Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
Fetishism and the
Theory of Value
Reassessing Marx in the 21st Century
Desmond McNeill
Palgrave Studies in the History
of Economic Thought
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Desmond McNeill
Fetishism and the
Theory of Value
Reassessing Marx in the 21st Century
Desmond McNeill
Centre for Development and the Environment
University of Oslo
Oslo, Norway
ISSN 2662-6578 ISSN 2662-6586 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought
ISBN 978-3-030-56122-2 ISBN 978-3-030-56123-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56123-9
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Foreword
I first read Desmond McNeill’s book around the millennium. It struck
me then as a well written and original introduction to Marxian econom-
ics. He demonstrates forcefully that Marx’s discoveries are not well served
by insisting on a narrow economistic approach to them. Marx’s theory of
value has suffered in particular by neglect of concepts often judged by
economists to be too ‘philosophical’, ‘sociological’ or ‘immature’ when
compared with the achievements of Capital.
The notion of ‘fetish’ is central to these questions, and it takes up the
first two sections of the book’s five sections. McNeill branches out in the
next two sections to consider first the implications of treating both money
and language as the main means of human communication. This involves
a critical assessment of structural linguistics and structuralist Marxism,
both of which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time that Marx
inspired genuinely new thinking. Second, he argues that the attribution
of value just to social relations of production and labour is unnecessarily
restrictive, extending the economic discussion to exchange and consump-
tion also. The fifth section is entirely new to this edition, updating Marx’s
relevance for our century in the context of more recent Marxist-inspired
literature on the pressing global issues of environment and
financialisation.
v
vi Foreword
This book, more than most, raises the question of its own and its sub-
ject’s historicity, a question that is foreign to economic orthodoxy and is
often neglected by twentieth-century Marxists, but not of course by Marx
and Engels themselves. It started out as a London doctoral thesis in 1988.
When I first encountered it two decades ago, I could not understand why
it had not yet been published, since its scope and quality far surpass the
promotion fodder that passes for academic publication these days. In
desperation, its author resorted to private publication later. Now at last it
has found its rightful place with a serious academic publisher, and I am
delighted to introduce new readers to this exemplary work.
There are several reasons why the book might not have found an aca-
demic publisher for over three decades. The structuralist bubble burst
around 1979–1980, when the neo-liberal counter-revolution against
post-war developmental states was launched by Reagan and Thatcher.
McNeill’s thesis saw daylight just before the turning point of our world,
1989–1994—the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet bloc,
the birth of one-world capitalism, China’s and India’s emergence as global
powers, the internet going public and its transformation by the World
Wide Web. Marxism went on the backburner for two decades, losing
ground to writers like Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss. But the Lehmann
crash of 2008 launched a revival of Marx’s work, especially in Germany.
Now, on the edge of what may be the next Great (or Greater) Depression
and with internet optimism nullified by Big Tech and the banks, McNeill’s
timing may at last be right.
The current global crisis is a suitable moment to revive his intellectual
project. Moreover, the author’s integration of various literatures, includ-
ing important nineteenth-century and twentieth-century sources, is a
powerful antidote to the short-termism and parochialism of late aca-
demia. His approach has been unfashionable for too long. Some readers
may be sceptical on two more fronts. First, they may imagine that this is
a narrow specialist topic. I have already flatly contradicted this, and the
rest of the Foreword expands on this view. Second, it may not be a suit-
able student textbook. This is true. It is mainly for mature academics who
appreciate original scholarship, intellectual ambition and fine writing.
* * *
Foreword vii
In Parts I and II, McNeill starts from the rather vague notion of fetishism
that concludes the dense, synthetic introductory chapter to Capital’s first
volume. With quick, precise strokes, he establishes the word’s origins in
European encounters with the indigenous populations of the Americas
and Africa, shows how Marx translated Spanish greed for gold into a local
German obsession with private property and charts its journey in Marx’s
writings from a word to a concept, culminating in the difficult but foun-
dational idea of ‘commodity fetishism’ in Capital. It is typical of McNeill’s
vision and method that a term coined as a shaky tool for understanding
primitive religion should be made the launching pad for grasping Marxian
economics.
For he aims to show that Marx’s ideas concerning value can only be
understood through close examination of the notion that relations
between men take the fantastic form of relations between things in soci-
eties dominated by capitalism. If Marx’s concept of surplus value was, in
his own eyes and McNeill’s, his supreme theoretical achievement, the
relationship of exploitation that it highlights is easier to understand than
the theory of value that underpins it. The same might be said of the
fetishism of interest on capital in relation to commodity fetishism. The
dialectic of appearances and social reality is reproduced in Marx’s concept
of the value-form, the unity of use-value and exchange-value in the com-
modity under capitalism.
McNeill develops his argument through a triangulation of Marx with
Bailey and Hegel, two of Ricardo’s contemporaries after the Napoleonic
wars. Samuel Bailey was a ‘vulgar economist’ who anticipated the mar-
ginalist revolution to a degree. Marx shared some of Bailey’s criticisms of
Ricardo, whose value theory was the immediate precursor to his own, but
he rejected Bailey’s (and later economists’) reduction of value to price. On
the other hand, Hegel offered a precursor of Marx’s own dialectical
method, but one which (in the latter’s view, but not mine) reduced the
material world’s movement to abstract ideas. This chapter concludes the
first two sections. More than any other, it reveals McNeill’s originality
and control as an intellectual historian.
Part III draws on an analogy between the economy and language. This
entails an assessment of French structuralist Marxism, an intellectual
bubble that burst soon after it came to dominate Anglophone critical
viii Foreword
discourse in the 1970s. McNeill considers three writers: Louis Althusser
who was definitely a Marxist, Claude Lévi-Strauss who was perhaps the
structuralist and Maurice Godelier who tried to synthesise the two. He
concludes that Althusser was not a serious structuralist nor Lévi-Strauss a
Marxist, and Godelier’s familiarity with both, while promising, did not
lead to an intellectual breakthrough. He might have added that none of
these shared his passion for literate scholarship, but he does not. The
main conclusion of his extension of the argument from economics into
structuralism is that de Saussure’s foundational Course in General
Linguistics (published posthumously in 1916) is the best guide to the
questions raised here. Last, McNeill makes a strong case for treating the
commodity conceptually as a sign.
Somewhat surprisingly, Part IV suggests that Marx’s reasons for privi-
leging social relations of production and labour in his economic analysis
were not strong enough. McNeill proposes that a general theory of value
should also take in exchange and consumption as economic spheres of
equal weight. Here his argument is more indicative than convincing, but
it does point to possibly fruitful applications of the solid achievements of
the earlier sections on fetishism and the value-form. The study of exchange
leads into the rich anthropological literature on reciprocity for whom
Marcel Mauss is usually taken as the key figure, even if Richard Thurnwald
and Bronislaw Malinowski deserve more credit for launching the con-
cept. Lévi-Strauss made it the cornerstone of his own approach, while
attributing it to Mauss who hardly ever used it. McNeill draws out at
length here Marx’s sympathetic reading of Aristotle. Consumption opens
up the issues of need and use-value that were revolutionised in the 1980s
by the French sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard. In my
view, Daniel Miller’s synthesis of Hegel, Marx and Simmel, Material
Culture and Mass Consumption (1987), would be a more useful source
from nearer to home.
Part V covers a discursive literature linking Marx’s theory of nature to
theoretical work underpinning contemporary ecological politics (‘the
red-green alliance’). McNeill’s treatment of these issues is far from super-
ficial. There is, however, a tension between the Enlightenment concept of
nature as whatever has ceased becoming (the property of life) and later
usage referring to a physical environment that has not been modified by
human intervention. Our author is right to say of Marxist geographers,
Foreword ix
as well as their economist counterparts, that Marx’s theory of value plays
only a peripheral part in this literature. Drawing on the idea of ‘accumu-
lation by dispossession’ (David Harvey from Giovanni Arrighi), he turns
from Marx’s theory of rent to a sharp discussion of forces underlying the
rape of the earth in our day.
The word ‘financialisation’ is now everywhere and sports a score of dif-
ferent definitions. This final chapter on finance, as with the one on pro-
duction, exchange and consumption earlier, is a more hit-and-miss review
than the core sections addressing value theory. It is nevertheless a useful
introduction to a very diverse literature and McNeill’s judgement is gen-
erally excellent. He spans the range from Marx’s analysis of interest-
bearing capital to ‘the financialisation of everyday life’ after having
discussed speculative green finance in the previous chapter. He does not
attempt to examine the financial crisis itself, preferring to stick to this
book’s focus on the theory of value. This is wise, since addressing the
recent history of money and the debt crisis would have been a step too
far. The chapter asks if finance is productive in Marx’s sense and con-
cludes with some more thoughts on the forms of appropriation.
This book seeks to correct the prevailing tendency to draw too tight a
line around the ‘economic’ aspects of Marx’s thought by privileging quan-
titative analysis over qualitative concepts. It is above all a passionate plea
to view Marx’s economics within the framework of a social ontology to
which fetishism is the most appropriate point of entry. McNeill’s rigorous
scholarship and commitment to analytical clarity are not entirely com-
patible with his desire to update Marx through an approach that in some
respects is more eclectic than Capital and consequently differs from it in
significant respects. The resulting text, however, is an exhilarating read,
one that has pushed me to explore the contemporary relevance of Marx’s
thought with renewed enthusiasm. I hope it might have a similar effect
on some of you.
Paris, France Keith Hart
July 2020
