The M ediation o f Nature through Society

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each other is first revealed in the exchange o f the products

o f labour, i.e. in the totaisocial process- T he pre-bourgeois
forms o f productions whose essence consists, in personal
relations o f dependence between men, are transparent
enough to prevent labour and the products o f labour from
taking on 'a fantastic form different from their reaHty .*
The products o f labour do not become commodities; T h e
fundamental form o f social labour is here the concrete,
particular, natural form o f labour,*1 and not abstract,
general and equal labour.
T he specifically M arxist discovery that historical relations
are objectified in the form o f the commodity can be misin
terpreted so as to produce the idealist conclusion that, since
M arx reduces all economic categories to relationships be
tween human beings, the world is composed o f relations and
processes and not o f bodily material things.** One o f the
main endeavours o f M arxist analysis is no doubt to pene
trate the surface o f economic reality which has hardened
into things in order to get at the essence behind it - the
social relations o f men. B u t as we have already revealed, for
M arx these relations are not something final and absolute.
It emerges from the analysis o f the process o f production,
on which rests the sphere o f circulation, that human labour
does not constitute the sole creator o f material wealth. T h e
mode o f existence o f abstract-general labour, its 'form o f
appearance,** is always the concrete-particular, and pre
supposes a natural substratum irreducible to human social
determinations. A ll social relations are mediated through
natural things, and vice versa. T hey are always relations o f
men to each other and to nature.**
Nature can neither be dissolved into the moments o f
a metaphysically conceived Spirit nor can it be reduced
to the historical modes o f its appropriation in practice.
L ukics succumbed to this neo-Hegelian actualist view in
History and Class Consciousness, in other respects important
for the history o f the interpretation o f M arx. In the course
o f his comprehensive discussion o f the philosophical aspects
o f the fetishism o f commodities, he remarks about M u x s
concept o f nature: