The critique of value, nature and fetishism: Marx and classical political economy.

Luke Neal, University of Manchester.

This text interrogates the relationship between Marx and classical economic doctrine. The discussion focuses on the ways in which Marx both reproduces and transcends Smith and Ricardo's accounts of value, labour and nature. Following Heinrich (2009; 2013), it is argued that his revolutionary contribution to theory and practice is not something situated alongside political economy, but in total opposition to it, even where he inherits concepts from Ricardo. The text is divided into 5 sections. The first outlines the historical context of classical political economy and its basic tenets, followed by an outline of Marx's critical project in opposition to them. Section 3 discusses the foundational concepts of value, abstract labour and money. The penultimate section considers the problem of history in the classical school, linking this to Marx's critique of fetishism, while the concluding part develops this theme by considering its prevalence in bourgeois theory.

The classical school. From practice to theory.

The intensification of the expanse and dynamic of capitalism in the eighteenth century necessitated a renewed understanding of matters economic. The new mode of production had embarked on an historic mission to draw out the productive power of combined and specialised labour. From its birthplace in Europe its stretched out tentacles over the world to find nourishment (Robinson, 1974: 2-3). The essence of this mode of production, according to the political economist, was free exchange relations (Walton and Gamble, 1972: 175). Its ascendant class of industrialists, who were concentrated in Britain and otherwise sporadically throughout western Europe, brought into the world a certain practical and material knowledge of their occupation. This familiarity bore corresponding theoretical notions in the form of classical political economy. As Dunayevskaya understood it, [p]roduction and more production became the theory because it was the life of the new mechanism (1964: 44). Of the leading economic nation of this period, Wood writes:

[The] characteristic ideology that set England apart from other European cultures was above all the ideology of 'improvement': not the Enlightenment idea of the improvement of humanity but the improvement of property, the ethicand indeed the scienceof profit, the commitment to increasing the productivity of labour, and the practice of enclosure and dispossession (1999: 112).

Classical political economy encapsulates many of these practices in theoretical form, as a science in perpetual tension with its Enlightenment provenance. For the proletarian, the new economy of freedom and equality meant more labour exchanged for less labour, while for the capitalist, less labour was exchanged for more (Marx, 1969a: 87). The philosophic and theoretical advance of this era took the form of a nascent liberalism, which both precipitated and reflected the industrial and political bourgeois revolutions and

their consequences for commerce and the state. It is amidst this period of transformation that the classical economists begin to grapple with the logic of industrialised production and international trade. Owing to the fact that large-scale industry itself was only just emerging from its childhood, classical political economy belongs to a period in which the class struggle was as yet undeveloped (Marx, 1976: 96-97). Yet the productive potential developed through early industrialisation prompted a conceptual reassessment of wealth, value, and human progress. They held that this progress was therefore as 'natural' as capitalism. Remove the artificial obstacles to it which the past had erected, and it must inevitably take place; and it was evident that the progress of production went hand in hand with that of the arts, the sciences and civilisation in general (Hobsbawm, 2009: 289-290). The relationship of the division of labour, production and progress is an example of how the traces of classical ideology featured in Marx's work have been the source of great debate and misreading. Where, for instance, he takes the view that the increase in the quantity of use-values is an increase of material wealth and the basis of all social progress (Marx, cited in Bonefeld, 2010: 263), it is perhaps easy to see how Marx may be understood as the heir, perfecter, or even as a member of the classical tradition. The claim of such interpretations has its basis in an undeniable intellectual heritage, but its emphases come at the expense of the richest foundations of Marx's critique.

In its modern form the problem of value could only be posed once the guild handicrafts had begun to give way to capitalist economy (Rubin, 1979: 64). The revolution in the labour process undermined the discourse of land-based theories of value, as the Physiocrats had maintained, in favour of a new grounding for value which was able to conceptualise how mechanisation and in particular the division of labour occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase in the productive powers of labour (Smith, 1985: 110). In Capital vol. IV Marx cites Berkeley, in the year 1750, asking whether the industry of the people is not first to be considered, as that which constitutes wealth, which makes even land and silver to be wealth, neither of which would have any value, but as means and motives to industry (1969a: 372). Likewise Marx remarks of his value theory's historical genesis in an 1858 letter to Engels:

Value as such has no other 'material' but labour itself. This determination of value, first indicated by Petty, clearly worked out by Ricardo, is merely the most abstract form of bourgeois wealth... Although an abstraction, this was an historical abstraction which could only be adopted on the basis of a particular economic development of society (1934: 106).

Smith considers value in these terms: Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared (1985: 136); and Ricardo, classical economy's last great representative (Marx, 1976: 96), in these: value...depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production (1949: 22).

Marx's critique of political economy.

[T]he antithesis to political economynamely communism or socialismfinds its theoretical presupposition in the works of classical political economy itself, especially in Ricardo, who must be regarded as its most complete and final expression (Marx, 1973: 884).

Having begun to study and criticise political economy in his mid-twenties, Marx composed his Parisian Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in 1844. But it was not until his years in exile in England that he took up this criticism systematically, as Walton and Gamble have observed: [b]efore 1850 no new economic concepts were introduced (1972: 167-168). In his mature economic studies, Marx starts from a commonly accepted definition of the concept under discussiona Ricardian conception of valueand proceeds by reconstructing it step by step into a new (Marxian) concept (Milios, 2003: 1). The residue of his intellectual heritage is present, but the significance of Marx's contribution lies in the fusion of those valuable elements of classical thought with his revolutionary methodology. It is not merely that Marx is criticising the conclusions of classical political economy, but the very manner in which it poses and frames its central questions (Heinrich, 2013: 33-34). The scope of the project accounts, in some ways, for the difficulties of its relations with past theorists.

An author who inaugurates a scientific revolution does not do it all at once in a perfect way. At some points, Marx stuck to the theoretical field which he broke with at the same moment. These two sides are not clearly separated ... [They] constitute two discourses (Heinrich, 2009: 90).

These two discourses have not always been acknowledged. Marx's critique of political economy was subject to almost a century of reading which privileged certain elements of its content at the expense of the question raised over form. In thought of the Second International, Marx's critique of categories, his accentuation of social forms and fetishism played no important role (ibid: 72). The influence of this orthodox reading is in some respects understandable, though mistaken. Considered either in a piecemeal or thematic way, or as a completed science, Marx's critique of political economy may appear as a conceptual reappraisal of classical economy which breaks with the tradition only insofar as proletarian activity at the point of production is taken into account. It is true that the classical school did not deal with labour adequately, despite their discovery of its value-creating function. But this approach underplays the significance and scope of the project of the critique of political economy, devaluing Marx's intention to criticise the categorical presuppositions of an entire branch of knowledge (Heinrich, 2013: 33). Socialism is not understood as the antithesis to political economy (Marx, 1973: 884), but as its culmination. It thereby sees political economy, rectified to a proletarian perspective by Marx, as an instrument by which the supposed rational conclusion of capitalismsocialismwill be realised (Bonefeld, 2014: 34]. In this regard it is worth restating Heinrich's basic observation that Capital did

not have, as a subtitle, 'A new System of Socialist Political Economy', but 'A Critique of Political Economy' (2009: 72). The remainder of this text attempts to summate the critique, examine its object, and go some of the way to address those neglected elements outlined by Heinrich in relation to classical theory itself.

Whereas political economy establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original and definitive human form (Walton and Gamble, 1972: 170), Marx simultaneously humanises classical political economy and could rid the [Hegelian] dialectical philosophy of its mystical enclosure (Dunayevskaya, 1978: 85). The former is performed through his recognition of the historical specificity of the categories of classical bourgeois economy, that is, the social, human character of economic forms. This humanist sentiment is echoed by E.P. Thompson in the preface to his magnum opus: I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships (1980: 8). The foundations of the critique are evident from Marx's humanist and economic studies of 1844, in dialogue the classical political economy, which he argues conceals the estrangement in the nature of labour by ignoring the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production (1992: 325). This theme is carried into his later work: political economy does not deal with the concrete, historically specific character of capitalist production, but rather, as Marx writes of Smith, takes the external phenomena of life, as they seem and appear and merely describes, catalogues, recounts and arranges them under formal definitions (1969b: 165). Consequently all previous economists share the error of examining surplus value not as such, in its pure form, but in the particular forms of profit and rent (1969a: 40). He credits this as one of his two breakthroughs:

The best points in my book are: (1) the double character of labour, according to whether it is expressed in the use value or exchange value (all understanding depends upon this, it is emphasised immediately in the first chapter); (2) the treatment of surplus value independently of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent etc. (1934: 226-27).

Ricardo never concerns himself with the origin of surplus-value. He treats it as an entity inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and in his eyes the latter is the natural form of social production (Marx, 1976: 651). He simply answers that this is how matters are in capitalist production (1969b: 397); for it is simply a fact that the value of the product is greater than the value of the wages (ibid: 406). Ricardo's error is emblematic on the one hand of the deficiencies in his value theory, and of a transhistorical treatment of nature on the other. The intersection of these two sites of contestationvalue theory and historical specificityis what distinguishes Marx's methodology from that of the classical school.

Abstract labour, money and the production of value.

Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely,

and has uncovered the content concealed within this form (Marx, 1976: 173-174). This incompletely uncovered content is the interrelationship of labour, time expended and value. Whereas Smith confuses the measure of value as the immanent measure which at the same time forms the substance of value, with the measure of value in the sense that money is called a measure of value (1969a: 150), Ricardo neatly sets forth the determination of the value of commodities by labour-time (1981: 60). A form of this position is reproduced by Marx: the value of a commodity varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labour which finds its realisation within the commodity (1976: 131); and with the following pivotal caveat: [w]hat exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is...the labour-time socially necessary for its production (ibid: 129). Ricardo is misled by his conviction of the determination of value: where he discusses the productivity of labour, he seeks in it not the cause of the existence of surplus-value, but the cause that determines the magnitude of that value (ibid: 651). Crucially, he does not examine the formthe peculiar characteristic of labour that creates exchange value or manifests itself in exchange valuesthe nature of this labour (Marx, 1969b: 164). Thus the fundamental shortcoming of classical bourgeois economy is the explicit in difference between Ricardo and Marx's concept of the determination of value: it does not contend the social and historical character of value-creating labour. The failure investigate...the specific form of labour manifest as the common element of commodities means that classical political economy cannot deal with the form which value takes under conditions of capitalist production (Marx, cited in Bonefeld, 2010: 264). Walton and Gamble have suggested that Marx himself was in no doubt that his success in removing the objections to Ricardo's labour theory of value was the main achievement in Capital (1972: 179). Though it certainly forms the analytical starting point for Marx's critique of political economy, this view is mistaken insofar as it sees the function of the critique as removing the objections to the classical bourgeois labour theory of value, when in fact it goes beyond mere revision.

Marx develops an historical account of value through analysis of its creation. Its prerequisite is the dual-character of labour (1976: 131-137). He sees this as the whole secret of the critical conception (1934: 232). Its two aspects are concrete labour, productive activity which creates use-values; and abstract labour: it is the quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that [the expenditure of labour-power] forms the value of commodities (1976: 137). Abstract labour is brought about by the universal alienation of individual labour (Marx, cited by Rubin, 1978: 117). This duality corresponds to the double-character of commodities, that is, entities which are at the same time objects of utility and bearers of value (Marx, 1976: 138). As a result, the commodity in embryo carries all the contradictions of capitalism precisely because of the contradictory nature of labour (Dunayevskaya, 1964: 85). Classical political economy does not make the distinction between labour as it appears in the value of a product, and the same labour as it appears in the product's use-value (Marx, 1976: 173, fn. 33). Subsequently it does not occur to the economists that a purely quantitative distinction between the kinds of labour presupposes their qualitative unity or

equality, and therefore their reduction to abstract human labour (ibid). Despite uncovering the source of value, the classical school could not comprehend its homogeneous character. The orthodox Marxist tradition reproduces similar mistakes in relation to abstract labour. Its championing of labour as the sole conscious organising principle of socialism goes is only possible as a conclusion of an understanding of value as something imposed by the private ownership of the means of production, without underlying critique of this form, andmost akin to the classical theoristswithout recognition of the social and historical transience of abstract labour (Endnotes, 2010). This lends itself to a physiological understanding of abstract labour which cannot be reconciled with the historical character of the value it creates (Rubin, cited in Bonefeld, 2010: 258). These tendencies overlook Marx's insistence that the labour which posits exchange value is a specific social form of labour, situated in commodity production, a historically peculiar social form (cited by Rubin, 1978: 121). As Rubin says, labour only assumes the character of abstract labour with the development of exchange (1978: 124). Abstract labour occurs in the direct production process and is consummated in exchange (ibid: 125; Heinrich, 2013: 50). The reduction of various concrete private acts of labour to this abstraction is only carried out through exchange, which in fact equates different products of different acts of labour with one another (Marx, cited in Heinrich, 2013: 50).1 Through this process the products of labour acquire a socially uniform objectivity as values (Marx, 1976: 166). Further, Marx states that equality between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract (ibid: 166). In this way the process of abstraction is the equation of particular labours into a homogeneous form of value. But its relation is dependent on the form and process of capitalist exchange. Earlier it was noted that Marx specifically criticised how Ricardo does not examine the formthe peculiar characteristic of labour that creates exchange value or manifests itself in exchange valuesthe nature of this labour (1969b: 164). The implication of this, as Marx goes on, is that he does not grasp the connection of this labour with money or that it must assume the form of money (ibid: 164). The classical tradition could not account for the existence of money other than as consequence of human natural propensity, most clearly the general disposition to truck, barter, and exchange (Smith, 1985: 121). In opposition to this, Marx associates the capitalist labour process with a necessary universal equivalent commodity, money.

Messrs. the economists have hitherto overlooked the extremely simple point that the form: 20 yards of linen = 1 coat is only the underdeveloped basis of 20 yards of linen = 2, and that therefore the simplest form of commodity, in which the value is not yet expressed as a relation to all other commodities but only as differentiated from the commodity in its own natural form, contains the whole secret of the money form and with it in a nutshell all the bourgeois forms of the product of labour (1934: 222).

This causal relationship is pivotal for Marx's understanding of commodities and money, and

1 From a revised manuscript to the first edition of Capital, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe.

contingently the process of value production, including the decisive question of the character of the labour involved. However it does not fully resolve the question of the form of value. The problem remains that the commodity- form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this (Marx, 1976: 165). In a commodity, likewise in the form of money, a social relation appears as its inherent property: 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 (ibid: 164-165). Or as Bonefeld perceives this dynamic, value is a social relationship in the form of an economic thing (2014: 37). The recognition and critique of the definite social relation between workers as the fantastic form of a relation between things constitutes Marx's decisive break from the classical school (Marx, 1976: 165).

Nature, fetish and historical form.

The problem remains: if value is not merely a quantity of expended living labour, in what terms can it be accounted for? Marx suggests that it has a phantom-like or spectral objectivity, attaining an occult quality (ibid: 128).2 This is because attempts to understand value outside of the exchange relation are hopeless: it cannot be found before its existence. The labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers (ibid: 165). However, located during the process of exchange, its character is revealed to determine the entire form of social relations. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things (ibid: 165-166). The peculiarities of the individual labour process from which value is produced are homogenised by the presupposed equivalence in exchange. It may only be realised against the backdrop of homogeneity in relation to total social labour, the precondition of the only form in which the value of a commodity can manifest itself (ibid: 128).3 As the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange (ibid: 165). In this way value only finds its realisation in the universal equivalent in its finished form: money. The collective labour of society appears...in exactly this absurd form (ibid: 169). On these grounds it has been argued that Marx pioneers a monetary rather than a labour theory of value, as in the traditional reading (Heinrich, 2013: 63). The best of the classical tradition (that is, those political economists who associate labour-time with the magnitude of value) maintain contradictory ideas about money precisely because they repeatedly treat the bourgeois form of value as the eternal

2 Spectral is Heinrichs translation.

3 Marxists Internet Archive translation.

natural form of social production (Marx, 1976: 174, fn 34). The recurrence of this presupposition is at the root of all their misconceptions.

In its economic thought, says Hobsbawm, liberalism was less inhibited...partly because the classical assumptions about the nature and natural state of man undoubtedly fitted the special situation of the market much better than the situation of humanity in general (2009: 288). Ricardo's regard for the labour of his own time as the the eternal natural form of social labour is symptomatic of this approach (Marx, cited in Bonefeld, 2010: 264). It arises from an ahistorical treatment of the temporally specific. The forms which stamp products as commodities...already possess the fixed quality of natural forms of social life before man seeks to give an account, not of their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but of their content and meaning (Marx, 1976: 168). Marxs 1858 phrasing of the same idea is complementary: classical economy supposes its categories as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded (1973: 87). This is the eternalisation of historic relations of production: the historically peculiarnamely capitalistrelations are conceived as universal, natural and transhistorical phenomena (ibid). Labour is conceived as productive activity of human beings in general, by which they mediate the material metabolism with nature, divested...of every social form and determinate character (Marx, cited in Bonefeld, 2010: 264). Labour is stripped of its social character and treated solely as a category of production. Their account performs a reductive act upon socially constituted relations. The protagonists of the classical economists' act are cast from an imagined state of nature based on early bourgeois development, where the possibility of history beyond this state is precluded, and pre-capitalist forms largely characterised in relation to a supposed natural course of opulence (Smith, 1985: 479-484). In this respect, writes Marx in polemic contra Proudhon, the classical economists resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation of God ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any (The Poverty of Philosophy, cited in Marx, 1976: 175, fn 35). Classical economy comprises a school of those who obliterate all historical differences and who see in all social phenomena only bourgeois phenomena (1981: 211). This is compounded by the inconsistencies of their investigation of value, meaning that the natural, or bourgeois forms of organisation, which they recognise universally, is divorced from its actual social constitution. Marx is able to transcend these limits through analysis of the peculiar character of value in opposition to, rather than on the basis of, its form of appearance on the market.

The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity form, together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc. (1976: 174, fn 34).

Political economy necessarily overlooks these details of content, despite making its objective the investigation of the content of the forms, as opposed to the forms themselves. These rather appear to the political economists bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself (ibid: 174-175). Their conclusions are product of their mode of investigation: on one side, an analytical, predominantly abstract approach to value; on the other, an uncritical reproduction of the categories of early capitalist development. As Marx regards Smith: on the one hand he attempted to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois society...on the other, he partly tried to describe its externally apparent forms of life for the first time, to show its relations as they appear outwardly (1969b: 165). In doing so he takes the external phenomena of life, as they seem and appear and merely describes, catalogues, recounts and arranges them under formal definitions (ibid: 165). At their critical juncture, these arguments rely on a specific conception of the natural state of human beings and their institutions. For Smith, commercial society and its basis in private property is shaped by the technical division of labour and our natural disposition to truck and barter. The latter imagined, static uniformity amongst humans is an attempt to rationalise the contradictory tendencies of capital accumulation on the basis of its outward appearance. Marx points out that the form of value compelled by capitalist production appears as something apart from individual human beings, despite is actual character as a social relation of production (1981: 49). Money is not merely, as the classical theorists held, a symbolic equivalent. Its autonomous character belies its genesis in social production. [T]his perverted appearance, this prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification [...] is characteristic of all forms of labour positing exchange-value (1981: 49). This dazzling, finished form of money 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 (1976: 168-169). But as he indicates earlier in this section of Capital, this is not mere appearance the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are (ibid: 166). Or as Lukcs phrases this notion: The direct forms of appearance of social being are not, however, subjective fantasies of the brain, but moments of the real forms of existence (cited in Feenberg, 2014: 66). Commodity production entails that most labourers do not come into contact in a direct or social manner outside of the moment of exchange. Their interaction actually does exist as a social relation between material things, objects bearing value. On the other side of this, commodity production animates material objects as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own (ibid: 165). Fetishism is the label Marx ascribes to the implied impersonal, objective domination by dead, accumulated labour over the living producers (Heinrich, 2013: 75). This power relation is a direct result of the manner in which constituent members of society relate to the products of labour. When they do so as commodities, that is, under conditions of capitalist production, these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them (Marx, 1976: 167-168). The machine is the master of man, which gives rise to the fetishistic appearance of

commodities and presents the relations between men as if they were the mere exchange of things (Dunayevskaya, 1978: 19). One dimension of this power dynamic is revealed in Marx's suggestion that members of bourgeois society equate different kinds of labour at the moment of exchange without being aware of it: as a reductive act performed unconsciously (Marx, 1976: 166-267). Many proponents of orthodox, or 'scientific' Marxism replicate the myriad issues encountered by classical political economy. However instead of presenting the categories of classical economy as immanent to the social relations of commodity production, they hold up the categories of 'Marxist political economy'. The critique of categories evident in the 1859 Contribution and Capital fall into the backdrop. In structuralist Marxism, capitalist social relations are considered to manifest a historically specific anatomy of some general economic laws of history (Bonefeld, 2014: 41). This produces the view that capitalist development occurs within the framework of its general laws, and the critique of political economy derobes the capitalist mode of functioning within these general economic laws (Hirsch, cited in ibid: 29). This develops a theory of production, rather than a critique of it. Such a conception relies upon the assertion that the social form of each mode of production throughout history can be traced back to some basis in nature. Similarly, the debate amongst orthodox interpretations focuses on content rather than form: the critique of economic nature leads to a spellbound scholarly dispute about the precise meaning of reified things (ibid: 37). Notably, Althusser and Balibar recommend skipping the section of Capital vol. I on the 'Fetishism of Commodities' (ibid: 37); likewise Mandel makes no mention of it in his discussion of 'The Method of Capital' (Marx 1976, pp. 17-25). Bonefeld has suggested this is consequence of their reading of Marx being unable to account for the critique of nature inherent to this pillar of Marx's perspective (2014: 28-40). These readings lend themselves to particular political conclusions, most prominently that labour, as a class, occupies a unique, privileged position to analyse capitalist society, or that to do so 'the standpoint of the working class' must be adopted. This misinterprets the agency of the proletariat and substitutes it for a form of theology which neglects the ways in which labour is equally susceptible and constant subject to the rationality produced by the commodity fetish. There is an inherent problem, too, following this logic, in how, Marx may be (mis)read to justify the project of 'actually existing socialism' within a framework of commodity production, albeit state-managed. These are but a number of the incorrect conclusions of a focus on content over form, bearing striking resemblance to the errors of the classical school. Notable, too, is the continuity between the politics of this reductive reception of Marx and the revision of theoretical economic teaching in the Soviet Union: the detail of the analysis of the commodity form was omitted from the official curriculum by Stalin in 1943 (Dunayevskaya, 1978: 19).

The fetishes of classical theory.

Above it was noted how classical economics takes shape throughout the period of the

industrial revolution, with its most prominent exponents, Smith and Ricardo, at either end of its most intense period of formal subsumption. The character of their doctrine reflects the ascendant prejudices and innovations of its Georgian and Enlightenment provenance: an association of bourgeois society with natural order; of such an order with progress; and an increasing understanding of the interconnectedness of value and labour, and of productivity and specialisation through the division of labour. The second notion presents many difficulties, both in the thought of the bourgeois economists and amongst those who understand the classical school as an ideological mouthpiece for capital. According to Robinson: The orthodox economists, on the whole identified themselves with the system and assumed the role of its apologists... They wrote as they did because it seemed to them to be the only possible way to write, and they believed themselves to be endowed with scientific impartiality (1974: 1-2). Hobsbawm takes a divergent view, urging defence of their intellectual integrity: Let it not be supposed that the men who held such views were mere special pleaders for the vested interest of businessmen. They were men who believed, with considerable historical justification at this period,that the way forward for humanity was through capitalism (2009: 290). Both arguments are compelling in both complementary and contradictory ways. The assertion of their sincerity, against the caricature of mere special pleaders, is not at odds with their actual apologetics for capitalist development. Their self-belief is inextricably connected to their professed scientific impartiality, and the limits to how they conceived of history and their place within it. These limits are the imposition of the consequence of how as values, commodities are simply congealed quantities of human labour of the process of their creation (Marx, 1976: 141), which appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race (1976: 165). Their appearance is abstracted: value does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic (1976: 167). The genesis of the individual commodity is concealed, and its characteristics appear as objective, socio-natural properties (1976: 165). Relations appear as properties, which produces the semblance of bourgeois relations as second nature rather than historically produced (Lukcs, cited in Buck-Morss, 1977: 55). Marx conceives of the scientific character of classical theory within the terrain of class struggle: Its last great representative, Ricardo, ultimately (and consciously) made the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of nature. But with this contribution the bourgeois science of economics had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass (Marx, 1976: 96). And again:

In France and England [c. 1830] the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. From that time on, the class struggle took on more and more explicit and threatening forms, both in practice and in theory. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics. It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, in

accordance with police regulations or contrary to them. In place of disinterested inquirers there stepped hired prize-fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics (ibid: 97).

The ideological content of bourgeois economy is thus laid bare. On the basis of these traits, Lukcs develops an historical account of its emergence: Nor is it an accident that economics became an independent discipline under capitalism. Thanks to its commodity and trade arrangements, capitalist society has given the whole of economic life an identity notable for its autonomy, its cohesion and its reliance on immanent laws. This was quite unknown in earlier forms of society (1971: 231). Yet commodity production was becoming hegemonic independently of liberal ideological justification. It follows, therefore, that it must be accounted for as more than the voice of capital. Capital had its own voice, clearly articulated through through proletarian toil and bourgeois luxury. Classical economy must be considered in terms of its political cause and terms of inquiry, the battle waged between industrial capital and landed property, alongside its reproduction of the fetishes of the capitalist form of value as a manifestation of nature. According to Adorno, commodity fetishism is nothing but [a] necessary process of abstraction, which presents itself to economics as a natural process (cited in Bellofiore and Rive, 2015: 26). The political economists take these processes to be incarnations of natural social laws. Lukcs: what is known as economics is nothing but the system of forms of objectivity of real life (1971: 152). Marx argues that both workers and capitalists are related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape, which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action (1976: 187). The success of the bourgeoisie lies in the imposition of fetishised forms of life as natural. Excepting moments of acute antagonism, domination is all the working class and the bourgeoisie itself knows to be real. The latter class' investigations into value comprise a contradictory process out of which it cannot progress without the critique of form. Marx is aware of this contradiction: Ricardo's theory already serves, in exceptional cases, as a weapon with which to attack the bourgeois economic system (1976: 96), but crucially recognises its constraints. In so far as political economy is bourgeois, i.e. in so far as it views the capitalist order as the absolute and ultimate form of social production, instead of as a historically transient stage of development, it can only remain a science while the class struggle remains latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena (1976: 96). He is able to progress, not by perfecting the form of classical political economy, but through its critique. Regarding the bourgeois economists on value, their belated scientific discovery marks an epoch in the history of mankind's development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labour (1976: 167). In contradistinction to this objectivity, Capital was informed by material struggle from below: the mobilisation of the English working class for the 8-hour day and against the American Civil War, and in particular that of the Paris Communards, in wake of whom Marx reworked the section on the fetishism of the commodity form yet again

(Dunayevskaya, 1978: 18). In other words, his entire critique relies on a shift from the history of theory to the history of productive relations (ibid: 34). This shift symbolises the success of his intention to break completely with classical political economy.

References.

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