philosophy essay - georg lukacs and the consequences of commodity exchange

8/6/2019 Philosophy Essay - Georg Lukacs and the Consequences of Commodity Exchange

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Christopher Schubert

Philosophy 317 Prof. Smith

Discussion Paper 4

Georg Lukacs

Geog Lukacs and the Consequences of Commodity Exchange

I consider myself something of an economic philosopher, so the selection from Georg Lukacs

hit home particularly strongly. I have always held a predisposition towards the analysis of capitalism by

Marx. When Georg Lukacs was writing this, I am not sure that he could possibly have imagined the full

realized consequences for the rest of this century that capitalism would have, but in terms of structure

of commodity exchange's effects, both objectively and subjectively, on human society and relations he

appears to be spot on.

First let me deal with the first discussion question. Are the consequences he articulates intrinsic

to any and all societies that exchange commodities? Quite clearly, not in the least. The insights and

consequences are unique to our age, as he openly articulates. Lukacs quotes Marx to make this point.

Marx states that, in the beginning production was simply for the creation of use-values, meaning as best

as I can imagine to be stuffs that are to be used directly by the humans that create them, and only this

reason. However, as the production exceeds what can be consumed by a localized group of producers

do these use-values become transformed into exchange values. It was on the borders of human relations

and activities that commodities were created, for a brief moment, as a conduit between two separate

groups, a physical representation of their natural and organic relationship. From this follows the rise of

merchants who facilitate this exchange, while at the same time impose a subjective interpretation to

these relations and establish formal commodity exchange, one based upon relative quantitative

equivalencies.

For the great portion of human history the process never progressed much further past this. The

natural and organic aspects of production prevented a further splintering of a good's intrinsic use-value


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and the value it had as a commodity to be exchanged. Lukacs says, ...the personal nature of economic

relations was still understood clearly on occasion at the start of capitalistic development, but as the

process advanced and forms became more complex and less direct, it became increasingly difficult and

rare to find anyone penetrating the veil of reification.

By reification he means the process by which a tangible good, a physical thing, comes to

represent a relation between people. This concept comes from Marx who had already explored the way

that all activity in a capitalistic society becomes measurable in terms of quantifiable exchange. This

erodes the value placed upon human work, and because it fails to understand a human's relationship to

its work, leads to a debasement of human beings as calculable cogs in a machine that is fundamentally

beyond their control or capacity to impact. Through the processes of reification, we come to define our

relationships between each other as mere physical objects that are in fact a grotesque shadow of those

relations.

This process reaches a critical point in the modern capitalist era in what Lukacs called

commodity fetishism. Through the principle of rationality, that is: concerned with what is and can be

calculated, the production and work process becomes more and more arbitrary as it is a continued

combination of specialized systems; where every aspect of production is broken down and studied and

built to achieve outcomes that are determined by pure calculation and which must therefore seem to be

arbitrarily connected with each other. This requires the view of the human as reduced being reduced to

labor hours provided, even to the worker himself. He comes to define his role in society as the free

owner of the universal commodity upon which all other commodities are based and acts accordingly in

society. Thus the dominance of commodity exchange is realized and fetishism achieved.

One need only look to the current jobs debate surrounding the state of the economy. The

capitalistic economic system seems to have pervaded the psyche so extensively that the principal

question of our group interactions is to somehow preserve the commodity market exchange of the

amount of labor-hours being supplied and the amount that firms demand. Hereto you can see the


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continued force of rationalization and specialization as many jobs are being lost and eliminated due to a

ravenous pursuit of efficiency by any and all means of production, human labor being only one small

part of that overall picture.

philosophy essay - georg lukacs and the consequences of commodity exchange

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