However, in the Depths

In present bourgeois society as a whole, this positing of prices and the circulation etc. appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear. It is forgotten, on one side, that the presupposition of exchange value, as the objective basis of the whole of the system of production already in itself implies compulsion over the individual, since his immediate product is not a product for him, but only becomes such in the social process, and since it must take on this general but nevertheless external form; and that the individual has an existence only as a producer of exchange value . . . that he is therefore entirely determined by society, that this further presupposes a division of labour etc., in which the individual is already posited in relations other than that of mere exchanger. That therefore this presupposition by no means arises either out of the individual’s will or out of the immediate nature of the individual, but that it is, rather, historical, and posits the individual as already determined by society. • • • What is overlooked, finally, is that already these simple forms of exchange value and of money latently contain the opposition between labor and capital. 9 "

The essential terms here are “determined,” “external form,” and, most significantly, “as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths, entirely different processes go on.” What is hereby indicated is not that the previous formal discussion is annulled but that, in the Hegelian sense, it is transcended, incorporated into the next level of development. Therefore, the mode of the previous analysis must be recast so that the reciprocal positing of individuals as means and ends, the discrimination between general motive and self-interest, the dialectic between equality and indifference, and participation of indviduals in their subordination to their own needs—that this whole system is now comprehended as compulsion over the individual, determination by society, and as a system wholly beyond individual control. 1 his alienated modality extends also to a striking passage in which Marx, on the ground of a lofty speculation regarding the possibilities of human development

under socialism, looks down upon the corruption of capitalist prehistory:

In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces . . . the full development of human mastery . . . the active working out of. . . creative potentialities . . . the development of all human powers as such the end in itself.... In bourgeois economics—and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds—this complete working-out of the human content appears as a complete emptying-out, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing-down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end [emphasis added]. 31

“Behind one's back” and “in the depths” this fateful contradiction reasserts itself: on the one side the emptied-out individual, and on the other the objective alienation of “overpower objects.”

We have now reached a critical point in Marx’s argument, and I should like to focus its primary relevance for our discussion. Marx’s analysis of formal exchange relations on the one hand, and their inversion in the depths of society, on the other, indicate how the actions of individuals are captured and turned against their will; how, in other words, consequences are severed from intentions and appropriated by the capitalist class.

The first instance of the discrepancy occurs on the level of formal exchange relations, where “the common interest which appears as the motive of the act as a whole is ... not the motive, but rather proceeds . . . behind the back ... of one individual’s interest in opposition to that of the other.” I understand this claim to mean that individual interests are constituted by the structure of the system that defines them and that this structure is reproduced in the course of pursuing individual ends. But the second discrepancy takes us past the formal exchange relationship “which appears as the surface process, beneath which, however, in the depths entirely different processes go on, in which this apparent individual equality and liberty disappear."

Now the fact that individuals’ private actions dialectically constitute the social structure of dependence manifests itself concietely as the “complete emptying out of these individuals under the domination of “total alienation.” The abstract, formal discrepancy between intention and consequence reveals itself concretely as the dominance of external compulsion over the socially atomized individual. We have thereby reached that aspect of Marx’s analysis that is the counterpart to the Freudian unconscious, for both can be described analogously as operating behind one’s back, in the depths, through the dominance of overpowering objects. Nor is this convergence an artificial imposition; rather, it represents the agreement noted in the first chapter, that individual life

is the manifestation of powerful forces that cannot be adequately represented in consciousness.

This development in the argument requires that we return to the original question of the relationship between essential structures and phenomenological forms. How, precisely, do these processes, which operate behind our backs and in our depths, reveal and obscure themselves through the presented categories of lived experience? What is the relationship between structure and experience? In the writings of Maurice Godelier there is an analysis which through its insight and error can be used to advance our understanding. The basic issue is what constitutes a social structure.

What both structuralists and Marxists reject are the empiricist definitions of what constitutes a social structure. For Radcliffe-Brown and Nadel, a social structure is an aspect of reality itself; it is order, the ordering of the visible relations between men, an ordering that explains the logic of the complementariness of these visible relations.

For Marx ... a structure is not a reality that is directly visible, and so directly observable, but a level of reality that exists beyond the visible relations between men, and the functioning of which constitutes the underlying logic of the system, the subjacent order by which the apparent order is to be explained. 32

Godelier seems to me correct in arguing as he does against the empiricist account of structure. Structure, which is defined as “visible relations,” is irrelevant to the primary features of contemporary social life, alienation, and ideological mystification. There is some distinction between what occurs behind one’s back and before one’s eyes that is inexpungable. But Godelier seems to me fundamentally mistaken in the view he himself espouses and attributes to Marx—that structure exists beyond visible relations, or, as Godelier puts it alternatively, “that what is visible is a reality concealing another, deeper reality, which is hidden and the discovery of which is the very purpose of scientific cognition.” 33

Once reality is placed totally beyond and out of view of lived experience it becomes impossible to locate structure, to understand how it manifests itself in experience, why experience bears the deep structural imprint, or how structure is reproduced. Such a perspective leads Godelier inevitably to the implausible claim that “capacities are therefore the objective properties of the structures, which do not depend on the individual members of the society and of which the individual is, for the most part, unconscious” (emphasis added). 34 The objectionable aspect of this account is not that individuals are unconscious of various objective properties of social structures but that the structure is held to exist independently of its individual members. Such a dichotomization between structure and individual, and between reality and appearance, leads to a reification of social structure which has remarkable similarities to the

Hegelian “geist” that Marx ridculed for its extraordinary power to act independently of its human manifestations. 35 Nor do I accept the “charitable” interpretation of Godelier which might claim that he does not intend to divorce structure from individuals but only from speed ic individuals. For the further conclusions Godelier proceeds to draw are, we shall see, incompatible with this moderate reading.

I certainly have no quarrel with the notion that individuals systematically misconstrue their social existence nor with the contention that the deep structures ol the social world exist beneath the awareness of ordinary consciousness and exert a compelling influence upon everyday practice and consciousness. What I believe is fundamentally mistaken in Godelier’s account is the separation of structure from lived, individual conscious existence. A structure that does not “depend on the individual members of the society" is simply not a social structure. It may be the Platonic form of a social structure, the reified “spirit” of a social structure, or the logical essence of a social structure. But society, as an ensemble of social relations,” is at least the ensemble of individuals who constitute these social relations. The structuralist account continually obliterates the fact that Marx’s theory of ideology insists not only upon the inversion of reality by appearance, but, simultaneously, upon its reflection.

Even the idea of inversion does not argue in behalf of independent structures. Godelier cites on his behalf the following passage from Marx:

The final pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface in their real existence and consequently in the conceptions by which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to understand them, is very much different from, and indeed quite the reverse, of their inner but concealed essential patterns and the conception corresponding to it. 36

The fact that there are inner, essential relations concealed to the agents of these relations, cannot justify a claim to the independence of these patterns from the agents. Godelier illegitimately equates the meaning of these terms. The Freudian unconscious is an obvious alternative. In fact, the notion of reversal undermines Godelier’s case completely, because only human beings are capable of reversal. 37 Only human beings are capable of error or illusion, which obviously have no existence independent of human mentality. Search as one will, it is impossible to locate “appearances,” “illusions,” “reversals, or mystifications ot any sort independent of mind. Both “seeing and concealing aie human achievements.

Godelier’s confusion on this point leads to the reductio ad absurdum of his position:

The fetishizing of commodities is not the effect of the alienation of consciousness but the effect in and for consciousness of the disguising of social

relations in and behind their appearances. Now these appearances are the necessary point of departure of the representations of their economic relations that individuals spontaneously form for themselves. Such images thus constitute a more or less coherent body ot illusory beliefs concerning the social reality within which these individuals live, and serve them as means of acting within and upon this social reality. 38

Consequently, it is not man who deceives himself over reality, it is reality which is deceiving him, by inevitably appearing in a form which conceals and presents itself the wrong way up to the spontaneous consciousness of people living in the commercial world. 39

Now, since the fetishism of commodities, and, I presume, the fetishism of consciousness as a whole, has its foundation not in consciousness, but “outside it, in the objective reality of social relations,” 40 all we need do to change these social relations is to locate their objective reality and overturn it. But were to look! Where is this realm which lies behind and outside of consciousness? In the unconscious of individuals? But Godelier does not claim that man unconsciously deceives himself. Again, he makes the extreme claim that reality deceives man. Perhaps, but we are given no direction as to how this realm is to be located or conceived. The whole conception is fundamentally unintelligible.

Godelier’s difficulty stems from a dualism of reality and appearance, disguising social relations and disguised consciousness. But what is this underlying social reality, stripped of consciousness, which has the pow'er to disguise itself in the consciousness of human beings? The heart of the matter is this: Shorn of consciousness, the world is devoid of human beings, and without a human population we can attach no sense to the “underlying social reality.” Nor can we understand how reality deceives us, nor howappearances, which are “spontaneously” formed, come to constitute a “more or less coherent body of illusory beliefs,” nor, even more starkly, how these illusions can serve us “as means of acting w ithin and upon this social reality.” The initial division is entirely too stark, too dichotomized, for any dialectic between these realms to become intelligible.

Thus far I have not argued whether Godelier is correct in claiming Marx as an advocate of this theory of social structures. As I will shortly contend, it is not possible to find a consistent, developed theory in Marx. But it is suggestive that Marx is cited by Godelier to prove that a commodity is “complex and obscure,” for the reason that “social labour does not appear as such.” 41 And the following passage from Marx is offered in evidence:

The existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. 42

My own understanding is that this passage ought to be taken to contradict the entire thrust of Godelier’s argument, because, for Marx, the fetishism of commodities which rests on the “social relations between men,” is a resultant of human labor, which Marx conceives as follows:

Labor is ... a process ... in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. . . . We presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. . . . But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. . . . He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. 43

It is the structure of labor, not the structure behind it, that is crucial in Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities and of his entire account of the reality of exploitation and surplus value: labor stamped as conscious, intentional, and purposeful.

Unfortunately, Marx is not always so clear. These are numerous statements supporting either a theory of structure as independent of human activity on the one hand, or a theory of structure as embodied human activity on the other. Marx often writes in the following mode:

Money in its final, completed character now appears in all directions as a contradiction, a contradiction which dissolves itself, drives toward its own dissolution [emphasis added]. 44

Capital as such creates a specific surplus value because it cannot create an infinite one all at once; but it is the constant movement to create more of the same [emphasis added]. 45

The more developed capital already is . . . the more terribly must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller proportions [emphasis added]. 46

We perceive, at first sight, the deficiencies of the elementary form of value: it is a mere germ, which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the Price-form [emphasis added]. 4 '

Over and over Marx appears to attribute agency to concepts and structures, and to lay himself open to precisely that form of acrid saicasm he employed against the reifications of the Hegelian dialectic, furthermore, in a less technical vein, Marx himself, in the first pieface to Capital, insists that

here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and classinterests. My stand-point, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains. 48

And, as we noted in the first chapter of this work, Marx approvingly cites a Russian reviewer who paraphrases Marx’s position in the following terms:

Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence ... a critical inquiry whose subject matter . . . can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness [emphasis added]. 49

One could argue the point of these passages but their prima facie meaning is clear. However, there is another modality in Marx’s presentation:

It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to the guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them. In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects [emphasis added]. 50

In Ricardo’s works the analysis is already so far advanced that

the independent material form of wealth disappears and wealth is shown to be simply the activity of men. Everything which is not the result of human activity, of labour, is nature and, as such, is not social wealth. The phantom of the world of goods fades away and it is seen to be simply a continually disappearing and continually reproduced objectivisation of human labour. All solid material wealth is only transitory materialisation of social labour, crystallization of the production process whose measure is time, the measure of movement itself. 51

When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product, etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. . . and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create [emphasis added]. 52

And as if in direct reply to the passages we previously cited as evidence for independent structures, Marx writes in the Grundrisse:

It will be necessary later, before this question is dropped, to correct the idealist manner of its presentation, which makes it seem as if it were merely a matter of conceptual determinations and of the dialectic of these concepts. Above all in the case

of the phrase: product (or activity) becomes commodity; commodity, exchange value; exchange value, money [emphasis added]. 53

Of course, it is Marx’s second perspective that is most congenial to the argument I am here presenting. I believe that his “idealist manner” of presentation was a shorthand, which, as he noted, had finally to be translated into the set of embodied meanings by which human beings carried the system of “conceptual determinations” with them through die social world. But it is less important to discover what Marx meant than to indicate what he should have meant. Since the interpretation of structure as independent of human activity seems clearly inadequate, we are either thrown back upon the vulgar empiricist account of structure as manifest behavior, or we are required to illucidate some third position. And such a position is available. It is suggested by our earlier analysis of the discrepancy between intention and practice, and by Marx’s reference to the replacement of “fixed forms by “individuals in mutual relationships.”