Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The Reproduction of Daily Life, by Fredy Perlman
Part 3: The Fetishism of Commodities:
By alienating their activity and embodying it in commodities, in material receptacles
of human labor, people reproduce themselves and create Capital. From the standpoint of
capitalist ideology, and particularly of academic Economics, this statement is untrue: commodities
are "not the product of labor alone"; they are produced by the primordial "factors of
production," Land, Labor and Capital, the capitalist Holy Trinity, and the main "factor"
is obviously the hero of the piece, Capital.
The purpose of this superficial Trinity is not analysis, since analysis is not what these
Experts are paid for. They are paid to obfuscate, to mask the social form of practical activity
under capitalism, to veil the fact that producers reproduce themselves, their exploiters, as
well as the instruments with which they're exploited. The Trinity formula does not succeed
in convincing. It is obvious that land is no more of a commodity producer than water,
air, or the sun. Furthermore Capital, which is at once a name for a social relation between
workers and capitalists, for the instruments of production owned by a capitalist, and for
the money-equivalent of his instruments and "intangibles," does not produce anything more
than the ejaculations shaped into publishable form by the academic Economists. Even the
instruments of production which are the capital of one capitalist are primordial "factors
of production" only if one's blinders limit his view to an isolated capitalist firm, since
a view of the entire economy reveals that the capital of one capitalist is the material
receptacle of the labor alienated to another capitalist. However, though the Trinity formula
does not convince, it does accomplish the task of obfuscation by shifting the subject
of the question: instead of asking why the activity of people under capitalism takes
the form of wage-labor, potential analysts of capitalist daily life are transformed into
academic house-Marxists who ask whether or not labor is the only "factor of production."
Thus Economics (and capitalist ideology in general) treats land, money, and the products
of labor, as things which have the power to produce, to create value, to work for their
owners, to transform the world. This is what Marx called the fetishism which characterizes
people's everyday conceptions, and which is raised to the level of dogma by Economics.
For the economist, living people are things ("factors of production"), and things live
(money "works," Capital "produces").
The fetish worshipper attributes the product of his own activity to his fetish. As a result,
he ceases to exert his own power (the power to transform nature, the power to determine
the form and content of his daily life); he exerts only those "powers" which he attributes
to his fetish (the "power" to buy commodities). In other words, the fetish worshipper emasculates
himself and attributes virility to his fetish.
But the fetish is a dead thing, not a living being; it has no virility. The fetish is no
more than a thing for which, and through which, capitalist relations are maintained. The mysterious
power of Capital, its "power" to produce, its virility, does not reside in itself, but
in the fact that people alienate their creative activity, that they sell their labor to capitalists,
that they materialize or reify their alienated labor in commodities. In other words, people
are bought with the products of their own activity, yet they see their own activity
as the activity of Capital, and their own products as the products of Capital. By attributing
creative power to Capital and not to their own activity, they renounce their living activity,
their everyday life, to Capital, which means that people give themselves daily, to the
personification of Capital, the capitalist.
By selling their labor, by alienating their activity, people daily reproduce the personifications
of the dominant forms of activity under capitalism; they reproduce the wage-laborer and the capitalist.
They do not merely reproduce the individuals physically, but socially as well; they reproduce
individuals who are sellers of labor-power, and individuals who are owners of means of
production; they reproduce the individuals as well as the specific activities, the sale
as well as the ownership.
Every time people perform an activity they have not themselves defined and do not control,
every time they pay for goods they produced with money they received in exchange for their
alienated activity, every time they passively admire the products of their own activity
as alien objects procured by their money, they give new life to Capital and annihilate
their own lives.
The aim of the process is the reproduction of the relation between the worker and the
capitalist. However, this is not the aim of the individual agents engaged in it. Their
activities are not transparent to them; their eyes are fixed on the fetish that stands between
the act and its result. The individual agents keep their eyes fixed on things, precisely
those things for which capitalist relations are established. The worker as producer aims
to exchange his daily labor for money-wages, he aims precisely for the thing through which
his relation to the capitalist is re-established, the thing through which he reproduces himself
as a wage-worker and the other as a capitalist. The worker as consumer exchanges his money
for products of labor, precisely the things which the capitalist has to sell in order
to realize his Capital.
The daily transformation of living activity into Capital is mediated by things, it is
not carried out by the things. The fetish worshipper does not know this; for him labor
and land, instruments and money, entrepreneurs and bankers, are all "factors" and "agents."
When a hunter wearing an amulet downs a deer with a stone, he may consider the amulet an
essential "factor" in downing the deer and even in providing the deer as an object to
be downed. If he is a responsible and well-educated fetish worshipper, he will devote his attention
to his amulet, nourishing it with care and admiration; in order to improve the material
conditions of his life, he will improve the way he wears his fetish, not the way he throws
the stone; in a bind, he may even send his amulet to "hunt" for him. His own daily activities
are not transparent to him: when he eats well, he fails to see that it is his own action
of throwing the stone, and not the action of the amulet, that provided his food; when
he starves, he fails to see that it is his own action of worshipping the amulet instead
of hunting, and not the wrath of his fetish, that causes his starvation.
The fetishism of commodities and money, the mystification of one's daily activities, the
religion of everyday life which attributes living activity to inanimate things, is not
a mental caprice born in men's imaginations; it has its origin in the character of social
relations under capitalism. Men do in fact relate to each other through things; the fetish
is in fact the occasion for which they act collectively, and through which they reproduce
their activity. But it is not the fetish that performs the activity. It is not Capital that
transforms raw materials, nor Capital that produces goods. If living activity did not
transform the materials, these would remain untransformed, inert, dead matter. If men
were not disposed to continue selling their living activity, the impotence of Capital
would be revealed; Capital would cease to exist; its last remaining potency would be
the power to remind people of a bypassed form of everyday life characterized by daily universal
prostitution.
The worker alienates his life in order to preserve his life. If he did not sell his
living activity he could not get a wage and could not survive. However, it is not the
wage that makes alienation the condition for survival. If men were collectively not disposed
to sell their lives, if they were disposed to take control over their own activities,
universal prostitution would not be a condition for survival. It is people's disposition to
continue selling their labor, and not the things for which they sell it, that makes
the alienation of living activity necessary for the preservation of life.
The living activity sold by the worker is bought by the capitalist. And it is only this
living activity that breathes life into Capital and makes it "productive." The capitalist,
an "owner" of raw materials and instruments of production, presents natural objects and
products of other people's labor as his own "private property." But it is not the mysterious
power of Capital that creates the capitalist's "private property"; living activity is what
creates the "property," and the form of that activity is what keeps it "private."