Smith, Marx and the Fetishism of the Division of Labor
How political economy naturalizes the division of labor
For today’s piece, I reworked a short response I wrote for a graduate seminar I took this year. It was discussing the division of labor as discussed by Marx and Smith, connecting it to Marx’s commodity fetishism. The piece is meant to be a taste of things I will write more extensively on in the future so I hope people enjoy it.
The Division of Labor in Smith and Marx
A major component of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is his analysis of the divison of labor and the increased specilization of work. According to Smith, the division of labor causes the “greatest improvements in the productive powers of labour,” as it allows for the further efficient production of commodities, and is therefore foundational to capitalism’s development.1 As exchange relations develop and markets grow, the division of labor specializes further as a result of more commodities being available for exchange, freeing up the potential for others to specialize, making the nation more productive and wealthy as a result.2
Setting aside the further discussion of what a capitalist division of labor entails, there is a crucial assumption in Smith that is retained in classical political economy and many economic schools today. Foundational to Smith’s analysis is the assumption that exchange relations (and as a result the division of labor) are a product of human nature. This is seen plainly in one of Smith’s most famous proclamations that there is a
certain propensity in human nature… the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.3
Smith assumes exchange and its resulting division of labor, both foundational to capitalist social relations, to be fundamentally products of human nature. This conclusion is relevant for several reasons.
First, politically, if it is true that there is in human nature this propensity, then changing these relations or going against them is like fighting a force of nature.
Second, it is not only the political implications but the actual analysis of social relations and how capitalism functions that is hurt by upholding this position. That is why Marx in Capital demonstrates how this is extremely erroneous for an analysis of capitalist social relations.
In contrast, Marx in all three volumes of Capital rejects the notion that exchange relations reflect inclinations of human nature. This common pratice of associating features of the social form of production (in this case capitalism) with the material content of things is what Marx refers to as commodity fetishism. As Marx states:
…the fetishism particular to bourgeois economics, which transforms the social, economic character that things are stamped with in the process of social production into a natural character arising from the material nature of the things (emphasize added) 4
In this case, the fetishism is presuming that the division of labor, exchange and the value commodities hold are “objective characteristics” of things themselves which are “naturally” this way due to human nature.5 Marx first outlines his theory of commodity fetishism at the end of the first chapter of volume 1. In an effort to make this short, I will not be going in depth into the first chapter, something that requires its own post in the future. However, briefly discussing the commodity-form as Marx does will show the fetishism Smith applies.
Marx explains that the commodity contains two key factors, its use-value and exchange-value. What gives a commodity use-value are the “physical properties” of the object itself that satisfy a human need.6 The use-value is both independent of the amount of labor expended to produce a commodity, and the mode of production it appears in.7 A house, a car, boat, wood, phone, food, clothes and so on are all use-values.
However, when goods become commodities under capitalism, they also develop an exchange-value. What gives a commodity exchange-value is that it can be exchanged for a certain quantity of another commodity. When it comes to use-values, there is “nothing mysterious about it” as no matter the mode of production, these objects satisfy a certain human need and remain “ordinary” sensuous things.8
Yet, when commodities develop an exchange-value they “transcend sensuousness.”9 The “mysterious character of the commodity-form,” Marx proclaims, comes from the fact that despite exchange-value reflecting the social relations of privately expended labor between people mediated through exchange, it appears as an objective characteristic of the commodities themselves, as the “socio-natural properties of these things.”10
This may sound rather academic and philosophical at first, but fetishism is a phenomenon that everyone who lives under capitalism has likely experienced, whether they realize it or not. When someone asks you what the value of something is, you often think about the exchage-value in the form of price without even thinking about it. Sure we often also think about use-value, but that is almost always together with exchange-value which seems to be just as inherently a part of objects. We act as if things just have a price and that is a normal part of the world since time immemorial, to the point at which it is argued to be a result of human nature.
Smith, through linking exchange to human nature, fetishizes exchange relations in a manner that makes commodities’ exchange-value appear as a socio-natural property of the things themselves. Marx’s method of analysis, rather than identifying the source of capitalist social relations in human nature, links them to historically contingent and material social relations. For Marx, exchange relations are not natural products of human nature, but characteristics related to the “social form” or the mode of production, in which relations of production occur.11 This means relations such as exchange-value are a product of the practices and institutions of the “social formation,” i.e., capitalist-commodity production, such as money, markets, exchange, the division of labor, competition, private property, wage-labour, and so on.12
Classical political economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in categorizing exchange as a product of human nature, fail to grasp the historical specificity of capitalism. As Marx states, Smith and Ricardo treat the “form of value [exchange-value] as something of indifference, something external to the nature of the commodity itself.”13 In other words, they treat it as something not the result of commodity relations themselves, but of human nature. This tendency towards fetishism occurs precisely because commodity-relations must develop fully before the analysis of their “content and meaning” can take place.14 By the time they become developed enough to analyze, their characteristics appear so natural to the political economists that their analysis lacks reference to its “historical character.”15 Smith’s analysis, for Marx, often correctly identifies the content and meaning of capitalist relations, but neglects to understand their historical character, thus leaving them shrouded in fetishism.
This is only meant to be a short taste of what Marx’s theory of fetishism means for the critique of political economy. However before ending, I wanted to speak to its practical importance for political struggles today.
It is all too common for liberals, conservatives and yes many socialists, to fetishize (i.e. naturalize) elements of present social relations as if they are part of human nature. Human relations are characterized prescisly by their malleability within the given historical relations of social-production. We engage with the material world to facilitate our metabolism through the production and reproduction of our social relations. This comes in a wide variety of historic forms.
Despite this, many do not realize the extent to which present elements of social relations are themselves products of historical and social factors. The way in which relations are gendered, racialized for example can be easily naturalized. Furthermore, even the most radical individuals can come to think uncritically about institutions such as money, the state, wages, profit, rent and so on.
To open ourselves to the nearly boundless potential of human social relations, we must first apply a ruthless criticism of all that exists.
Source: M.Gouldhawke
Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Elecbook Classic version 17.
Smith, 35. ,
Smith, 29.
Marx, Capital Volume 2, 303.
Marx, Capital, 164.
Marx, 125
Marx, 126 and 131.
Marx, 126.
Marx, 163.
Ibid
Marx, 165
Marx, 164
Marx, 175
Marx 174
Marx, 168