Introduction: Commodity Fetishism by Fredy Perlman According to economists whose theories currently prevail in America, economics has replaced political economy, and economics deals with scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. In the definition of Paul Samuelson, "economics or political economy, as it used to be called . . is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources, which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society."1 According to Robert Campbell, "One of the central preoccupations of economics has always been what determines price."2 In the words of another expert, "Any community, the primers tell us, has to deal with a pervasive economic problem: how to determine the uses of available resources, including not only goods and services that can be employed productively but also other scarce supplies."3
If economics is indeed merely a new name for political economy, and if the subject matter which was once covered under the heading of political economy is now covered by economics, then economics has replaced political economy. However, if the subject matter of political economy is not the same as that of economics, then the "replacement" of political economy is actually an omission of a field of knowledge. If economics answers different questions from those raised by political economy, and if the omitted questions refer to the form and the quality of human life within the dominant social-economic system, then this omission can be called a "great evasion".4 The Soviet economic theorist and historian I.I. Rubin suggested a definition of political economy which has nothing in common with the definitions of economics quoted above. According to Rubin, "Political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with production relations which are established among people in the process of production."5In terms of this definition, political economy is not the study of prices or of scarce resources; it is a study of social relations, a study of culture. Political economy asks why the productive forces of society develop within a particular social form, why the machine process unfolds within the context of business enterprise, why industrialization takes the form of capitalist development. Political economy asks how the working activity of people is regulated in a specific, historical form of economy. The contemporary American definitions of economics quoted earlier clearly deal with different problems, raise different questions, and refer to a different subject matter from that of political economy as defined by Robin. This means one of two things: (a) either economics and political economy are two different branches of knowledge, in which case the "replacement" of political economy by economics simply means that the American practitioners of one branch have replaced the other branch, or (b) economics is indeed the new name for what "used to be called" political economy; in this case, by defining economics as a study of scarcity, prices, and resource allocation, American economists are saying that the production relations among people are not a legitimate subject for study. In this case the economists quoted above are setting themselves up as the legislators over what is, and what is not, a legitimate topic for intellectual concern; they are defining the limits of American knowledge. This type of intellectual legislation has led to predictable consequences in other societies and at other times: it has led to total ignorance in the excluded field of knowledge, and it has led to large gaps and blind spots in related fields of knowledge. .............................. Marx's principal aim was not to study scarcity, or to explain price, or to allocate resources, but to analyze how the working activity of people is regulated in a capitalist economy. The subject of the analysis is a determined social structure, a particular culture, namely commodity-capitalism, a social form of economy in which the relations among people are not regulated directly, but through things. Consequently, "the specific character of economic theory as a science which deals with the commodity capitalist economy lies precisely in the fact that it deals with production relations which acquire material forms." (Robin, p.47). Marx's central concern was human creative activity, particularly the determinants, the regulators which shape this activity in the capitalist form of economy. Robin's thorough study makes it clear that this was not merely the central concern of the "young Marx" or of the "old Marx", but that it remained central to Marx in all his theoretical and historical works, which extend over half a century. Robin shows that this theme gives the unity of a single work to fifty years of research and writing, that this theme is the content of the labor theory of value, and thus that Marx's economic theory can be understood only within the framework of this central theme. Marx's vast opus is not a series ol disconnected episodes, each with specific problems which are later abandoned. Consequently, the frequently drawn contrast between an "idealistic young Marx" concerned with the philosophical problems of human existence, and a "realistic old Marx" concerned with technical economic problems,7is superficial and misses the essential unity of Marx's entire opus. Robin shows that the central themes of the "young Marx" were being still further refined in the final pages of Marx's last published work; Marx continually sharpened his concepts and frequently changed his terminology, but his concerns were not replaced. Robin demonstrates this by tracing the central themes of works which Marx wrote in the early 1840's through the third volume of Capital, published by Engels in 1894. In the different periods of his productive life, Marx expressed his concern with human creativity through different, though related, concepts. In his early works, Marx unified his ideas around the concept of "alienation" or "estrangement". later, when Marx refined his ideas of "reified" or "congealed" labor, the theory of commodity fetishism provided a focus, a unifying framework for his analysis. In Marx's later work, the theory of commodity fetishism, namely the theory of a society in which relations among people take the form of relations among things, the theory of a society in which production relations are reified, becomes Marx's "general theory of production relations of the commodity-capitalist economy". (Robin, p. 3). Thus Marx's theory of value, the most frequently criticized part of his political economy, can only be understood within the context of the theory of commodity fetishism, or in Robin's words, the "ground of Marx's theory of value can only be given on the basis of his theory of commodity fetishism, which analyzes the general structure of the commodity economy". (p.61) This essay will examine the relationship between the concept of alienation, the theory of commodity fetishism and the theory of value, and it will be shown that the three formulations are approaches to the same problem: the determination of the creative activity of people in the capitalist form of economy. This examination will show that Marx had no interest per se in defining a standard of value, in developing a theory of price isolated from a historically specific mode of production, or in the efficient allocation of resources. Marx's work is a critical analysis of how people are regulated in the capitalist economy; it is not a handbook on how to regulate people and things. The subtitle of Marx's three volume Capitalis "Critique of Political Economy",and not "Manual for Efficient Management". This does not mean that Marx did not consider problems of resource allocation important; it means that he did not consider them the central concern of political economy, a science of social relations. Full at http://www.blackandgreen.org/fp/commodity.html
