3. If Marxism is a theory of human alienation under
all forms and expressions of capitalism, it becomes
unintelligible why, having proclaimed the fact of
human alienation at the outset of his studies, Marx
should have devoted himself for almost twenty years
to the systematic analysis of the mechanics of capitalist
production. The existence of alienation was already
established on the basis of phenomena observable
whenever the free market system was introduced.
Nothing in Capital throws any further light on the
phenomenon. The section on the “Fetishism of Com-
modities” (Capital, Vol. I, Ch. I, Sec. 4) is a sociological
analysis of commodities where private ownership of
the social means of production exists, and dispenses
completely with all reference to the true essence of
man and his alienations of that essence. What Marx
calls “the enigmatic character” of the product of labor
when it assumes the form of a commodity is the result
of the fact that
social relationships among men are
experienced directly by the unreflective consciousness
as a
natural property of things. The economic “value”
of products that are exchanged is assumed to be of
the same existential order as “the weight” of the
products.
This results in the fetishism of commodities which
is compared to the fetishism of objects in primitive
religion in which men fail to see that the divinity
attributed to the objects is their own creation. Or to
use another analogy, just as what makes an object
“food” ultimately depends upon the biological rela-
tionships of the digestive system, and not merely upon
the physical-chemical properties of the object, so what
makes a thing a “commodity” depends upon social
relationships between men, and not merely on the
physical characteristics of what objects are bought and
sold. Marx's analysis here is designed to further his
contention that men can control their economic and
social life and should not resign themselves to be ruled
by economic processes as if they were like natural
forces beyond the possibility of human control. The
Marxist analysis is used here to argue for the feasibility
of a shorter working day and better conditions of work.
