Vasilis Grollios. Democracy and Commodity Fetishism in Marx: A Response to Antonio Callari and David Ruccio.

The discussion of dialectics and materialism in Karl Marxs political philosophy is underdeveloped in the literature. Research in this area is usually conducted by social scientists rather than by political philosophers. This is not in question and is easily explained by the fact that most contemporary political philosophers work within a broadly liberal framework. In view of this, I welcome the contribution of Antonio Callari and David Ruccio on the possible relationship between commodity fetishism and democracy in Marxs philosophy (Callari and Ruccio, 2010). In this paper, I advance an argument that is in contrast to that of Callari and Ruccio in order to further the debate on this important subject. Callari and Ruccios main aim is to reconceptualize economy and society as open spaces (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 404) so as to reject the modernist reduction of social processes and forms of consciousness to a uniform structure of economic relations (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 405). According to their interpretation, if the space of social being is determined and described by the changing forms of laboring activity, we attain only a unidimensional understanding of social being and must necessarily adopt a deterministic conception of socialism (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 408). The authors advocacy of a multidimensional understanding of social being leads them to interpret materiality as referring not to the process of production as such, but to thehistoricalspecificity of all forms of social being (Callari
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and Ruccio 2010, 409). Moreover, they assert that it is not only social space that must be understood multidimensionally, but also individual agents themselves since Marx refused to reduce concrete individuals to the unidimensional space of commodity and class relations (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 411). A crucial outcome of their argument is that democracy is the manifestation of the desire to construct society as an open space rather than as a given, uniform structure. They regard this conception of democracy as an open space as implicitly present in Marxs argument on commodity fetishism (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 415). Callari and Ruccio warn us against the danger of having a uniform consciousness, which they argue naturally results from conceiving social being as a uniform space. In conclusion, the gist of their argument is that Marxs conception of democracy enables us to obtain a multidimensional view of social being and, consequently, to perceive the homogenizing effects of commodity fetishism embedded in the bourgeois concept. The connection between commodity fetishism and democracy is too complex and extensive a question to be analyzed in detail here. Since I have developed my argument on democracy in Marx elsewhere (Grollios, 2011), I will refer here only to the main points of difference that I have with Callari and Ruccios argument. There is a broader question that is not addressed in their paper but is inextricably connected to their analysis: what is the distinctive characteristic of the capitalist mode of production? Is it not a system that exploits the majority of the population to the advantage of a small minority? Is it not the case that

most people are forced to sell their labor power, which is in turn transformed into a commodity? If this is so, then the most important characteristic of capitalism is the form that laboring activity takes. What is capital if it is not the distorted form that the most important relation in society the way people interact with each other and with nature in order to satisfy their basic needs (labor) takes? I believe that Callari and Ruccios approach has great difficulty responding to these questions. If, as they argue, laboring activity is not the most important relation in society, then we might be satisfied with a system that perpetuates exploitation, injustice, and continues to perceive workers as personifications of economic categories while promoting freedom in other dimensions of the multidimensional social being. I am not implying, however, that as Marxists we should focus our attention solely on the conditions of labor. Rather, my point is that since basic social needs are satisfied through labor, this relation has the greatest strategic importance in society. This explains why working-class struggle is the most efficient and important means by which to promote democracy in a capitalist framework, although it is not the only one. The different understanding that Callari and Ruccio have about the above-mentioned approach, which has its origin in critical theory, explains the surprising omission of dialectics from their analysis. This omission in turn explains the different view that I hold as far as materiality is concerned. Callari and Ruccios position is in fact closer to that of liberal philosophers insofar as a large part of liberal political theory also attempts to found its arguments on historically specific forms rather than a dialectical treatment of materiality. I

maintain instead that materiality is not limited to historically specific forms of social being. Materialism in Marx is not, as most of Marxist scholars believe, merely an epistemological theory underlining the importance of Matter to that of Ideas. Rather, materialism denotes the ad hominem critique, which reveals the true content of different forms and thus dilutes all dogma and fetishes. The way in which people come to terms with each other and with nature in order to satisfy their most basic needs in the capitalist system takes many forms, such as representative democracy in its bourgeois version, the state, and money. In order to find out the true nature of these forms, we must penetrate their appearance and identify their essence. How is this achieved according to Marxist philosophy? By thinking materialistically, using the ad hominem critique, we should endeavor to find the essence of these forms in their social constitution by focusing on the conditions of social life endangered by societys current form. This is the only way in which materialism can be connected to Marxs social theory, a connection that is not clear in Callari and Ruccios argument because their theory does not, and cannot, connect materialism to dialectics. The best summary of materialism is Marxs eighth thesis on Feuerbach. Here, Marx states that the categories of analysis should not simply be connected to the social but to human practice. The social is a vague notion and is unable to portray the rich meaning of Marxs phrase. Marx wishes to stress the dynamic character of human practice, the fact that the form of this practice (that is, human cooperation) in the capitalist mode of production takes the form of capital, which is an inherently contradictory relationship

since it is constituted by two elements that unavoidably oppose each other, the capitalist and the worker. Thinking in terms of dialectical materialism involves trying to identify the essence of the thing under consideration, to understand what the thing is in itself. It means that we try to bring to light the real content of each social form, whatever this might be state, representative democracy in its bourgeois form, value as money. The real content of each form is nothing other than the way in which the most important of human relations, labor, is constructed. Thus, all social forms are the expression of class struggle, of exploitation. Dialectical materialism reveals that social forms are products of the perverted form of our doing, of our everyday activity. Thus, since the antagonism between capital and labor is in the essence of the social form, in the thing itself, contradiction is also in the essence of the social form and permeates our existence. The logic of the topsy-turvy world is therefore dialectical since contradiction is in the essence of the inverted social forms. As personifications of economic categories, we live under the domination of these inverted, distorted forms that express the perverted form that our doing must take in order to continuously beget money from money, that is to say, abstract labor. Thus, materialisms ad hominem critique helps us understand that in the capitalist system, our doing is restricted due to the bonds of abstract labor. The transformation of doing in our everyday lives into abstract labor comprises the content of different fetishes, the content of the aforementioned different social forms. Therefore, although economic categories and social forms appear to have a life of their own, they are in fact just manifestations of our doing.

Since Callari and Ruccios argument is essentially non-materialistic in nature, it cannot reveal the true human content of the aforementioned forms. For them, social relations are not forms of an underlying essence that is contradictory in nature, and social forms are not perverted forms of our doing. Thus, they cannot uphold Marxs understanding of our world as upside down, perverted. For them, as well for the whole Althusserian tradition, contradiction lies outside social forms. In my view, however, 1 contradiction lies in the essence of every form since forms in the capitalist mode of production are the appearance of our doing; that is to say, they are the reflection of the way in which we interact with each other and with nature in order to satisfy our needs. Since the means of production in capitalism are owned by individuals, by capitalists, the workers cannot control the most basic relation in society, that is, the way in which they satisfy their elementary needs. The dialectical relation between form (capital) and content (our doing) is the crux of the argument on the existence of contradiction, of the dialectical nature of our world. The non-materialistic and non-dialectical character of Callari and Ruccios Althusserian theory makes them unable to pose maybe the most important question in Marxist philosophy: why does the content take this form? This dialectic between form and content makes it clear that someone cannot be a materialistic thinker without being at the same time a dialectical one. How, then, can we return the inverted, topsy-turvy world to its feet? We can do so by refusing to subordinate our doing to the demands of
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The Open Marxism tradition has been very successful in showing the dialectic relation

between form (appearance) and content (essence). It is my view that Holloway, especially in his most recent text Crack Capitalism, has successfully shown the contradictory nature of totality.

abstract labor, that is, to money. Thus, defetishization presupposes class struggle, and this is why class struggle is vital. Callari and Ruccio contend that viewing social forms as the expression of the same relationship unavoidably leads to economic determinism. However, I do not believe that this is an accurate assessment, and since they provide no coherent argument upon which to ground this opinion, I have reason to refute it. Their position presupposes an undialectical understanding of the economic and implies that the economic is totally separate from the political, consisting only of forces of production understood only as machinery, as technological achievements. They reiterate the Althusserian concept of overdetermination, according to which everything is connected to everything. But exactly how this sea of chaotic differences will help the working class movement acquire a clearer perception of the logic of the capitalist system is doomed to remain unanswered in this approach. And if we do not have a clear idea of the logic of the capitalism system, how will we be able to oppose the values upon which this system is based and confront them with socialist values? How will the content of these values be formed? On the contrary, the critical theory tradition depicts the economic and the political, the forces and relations of production, as mediated to each other: they are separate in unity; they exist through each other; they are different forms that express the same relation the form that class struggle takes. 2 That is why this kind of Marxism is characterized as open, meaning that historical contingency defines the content of concepts.
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The best criticism of Althusserian thinking that I have encountered and one of the most

constructive analyses of the relationship between economy and politics is that by Simon Clarke (1980),

In Callari and Ruccios version of Marxism, an undesirable result of conceiving social space as uniform, as my argument does, would be to impose the same form of consciousness upon all individuals (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 416). My response to this is very simple. Is it necessary for the working class to agree on a number of political demands that it will fight for? Are we not obliged to agree, at least to some extent, on the content of the ideas that are worth fighting for today? How can class struggle be promoted if the working class movement does not reach agreement on how the contemporary capitalist system strikes a serious blow to human dignity, on how exploitation takes place today, on the content of the values that a normative Marxist political philosophy will promote? Of course, I do not propose that we must agree on everything. Nevertheless, there is a need for political thinkers to formulate a normative democratic political philosophy that enables us to obtain a more precise view of the world by penetrating its appearance all the way to its essence. In the third volume of Capital, it is wisely and clearly stressed that all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided (Marx-Engels, Capital v.3, 804). What the third volume makes explicit is that fetishism is not a phenomenon that exists alongside other phenomena in the capitalist mode of production; rather, it forms the core element of the capitalist system. In capitalism, we live under the dominance of mystified forms, the essence of which must be identified. Therefore, the role of the philosopher is to demystify, to defetishize social forms. The final aspect of Callari and Ruccios argument that shows the nonmaterialistic and non-dialectical, non-Marxian, and problematic character of

their effort is the fact that they completely separate the reinscription of society as it is and imagining society as it could be. They even admit that they have an unabashedly Marxian Utopian vision (Callari and Ruccio 2010, 405). With all due respect to the work of these researchers, I believe that this caricatures Marxs thinking. First of all, nowhere did Marx describe an imagined society or a utopian vision. He wrote no text addressing this subject. There are barely more than twenty pages scattered throughout his collected works on the shape that a future communist society might take. On the contrary, he identified the existing tendencies of his time that he supported and proposed ways in which they could be promoted. For Callari and Ruccio, this utopian vision looks beyond and exceeds the bourgeois order. This assertion, however, raises the following questions: if the seed of a future society is not inherent in an underdeveloped form in this world, where does it come from? Is it really the role of the philosopher to envision a new social order? Surely, this is the domain of science fiction writers! Rather, the starting point of philosophical criticism must be actual participation in politics, that is, in real struggles. We should be mindful here that Marx underlined that: We develop new principles for the world out of the worlds own principles (Marx 1975, 143). Adornos words should always be at the fore of a dialecticians thinking: We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things (Adorno 1973, 33); dialectical logic respects that which is to be thought the object (Adorno 1973, 141). In the negative dialectics approach, potential arises not from outside social reality, but from inside it. The untruth of identity is revealed because

the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived (Adorno 1973, 5). A residue always remains, and this is the potential that we must focus on. It is the development, the strengthening of the still undeveloped power of labor that can change the essence of society and, thus, its form (Grollios, 2011, 15). Unfortunately, therefore, I feel compelled to remind Callari and Ruccio of Marxs famous line: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they pleasebut under circumstancesgiven and transmitted from the past (Marx 1979, 103). In addition, Callari and Ruccios use of the word imagination is problematic. I cannot understand what role imagination plays in the effort described by Marx. If we are to imagine the potential in society as it is, why then should a political philosopher study social sciences? Why should we care about history or political science, for example? How could we benefit from this kind of knowledge? Maybe the use of the word imagination was an unfortunate choice by Callari and Ruccio and misrepresents their thinking. Nevertheless, they need to clarify how the potential is to be identified in their version of Marxism. In conclusion, I would like to make clear that I do not accuse Callari and Ruccio of not being good students of Marx, nor am I attempting to debate which of us is a greater devotee of Marxs thinking. Rather, I genuinely believe that their philosophy has great difficulty in clarifying the nature of the capitalist mode of production today. It is my belief that the connection between democracy and commodity fetishism takes a different form than Callari and Ruccio believe, that the democratic theory that can be found in Marxs writing has a philosophical background very different from the one that they provide,

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and that if the working class movements struggles are to have a chance of success in our time, this version of postmodern Marxism must be rejected.

References Adorno, T. 1973. Negative Dialectics, Great Britain: Routledge. Callari, A. and D. Ruccio. 2010. Rethinking Socialism: Community, Democracy, and Social Agency, Rethinking Marxism 22 (3): 403-419. Clarke, S. 1980. Althusserian Marxism, in One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture ,. S. Clarke and V. J. Seidler, K. McDonnell, K. Robins and T. Lovell (eds), 7-102. London and New York: Allison & Busby. Grollios, V. 2011. Marx and Engelss Critique of Democracy. The Materialist Character of their Concept of Autonomy, Critique 39 (1): 9-26. Holloway, J. 2010. Crack Capitalism, London and New York: Pluto Press. Marx, K. and F. Engels, 1998. Capital, v.3, Collected Works 37, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. 1975. Letters from the Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher in Marx and Engels, Collected Works 3, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, K. 1979. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works 11, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

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