality itself the forces for further development and motion" (Rubin, p. 57). The link between alienation and commodity fetishism is the concept of 'reification' (materialization or objectification) of social relations. Rubin traces certain stages of in Marx's formulation of the concept of reification. In the _Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_ of 1859, Marx noted that in capitalist, where labor creates commodities, "the social relations of men appear in the reversed form of a social relation of things." In this work, social relations among people merely "appear" to take the form of things, they merely seem to be reified. Consequently, Marx calls this reification a "mystification," and he attributes it to "the habit of everyday life."
However, in Volume I of _Capital_, this reification of social relatios is no longer merely an appearance in the mind of the individual commodity producer, and it is no longer a result of the commodity producer's thinking habits. Here, "the materialization of production relations does not arise from 'habits' but from the internal structure of the commodity economy. Fetishsism is not only a phenomenon of social consciousness, but of social being." (Rubin, p. 59). The cause of the fetishism, namely the cause of the fact that relations among people take the form of relations among things, is to be found in the characteristics of capitalist economy as a commodity economy: "The absence of direct regulation of the social process of production necessarily leads to the indirect regulation of the production process through the market, through the products of labor, through things." (Ibid.)
Consequently, the reification of social relations and the fetishism of commodities are not "chains of illusion" which can be "broken" within the context of capitalist society, because they do not arise from "sterotyped alternatives of thinking" (Erich Fromm). The capitalist form of social production "necessarily leads" to the reification of social relations; reification is not only a "consequence" of capitalism; it is an inseparable aspect of capitalism. ********