The Defetishized Society

New Economic Democracy as a Libertarian Alternative to Capitalism

Chris Wyatt

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441147028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New Economic Democracy establishes a self-governing civil society, unifying the private sphere of production and the public sphere of citizenship within a non-statist scheme of communal ownership. It provides the premises to seeking a solution to Marx's fetishism of commodities. Only a thorough restructuring of the economic and political institutions can provide the social climate in which the phenomenon of fetishism can be transcended. Defetishizing the commodity implies reversing the concealment of the social relations through which commodities are produced and preventing the tendency to bestow magical characteristics to commodities. The key imperative to the defetishized society is a system of genuinely democratic institutions. iprovides this necessary corrective and also challenges the prediction that politico-economic organizations, like worker cooperatives, are destined to be dominated by the dictates of oligarchs. The explanatory approach of Marx's concepts combined with an original argument will make the book a valuable research tools to students and researchers in political theory, democratic theory, and political economy.

SECTION II

DEFETISHIZATION IN THE ECONOMY OF NEW ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

3

Superseding Alienation

This lengthy chapter argues that alienated labour can be superseded in NED. The key contention is that the internal political structures within the guilds, and their external relations with the consumer and civic councils, are arranged in such a way that the guild cooperatives will have every opportunity and every incentive to provide the material conditions through which creative labour can be sustained. There are three parts to the chapter. Part One, ‘Alienation and Dealienation’, establishes what Marx means by alienated labour. Then, in response to the claim that it cannot be negated, I provide a rational for what I have termed the organizational solution. Part Two, ‘Creative Labour in New Economic Democracy’, is the longest part. It addresses both the macro (external to guild cooperatives) and the micro (internal to guild cooperatives) divisions of labour in NED’s political economy. I argue that creative labour can be embedded within this material system. Finally, Part Three, ‘Dealienated Consumption’, highlights the role played by consumer councils in NED’s dealienated mode of consumption.

Part One: Alienation and Dealienation

There are four sections to this first part. The first, ‘Marx and Alienation’, provides an exposition of his critique of alienated labour.¹ The second, ‘Alienation and Fetishism’, reaffirms the connection between alienation and commodity fetishism. The third, ‘Alienation Unavoidable’, introduces the argument that due to the complexities of the division of labour in all advanced economies, alienation is inescapable. In the fourth, ‘Realizing the Impossible: The Organizational Solution’, the productive conditions that are a prerequisite for engendering creative labour are laid-out.

Marx and Alienation

The young humanist Marx argues that human nature is twisted negatively by the structures within capitalist society. It is this distortion that he calls alienation. Marx holds that human essence is more than just thought; it is, more fundamentally, creative activity – the many aspects of labour. Consciousness can only be considered one feature of humanity. It is practical, creative activity that is the focal point of his alienation theory. This theory is not so much related to the subjective experience of workers, but to the structure of the commodity economy. In the social class structure of capitalism, one class, the non-owners of the means of production, have no choice but to sell their labour power to another class, the owners of the means of production. It is this central social relation in capitalism, wage-labour, that is the bases of alienation. Marx, then, locates alienation at the base of capitalist society (1977: 85). To help explain why ‘the more powerful the work the more powerless becomes the worker’ (1977: 79), he invokes a religious analogy. The maker of a product, Marx suggests, undergoes a similar experience to the maker of god. In both cases, the more energy people put into god or a product, the less they retain in themselves (1977: 79). As Part One of Chapter 1 explained, in the actual process of producing workers externalize basic human attributes, thereby objectifying humanity. The laws of political economy are not directly willed by the workers they regulate, which implies the latter cannot be considered free. The workers, having no say in the direction of their work, are transformed into a thing due to the dependence on capital. That is, Marx identifies an inversion between appearances and what really is. As capital, which is produced by human endeavours, is an estranged being that rules people via its economic laws, there is an inversion between the person–thing relation. The society of alienated labour, as with the society of commodity fetishism, has no autonomy. People are not masters controlling their own fates, but slaves to the economic infrastructure they have brought into existence. In this self-contrived inverted world, capital appears as a thing dichotomized from the people who created it and who in turn are ruled by it. Individuals’ lives are progressively determined unintentionally by the collective activity which is structured by impersonal exchange relations (Marx, K. 1977: 79, 85; Howard, M. W. et al. 1985: 18; Fromm, E. 1992: 49–50; Perlman, F. 1972: xiii–iv; Ritzer, G. 1992: 57).

In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM) (1844) and the Notes on James Mill (1844), Marx argues that a person’s subjectivity is a function of his or her relationship with external nature (essential to which is the means of production) and with others. It is this subjectivity which is alienated by wage-labour. Alienation from human essence therefore means people’s subjectivity – their physical and intellectual energies, or work capacity – is removed from them. In this separation material objects are not merely things, they become incorporated in the objectification of human subjectivity. When they produce just to exchange, people do not relate to each other’s objects as human beings because they themselves do not relate in a human way to those they produce (1977: 114–15). Workers exchange labour power for wages, and in the process alienate themselves from their producing activities. The labour of workers becomes something external to them, something to be appropriated by others. Alienated labour becomes a commodity, its price determined by market factors. As a corollary, workers are alienated from the products their labour produces. Labour is embodied in an object. As soon as labour is sold, it follows that the goods produced by that labour, including the exchange-value of these products, also belong to the employers. Further, workers become alienated from others, who come to appear as egoistical competitors, and from their own social being because they do not contribute in any significant or meaningful way to the planning of production. Consequently, they do not come to identify with universal interests. So in estranged (wage) labour, the labourer’s ‘essence’ is objectified and alienated. The key point in the EPM is that the workers’ estrangement is the separation of social relationships from themselves. Marx’s argument is that workers transfer to something else (god, political state or in Capital the inhuman power of commodities and capital – all of which assume an independent entity) that which is essential to their nature, to control their own activities and hence initiate historical processes. It is important to add that for Marx, the process of objectification is a universal feature of all societies; and it may be a positive or negative experience, depending on the particular social relations of production in which it occurs (Marx, K. 1975: 282–7, 295–303, 327–30; 1977: 80–3, 114–15; Colletti, L. 1975: 50–2, 54; McLellan, D. 1986: 34; 1995: 110, 242; Howard, M. W. 2000: 77).

It is evident that Marx dislikes markets because commodity exchange in capitalist society alienates people’s human existence from their essence. His concept of work attempts to capture this essence, or ‘species’ being. According to Marx, people have both a ‘natural’ and species being. They are natural beings in the sense that they share a number of physical features with other species – the need for food, water and to reproduce through sexual selection. As a species being, people can be distinguished from other living things, for they now possess qualities which are uniquely their own, and can only be known by their own species. Like human’s natural power, their species power implies particular relationships between them and nature, including other people as parts of nature. The importance for Marx is that humans manifest themselves as a species being through activity that can only be done by human beings. He proposes that in the appropriate productive process, people’s creative and free activity, in cooperation with their fellows, could be given expression in the goods they are producing; and how genuine control over the process of self-creation can be initiated. People act as a species being when they produce for others in order to satisfy their needs, so consciously directing labour. In this cooperative process of creative self-activity, when they see others appreciating their products, work becomes a fulfilling experience. A conscious understanding of the needs of others is generated. This, as Marx puts it, is to produce in a ‘human manner’ (1977: 121–2). Under the system of private property, exchanges are conditional, individuals expect something in return. Here there is no personal use-value; that is, a person produces something s/he does not want, it is only a means to other goods. Alienated labour, so understood, is to produce something of no interest to oneself. Relations are based around private property owners, not as species being. Products are in private hands, the exchange is one of private properties. So although exchange (or ‘interchange’) is our species activity, all the time it takes place within the framework of private property, it is alienated species activity. The gap between individual and the general interest increases when the chief aim is to collectively exchange commodities in an impersonal market, which is the domain of profit-seeking egoism. So for Marx, in capitalist society workers are denied an expression of their species being, or communal creativity, who, as such, experience lives of misery, un-fulfilment . . . alienation. He concludes that in order to realize their species being people must end the system of commodity exchange in a distant market (Marx, K. 1977: 82, 114–18; Ollman, B. 1971: 76, 82–5; McLellan, D. 1986: 34; 1995: 110, 242; Howard, M. W. 2000: 77).

In summary, an alienating context exists wherever the social relations of production prevent, by a fragmentation of the natural interconnectedness (of people-to-people and people-to-nature) that is essential for a human life to reach its potential, the development of the full range of human capacities. Marx’s alienation thesis is commonly broken down into four aspects. First, workers are alienated from their productive activity, and thereby from the essence of humanity. The seller of labour power relinquishes control of productive decision-making. Once the process of production is under the direction of the capitalist, labour, subject to minor restrictions, cannot be self-directed. Discipline is typically enforced by close supervision, which severely undermines the enthusiasm for workers to develop their creativity and autonomy. The loss of freedom is further enhanced by the dictates of technology, which is frequently employed in the capitalist enterprise to deskill and intensify a minute division of labour. Secondly, each person is alienated from the product. It follows that if workers are alienated from their productive activity, they must also be alienated from the goods their productive activity produces. The worker has no control over the determination of what gets produced, nor how it should be disposed. In the third place is alienation from fellow workers, who are likewise alienated from human life. Where everything is a commodity, individuals are forced to compete with each other. Cooperation (which for Marx is, as clarified above, our natural inclination) becomes less prevalent, and people come to see each other as means to their own ends. The resulting interpersonal hostility ensures workers are alienated from their associates. Finally, in the fourth place is alienation from oneself. Self-alienation refers to the separation from what it means to be human: to produce through creative, purposeful and rational activity. Workers are alienated from their own potential, and cannot express their human attributes. These, according to Marx, are the four forms alienation takes in capitalist society. The crucial point is that the labour process is outside the direct control of disempowered workers (Marx, K. 1977: 80–3; Ritzer, G. 1992: 57–9).

Alienation and Fetishism

Before moving on to address the argument that alienation is unavoidable in any modern economy, it will be helpful to reconfirm the interrelation between alienation and commodity fetishism. McLellan (1971) stresses that Marx’s theory of fetishism recalls clearly his earlier writings on alienated labour. To briefly reiterate, in Capital I Marx demonstrates that in commodity societies the products of labour generate an independent and anti-human power. As with alienation, the fetishism of commodities emerges when products are exchanged through an impersonal market. Marx states that a commodity is a very mysterious thing because the social character of labour that it embodies appears to the workers as an objective character. These commodities, which have only achieved their status through complex social relations, then appear to interact with each other and with people, whereupon they seem to have values and a life of their own. People’s values become largely centred on appearances, things and what they are worth. The relations of producers to their own labour appear in their eyes as a social relation existing between independent products, and not between themselves. The result is that individuals, vis-a-vis the theory of alienation, remain separated from each other and from the general interest. As in capitalism the chief forms of social relations are based around commodities. Marx concludes the tendency to fetishism is hardly surprising. But it does mean that the real social processes, including the manner in which labour is exploited, remains concealed and unrecognized. Geras (1971) offers a similar insight. He states that in Marx’s thesis, fetishism inflicts itself upon people as mystification and domination. Mystification was covered in Chapter 1, it is the dominating aspect of fetishism I now wish to draw attention to. In contrast to former modes of production, in capitalist society the domination is disguised, and it is impersonal. Domination is a reoccurring theme in Marx’s writings. It first appears in the EPM (1844) in his discussion of alienation, and is present in Capital 1.² Interestingly, Geras stresses that the role of alienation in the latter is that its roots are in specific social relations, not in a negated species-being. It is this, he suggests, that separates Capital from EPM. ‘In place of a concept of alienation founded on an essentialist anthropology, we have one tied to the historical specificity of forms of domination’ (1971: 3; Marx, K. 1977: 435–6; McLellan, D. 1971: xxxvii, xIi; Howard, M. W. 2000: 77–9, 82).

Others, too, have drawn attention to the general unity in Marx’s thought. For Perlman (1972) and Rubin (1972) Marx’s concept of alienation and his theory of commodity fetishism are, along with the theory of value, formulations which address the same issue: how working activity is determined in capitalist society. In the EPM Marx explains alienation in a way that will reflect his later account of commodity fetishism. The more effort workers put into their product, the more their lives are displaced in it; in proportion, the poorer their inner lives become. Likewise, the more value workers create, the more worthless they become. For Marx, this impoverishment is a ‘contemporary fact of political economy’ (1977: 78–9). As labour is embodied in an object, the later appears as an objectification of labour:

The externalization [alienation] of the worker in his product implies not only that his labour becomes an object, an exterior existence but also that it exists outside him, independently and alien, and becomes a self-sufficient power opposite him, that the life that he has lent to the object affronts him, hostile and alien. (Marx, K. 1977: 79)

‘This passage’, Perlman concludes, ‘seems, in retrospect, like a summary of the theory of commodity fetishism’ (1972: xxix). Alien objects stand opposed to labour as an independent power because the labour embodied in the product is appropriated by the capitalist. It is in this sense that both fetishism and alienation are inherent in the social relations central to commodity-producing societies. The capitalist class appropriates the labour which the working class alienates. So by its very definition, wage-labour is alienated labour (Marx, K. 1977: 78–9, 84; Perlman, F. 1972: xvii–iii).

In his later writings Marx abandons terms like ‘human essence’. He now considers human nature to be conditioned by material factors which are constantly changing. So rather than human nature in general, Marx now bases his analysis on human beings producing in a given historical setting. This enables him to make a new claim: the essence of human beings cannot be separated from their historical existence. People create their material conditions, not by way of an ideal society, but through the limits laid out by the existing forces of production. Rubin captures the transformation in Marx’s thought neatly:

In order to transform . . . [his] 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, I. I. 1972: 57)

Marx’s ‘progression’ from utopian to scientific socialism involved a change in how he conceptualized alienation. The contradiction between alienated workers producing in capitalist society and their unalienated species-being, or human essence, is now dropped. The opposition between the social relations and their material base is no longer treated as an opposition between what actually is and what ought to be; both opposing factors are now located in existing reality. But although Marx came to abandon the word alienation, he continues to develop its content. And it is this development that occurs in the new formulations of commodity fetishism and value. ‘The link between alienation and commodity fetishism is the concept of “reification” (materialisation or objectification) of social relations’ (Perlman, F. 1972: xxiii; Rubin, I. I. 1972: 57–8).

Chapter 1 explained that the term reification refers to a mistaken interpretation of an abstract entity (god, state) or concept as concrete. To briefly reiterate, Marx uses the term mostly to explain how commodities, money, capital, etc., are given the status of things when they should more accurately be treated as social relations. The work process causes labour to be objectified. People appropriate the natural world, and, through their labour, objectify themselves in it. When this objectification occurs under alienating conditions, it may be termed reification. Reification, so understood, describes a situation in which the social relations between people appear as the relations between things. The reification of productive relations is supplemented by the personification of things. People come to evaluate others just as they evaluate things. Crucially for Marx, they do not perceive this as abnormal, but as natural. With intensified commodification, the market becomes the only standard of evaluation. Impersonal market forces come to dominate human relations. It is this fundamental aspect of reification that Marx labelled commodity fetishism. Behind the veil of commodity fetishism, the market is experienced by alienated people as an impersonal force. In Capital 1 the reification of social relations is explained as not just the result of the thinking process of commodity producers, as Marx had suggested in 1859 where he refers to reification as a ‘mystification’, it is located in the internal structure of commodity-producing society. It is the capitalist economy that causes fetishism; capitalist social relations necessarily lead to reified social relations. Reification is a consequence of capitalism, but it is more than that, it is inseparable from it. Hence, fetishism, as an objective feature of commodity-producing society, is a phenomenon of soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Introduction
• SECTION I  COMMODITY FETISHISM, ANTI-FETISHISM AND NEW ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
• SECTION II  DEFETISHIZATION IN THE ECONOMY OF NEW ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY
• Bibliography
• Index