KEY CONCEPT on MARXISM

1. C OMMODITY : "an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind" (Marx, Capital 125 ) and is then exchanged for something else. When Marx speaks of commodities, he is particularly concerned with the "physical properties of the commodity" ( 126 ), which he associates closely with the use-value of an object. However, use-value does not automatically lead to a commodity: "He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values , but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values , but use-values for others, social use-values " (131). Commodities, therefore, "possess a double form, i.e. natural form and value form" ( 138 ). ( See Use-Value vs. Exchange-Value .) The physical body of the commodity is made up of 1) the material provided by nature (e.g. linen, gold, etc.); and 2) the labor expended to create it (see Marx, Capital 133 ). Note that a commodity can refer to tangilble things as well as more ephemeral products (e.g. a lecture). What matters is that something be exchanged for the thing.

2. U SE-VALUE vs. EXCHANGE-VALUE : The usefulness of a commodity vs. the exchange equivalent by which the commodity is compared to other objects on the market. Marx distinguishes between the use-value and the exchange value of the commodity . Use-value is inextricably tied to "the physical properties of the commodity " ( 126 ); that is, the material uses to which the object can actually be put, the human needs it fulfills. In the exchange of goods on the capitalist market, however, exchange-value dominates: two commodities can be exchanged on the open market because they are always being compared to a third term that functions as their "universal equivalent," a function that is eventually taken over by money. Exchange-value must always be distinguished from use-value, because "the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values" (127). In capital, money takes the form of that equivalence; however, money in fact hides the real equivalent behind the exchange: labor. The more labor it takes to produce a product, the greater its value. Marx therefore concludes that "As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time" ( 130 ).

3. M ARX TURNS TO FETISHISM to make sense of the apparently magical quality of the commodity : "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties" ( 163 ). Fetishism in anthropology refers to the primitive belief that godly powers can inhere in inanimate things (e.g., in totems). Marx borrows this concept to make sense of what he terms "commodity fetishism." As Marx explains, the commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use-value . When a piece of wood is turned into a table through human labor, its use-value is clear and, as product, the table remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the table "emerges as a commodity , it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness" ( 163 ). The connection to the actual hands of the laborer is severed as soon as the table is connected to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. People in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object. As Marx explains, "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" ( 164-65 ). What is, in fact, a social relation between people (between capitalists and exploited laborers) instead assumes "the fantastic form of a relation between things" ( 165 ).

This effect is caused by the fact that, in a capitalist society, the real producers of commodities remain largely invisible. We only approach their products "through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products" ( 165 ). We access the products of the proletariat through the exchange of money with those institutions that glean profit from the labor of the proletariat. Since we only ever relate to those products through the exchange of money, we forget the "secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities " ( 168 ); that is labor: "It is... precisely this finished form of the world of commodities — the money form —which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly" ( 168-69 ). In capitalist society, gold and then paper money become "the direct incarnation of all human labor" ( 187 ), much as in primitive societies the totem becomes the direct incarnation of godhead. Through this process, "Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way; they become alienated because their own relations of production assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action" ( 187 ). Although value ultimately accrues because of human labor, people in a capitalist system are led to believe that they are not in control of the market forces that appear to exist independently of any individual person.

The situation differed in feudal society : In such a society, "we find everyone dependent—serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clerics." Because "relations of personal dependence form the given social foundation, there is no need for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind" ( 170 ). Transactions in feudal society involve the particularity of labor rather than the abstract universal equivalent necessary for commodity production. Marx therefore concludes that "Whatever we may think... of the different roles in which men confront each other in such a society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between things, between the products of labour" ( 170 ).

4. A LIENATION (Marx) : the process whereby the worker is made to feel foreign to the products of his/her own labor. The creation of commodities need not lead to alienation and can, indeed, be highly satisfying: one pours one's subjectivity into an object and one can even gain enjoyment from the fact that another in turn gains enjoyment from our craft. In capitalism, the worker is exploited insofar as he does not work to create a product that he then sells to a real person; instead, the proletariat works in order to live, in order to obtain the very means of life, which he can only achieve by selling his labor to a capitalist for a wage (as if his labor were itself a property that can be bought and sold). The worker is alienated from his/her product precisely because s/he no longer owns that product, which now belongs to the capitalist who has purchased the proletariat's labor-power in exchange for exclusive ownership over the proletariat's products and all profit accrued by the sale of those products.