Fetishized Economic Categories and Entitlement Theory

• In Event: Origins of Political Ideas

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that commodity fetishism is responsible for the illusion in classical and neoclassical economics that the factors of production (capital, land, and labor) are rewarded according to their contribution. This mainstream belief is analytically unsound and normatively pernicious. Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism has the function of exposing the analytical errors associated with what he calls in the third volume of Capital, the “trinity formula”, the idea that capital yields profit, land yields rent, and labor yields wages. This trinity formula provides the positive basis for the normative claim that the factors of production are justly rewarded according to their contribution.

The paper has two purposes. First, to show how commodity fetishism masks social relations among persons and makes it seem as though the categories of profit, rent, and wages arise because of relations among things. Commodity fetishism makes for the appearance that different factors of production contribute a certain magnitude of value to the final product and are rewarded accordingly. Marx demonstrated the falsity of this reasoning for classical political economy, and I draw on examples from neoclassical economists who make the same error on the basis of their marginal theory of value.

Second, I consider the ideological stakes of commodity fetishism. Fetishized economic categories make it seem as though every individual is rewarded according to the contribution of her person and the factors she owns. When this is the case, it is not a far leap between Is and Ought to make the argument that the rewards the market yields are fairly distributed, that each factor-owner gets what she contributes and deserves, that there is no exploitation. Understanding the process of fetishism allows students of Marx to look beyond the realm of exchange and into the realm of production, where it is revealed that labor is the source of value and that which has value, and the owners of means of production use the prevailing legal property relations to exploit surplus value produced by labor. When this is revealed, claims to entitlement grounded in political-moral claims of desert espoused by the likes of Robert Nozick are severely undermined.

The paper proceeds as follows. I begin in Section I with an overview of commodity fetishism. I describe it as the social form of a thing appearing as its material content. Based on Marx and Marxian political economists such as I. I. Rubin, I reconstruct the material conditions responsible for the emergence of fetishism, focusing on market dependence and the domination and exploitation characteristic of capitalist relations of production.

Section II gives an account of the relationship between commodity fetishism and the view of classical and neoclassical economists that factors of production are rewarded according to their contribution. Commodity fetishism makes it seem as though each factor receives back the value of what it produces because of the relations of commodities on the market. When the theory of commodity fetishism is applied to the mainstream economic view, relations of exploitation are exposed.

In Section III, I discuss the normative stakes of theories of economic value. The classical and neoclassical theories of value lend themselves to supporting an entitlement theory of distributive justice in which capital is entitled to its profits. Political beliefs regarding desert are the products of reasoning within a theoretical framework that utilizes fetishized economic categories. The upshot of this section in relation to the previous two is to reveal that beliefs about desert have a material basis in market dependence and capitalist social relations that are reflected in mainstream economic categories. A Marxian analysis of these categories gives both positive and normative reason to abandon them. This analysis lends itself to an anti-capitalist politics, one aimed at revolutionizing the material conditions that give rise to fetishized economic categories and its corresponding entitlement theory. I conclude with a reflection on what Marx’s comments on communism imply regarding the material conditions for a de-fetishized economic theory and for a theory of distributive justice in which distribution is according need rather than marginal contribution.

Author

• James Rosenberg, Harvard University