14. Reification and Real Abstraction in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

See Honneth (2005), Wallat (2009), Deutsche Zeitschriftfür Philosophie (2011), Bitterolf and Maier (2012), Friesen and Lotz (2012).

See Sohn-Rethel (1973: 38). For a critique of Sohn-Rethel, see Reichardt (2008).

I cannot deal further here with the considerable problems caused by this thought in Marx’s theoretical frame of reference, in particular with regard to the mediation of the quality and the quantity of the determination of value. See Elbe (2010: 261–263) as well as Ellmers (2016).

‘As use values or goods, commodities are corporeally distinct things. Their existence as value, in contrast, constitutes their unity. This unity does not originate in nature, but rather in society’ (MEGA II/5: 19). Things are similar with regard to the ‘substance’ of value: ‘As useful activity directed to the appropriation of natural factors in one form or another, labour is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material interchange between man and nature, quite independent of the form of society. On the other hand, the labour which posits exchange value is a specific social form of labour. For example, tailoring if one considers its physical aspect as a distinct productive activity produces a coat, but not the exchange value of the coat. The exchange value is produced by it not as tailoring as such but as abstract universal labour, and this belongs to a social framework not devised by the tailor’ (Marx and Engels 2010b: 278).

See: ‘by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour’ (Marx 1976: 166).

‘Tailoring and weaving’ both ‘therefore possess the general property of being human labour, and they therefore have to be considered in certain cases, such as the production of value, solely from this point of view’ (Marx 1976: 150). ‘In every social form of labor, individual acts of labor of different individuals are also related to each other as human labor, but here, this relationship itself counts as the specific social form of the acts of labor’ (MEGA II/5 1983: 41).

See: ‘The validation of concern here is neither one agreed upon by those engaging in exchange, nor imposed by the state. Rather, it is a relation structurally given in an economy based upon exchange’ (Heinrich 2008: 119).

This state of affairs arises from a passage in Capital that is usually not understood, in which Marx on the one hand emphasizes that it’s only a specific social relationship between people ‘which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1976: 165) and on the other hand writes that ‘to the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things’ (ibid.: 166). On this, see Wolf (1985: 217).

What ‘vanishes’ in the empirical forms of wealth is not the fact that labor is necessary to create its material bearers, but rather that the form itself is the exclusive result of a specific social relation, abstract labor as the substance of value.

This is also practiced in the most elaborated commentaries; see Fischer (1978: 80 ff.), Heinrich (2008: 174) and Lindner (2013: 289, 346). The overloading of the concept of fetishism corresponds to that of the concept of reification in Lukács’ work.

Extreme examples are Colletti (1977: 28 ff.), Jappe (2005: 161, 193), Grigat (2007: 53) and Iorio (2010: 254 ff.). For a critique of irrationalism in the reception of Marx, see Elbe (2008), Elbe (2010: 139 ff., 251) and Wolf (1985: 221 ff.).

See also: ‘the effects of a certain social form of labour are ascribed to objects, to the products of this labour; the relationship itself is imagined to exist in material form. We have already seen that this is a characteristic of labour based on commodity production, on exchange value, and this quid pro quo is revealed in the commodity, in money […] and to a still higher degree in capital’ (Marx and Engels 2010c: 428).

See also: ‘this fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labour which produces them’ (Marx 1976: 165).

Dannemann (1987: 41ff.) and Wallat (2009: 87) go in this direction when they distinguish between two forms of reification: real inversion and ideological inversion.