The Philosophy of Marx by Etienne Balibar

Author:Etienne Balibar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

Exchange and obligation: the symbolic in Marx

Lukács’s extrapolation is both brilliant and important in its own right, but it has the drawback of totally isolating the description of fetishism from its theoretical context in Capital. Now, that context suggests a quite different type of interpretation, centred on questions of law and money and thus leading on to what we would today call the analysis of symbolic structures (a terminology Marx could not have used, but in which it is possible to make explicit what is at stake in his description of the double language ‘spoken’ by the world of commodities: the language of equivalence and measurement, given formal expression in the monetary sign, and the language of obligation and contract, formally expressed in law). This is the second philosophical legacy to which I have referred.

As part of that legacy, I shall mention two works here which are very different, both in their intentions and the conditions in which they were written. The first of these is the book Law and Marxism: A General Theory by the Soviet legal theorist, E. B. Pashukanis (who advocated the ‘withering away of the State’ and was executed during the Stalinist terror). This was published in 1924 and hence almost at the same time as Lukács’s work.24 It is an extraordinarily interesting study because Pashukanis starts out from the Marxian analysis of the value-form and uses this to conduct an exactly symmetrical analysis of the constitution of the ‘legal subject’ in bourgeois-civil society. (For Pashukanis, who subscribes here to some extent to the tradition of natural right against juridical positivism, for which every legal norm is laid down by the State, the foundation of the juridical edifice is private law, which can precisely be regarded as having parallels with commodity circulation.) Just as individual commodities seem by nature to be bearers of value, so individuals engaged in exchange seem by nature to be bearers of will and subjectivity. Just as there is an economic fetishism of things, so there is a juridical fetishism of persons, and in reality these are one and the same thing because the contract is the other side of the exchange and each is presupposed by the other. The world lived and perceived on the basis of the expression of value is, in reality, an economico-juridical world (Marx had pointed this out and it was, indeed, what was at stake in his critical re-reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the effects of which are present throughout the text of Capital).

More recent analyses, particularly those of Jean-Joseph Goux, allow us to make this point more clearly.25 The structure common to economic and to juridical (and moral) fetishism is generalized equivalence, which abstractly and equally subjects individuals to the form of a circulation (circulation of values, circulation of obligations). It supposes a code or a measure – both materialized and idealized – before which ‘particularity’, individual need, must yield. It is simply that, in the one case, individuality is exteriorized, becoming an object

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