| This question <91|91> overall <85|87> Martin: <51|14>. |
| Question 194: Someone says the commodity relation is fetishized because otherwise exploitation would not be possible without a police state. Comment. |
| [86] Martin: Fetishism or Police state This is incorrectly phrased in a number of ways but is an interesting proposition. |
| It implies a conspiracy theory of economic and political developments which is not Marx's analysis at all. He does however explain what social formations are relatively stable at which stages of economic development, and from this point of view the question needs some thought to answer. |
| About terminology I think Hans Ehrbar has demonstrated clearly by comparing various translations including the French, that the common English translation, “commodity fetishism” is wrong. It is not Marx's meaning to moralise against a desire for use values in the form of commodities. On the contrary he anticipates that social progress will be associated with an increase in use values. |
| It is true that the apparent fairness of commodity exchange (even if people are in very unequal situations) masks the fact that the surplus product goes to a small minority of the society. In slave societies and in feudal societies, force was specifically given to the exploiting class and used to put down periodic slave revolts or peasant revolts. Nowadays it is no longer necessary publically to crucify one in ten steel workers when their plant is closed down through competition from the far east, in order to keep them socially disciplined. Their inability to sell their labor power, and their assumption that that there is no alternative, is largely sufficient. |
| They may demand other work, and they may demand unemployment benefit, but only as second class citizens, because the fetish-like nature of commodities conceals a social relation underneath the material reality of the product. They accept that because there is less need to produce steel as a use-value within the USA because it can be bought more cheaply from abroad, their contribution to the aggregate social labor of the USA really has been “devalued”. Instead there should be a redistribution of total social labor within the USA if not within the world to enable everyone to work productively. |
| The question implies that exploitation is a feature of socialist states. This is clearly not Marx's meaning in his description of the association of free human beings. Certainly a social product was created and there is controversy among would be socialists about whether the officials in former socialist states shoudl have had any privileges at all and whether by doing so, they became part of an “exploiting” “class”. But in the case of the former east Germany even Erich Honecker's wealth was found to be unremarkable by comparison to what a leading capitalist of the former West Germany would expect. (I think I am right is saying this.) Anyway Marx did not speculate in detail about how socialist societies should be run but it is clear from his comments here that he did not regard exploitation as part of the process. |
| The question however implies further ironically that the controversies about police states in former “socialist” countries were because they did not have a mystifying economic system of commodities and capital accumulation. Perhaps these problems will become easier with more ready availability of highly complex information systems, but I think it is true that in the former socialist countries there was a major problem about how to organize democracy to get adequate consent for how the surplus product was distributed. This was made worse by the real and imagined dangers of capitalist encirclement. |
| Yugoslavia which was thought to be less of a police state than most, got torn apart not by its different nationalities suddenly becoming intolerant of each other's religions but because of a big disparity in rates of economic development between those regions near the European Union, and others. The richer regions wanted to reduce their contributions to the federal budget and failing that, to secede. To stay a unified country, Yugoslavia would either have needed a period of increased internal repression, or to have quickly gone over to capitalist economic methods in the hope that it could have remained a looser sort of confederation or at least have had a velvet divorce, like Slovakia and the Czech Republic further north. The Yugoslav Federation could have applied to become associated with the European Union, and the richer regions could have reduced their “subsidies to the poorer southern regions, which could have received subsidies from the European Union.” I fear that to stay a separate unified and socialist state under the economic pressures of a semi-commodity based economy, would have required greater policing. |
| In summary in answer to the question as put, leaving aside the sarcasm and irony, I think it is true that for a socialist society in a capitalist world, under present conditions of economic development, it would difficult for the state not to have some repressive powers, even if they were well regulated by law. |
| However perhaps greater “transparency” about economic and financial processes, preferably on a world scale, will enable us to move without coercion more easily to a conscious free association of all. |
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