![]() Exchange value has as yet no form of its own, but is still directly bound up with use-value. Marx lays great stress on the essentially episodic appearance of the commodity form in primitive societies: “Direct barter, the original natural form of exchange, represents rather the beginning of the transformation of use-values into commodities, than that of commodities into money. For depending on which is the case, all the subjective phenomena in the societies concerned are objectified in qualitatively different ways. The distinction between a society where this form is dominant, permeating every expression of life, and a society where it only makes an episodic appearance is essentially one of quality. What is at issue here, however, is the question: how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society? Thus the extent to which such exchange is the dominant form of metabolic change in a society cannot simply be treated in quantitative terms - as would harmonise with the modern modes of thought already eroded by the reifying effects of the dominant commodity form. ![]() Commodity exchange an the corresponding subjective and objective commodity relations existed, as we know, when society was still very primitive. Only by understanding this can we obtain a clear insight into the ideological problems of capitalism and its downfall.īefore tackling the problem itself we must be quite clear in our minds that commodity fetishism is a specific problem of our age, the age of modern capitalism. Our intention here is to base ourselves on Marx’s economic analyses and to proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjective stance corresponding to it. Nor shall we consider its implications for the economic doctrines of the vulgar Marxists which follow from their abandonment of this starting-point. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the central importance of this problem for economics itself. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people. The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them. That is to say, the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Of course the problem can only be discussed with this degree of generality if it achieves the depth and breadth to be found in Marx’s own analyses. For at this stage in the history of mankind there is no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle of commodity-structure. IT is no accident that Marx should have begun with an analysis of commodities when, in the two great works of his mature period, he set out to portray capitalist society in its totality and to lay bare its fundamental nature. Marx: Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. For man, however, the root is man himself. To be radical is to go to the root of the matter. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat by Georg Lukacs
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