Mystification
Mystification
MYSTIFICATION OF THE COMMODITY
The obfuscatory dimension of human reason has been a subject of Western philosophical investigation since Aristotle, and the term mystification has been deployed in various ways to explain how deception, disguise, and dissimulation play a role in driving human behavior. It has relevance throughout the social sciences—for example, in experimental psychology, with game theory in political science and economics, and in sociological analyses of propaganda and mass action—as both a methodological approach for testing behavioral subjects and as an explanatory paradigm for rationalizing human action. For the purposes of this article, discussion is principally limited to the most developed employment of mystification as a category of theoretical analysis originating in the Marxian political economic tradition. When reference is made to mystification in Marx, one of three processes is potentially being referenced: a mystification of the consumptive and productive processes that underlie the commodity; a mystification of historical truth through the promulgation of narratives sympathetic to the structural position of dominant classes; or a philosophical mystification of the important role practice plays in driving history through the relativization of ideological positions over material reality.
MYSTIFICATION OF THE COMMODITY
Karl Marx’s discussion of commodities in volume 1, part 1, of Capital famously differentiates between use and exchange values, where
as use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity.… if we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value [in particular, the labor embodied in its construction]. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished (Marx 1990a, p. 128; emphasis supplied).
He suggests that labor time expenditures, though obscured in the exchange of its product, are calculable, while value in exchange derives socially, thus making the commodity more “mystical,” “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (p. 163). Thus through their exchange, commodities “appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race,” a process Marx regards as “fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities” (p. 165). Marx’s writings concerning fetishism have been extensively referenced and syncretized with other categories of analysis within the social sciences and humanities, particularly with respect to the concept of consumption (not only of commodities, but also of ideas, literature, art, and so on). In Marx and his more orthodox interpretation, however, fetishism’s meaning (with respect to the production commodities on the one hand and capital on the other) is quite specifically economistic.
Volume 3 of Capital contains an exhaustive cost accounting of the mystification of the productive process, in which Marx provides a very thorough econometric differentiation between profit and surplus value and differentiates his method from that of classical economics. Marx concludes the volume with a critique of the classical economic “Trinity Formula” of “capital-profit (or better still capital interest), land-ground-rent, and labour-wages,” wherein he argues that
this economic trinity [and its itinerant] connection between the components of value and wealth in general and its sources completes the mystification of the capitalist mode of production, the reification of social relations, and the immediate coalescence of the material relations of production with their historical and social specificity: the bewitched, distorted and upside-down world haunted by Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre, who are at the same time social characters and mere things (Marx 1990b, pp. 968-969).
While this cost-accounting antidote to mystification continues to enjoy some popularity among Marxist economists, the thrust of this intervention in contemporary social science can largely be found in the proliferation of commodity studies increasingly popular since the mid-1980s. There is also an extensive body of work in cultural studies, beginning most prominently with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which, rather than focusing on an accounting or analysis of production, theorizes the commodity principally in terms of consumption, through studies of media such as advertising, art, and literature. The contemporary literature on fetishization (of everything from commodity fetishization to the fetishization of the state) in fact stems very much from these particular theoretical developments.
HISTORICAL MYSTIFICATION
Capital, volume 1, part 8, on “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” presents an alternative history of the rise of capitalism focused on political economic inequities arising out of a history of exploration and conquest by the West. In it, Marx argues that the bourgeoisie has mystified the development of capitalism by reifying the birth of capitalism as a story about the saving and hard work of Europeans. “So-called primitive accumulation” is thus simply “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (1990a, p. 875). He argues here that in fact the resources accumulated in the West for its massive capitalist expansion emerged from centuries of brutally extractive and exploitative relationships with the non-West, particularly with expedition and colonialism in the Americas.
Marx’s intervention inspired a large body of work in the social sciences and economic history devoted to discussing the dominance of capitalism in world historical terms and the matrices of its relationship with the non-West, most conspicuously with the work of Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Walter Rodney. At the same time, reactions against Marx’s theory of capitalist development have emphasized its cultural dimensions, beginning notoriously with Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which argues the success of modern capitalism as having derived from the asceticism of European Protestantism and the moral values placed on saving and accumulation.
While the Marxian analysis of historical mystification provides a useful backdrop for understanding how knowledge is produced and politicized, claims of mystification in historical representation more generally have had an active scholarly life outside the Marxian tradition. This is evident in the historical debates about the emergence and development of modern racism. Denying any connection to Marx, the sociologist Oliver C. Cox criticized many of his peers, such as Robert Park and Gunnar Myrdal, as well as anthropologists (notably Ruth Benedict), for suggesting that racial inequality was based on institutionalized marginalization or ethnocentrism. He argued conversely that racism was historically contingent upon class inequalities and programs of global capitalist expropriation and colonialism that prompted racial antagonisms. Cox even suggested that Myrdal’s famous Carnegie studies of race (which, following W. Lloyd Warner, suggested an analogy between race and caste) were “mystical.” Critics maintained Cox’s assertions were mystical themselves, ignoring a long history of racial antagonisms that predated capitalism. The debate highlights competing concerns about the predominance of global capital institutions against charges that economic reductionism inheres in such an approach.
PHILOSOPHICAL MYSTIFICATION
The final dimension of Marx’s discussion of mystification relates to his insistence on developing a materialist theory of praxis. A student of Georg F. W. Hegel, Marx was concerned with adapting Hegel’s Grundilinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821; Eng. trans., Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1991) for a historical approach grounded less in thoughts and ideas and more in the reality in which they are performed. The postface to the second edition (1873) of Capital contains Marx’s most relevant criticism of the obfuscatory power of philosophy as complicit in the practical building of power relationships:
the mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. (Marx 1990a, p. 103)
Marx’s tempered criticism of Hegel (he refers to him in the same breath as a “mighty thinker”) sees his own dialectical method as “exactly opposite,” where “the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man” (1990a, p. 102). Marx thus sees himself standing steadfast against the complicity of a German idealist legacy that abetted the legitimacy of the state and empire: “in its mystified form, the dialectic became the fashion in Germany, because it seemed to transfigure and glorify what exists” (1990a, p. 103).
Marx’s materialist legacy continues to be a subject of much debate in the social sciences. Regardless of its merits or shortcomings, there is an extensive tradition of scholars (beginning prominently with György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and here also with elements of the Frankfurt School) concerned methodologically with outlining the development of ideology through theories of practice. Scholars such as Gramsci (and later Michel Foucault) maintain that mystification enables forms of domination based on social and cultural institutions that inculcate and naturalize inequitable social relations, rather than domination legitimated by force. Of course, such works tend to be more critical and radical in their approach but nonetheless recall writings by Émile Durkheim, Weber, and others on religion and the origination and maintenance of social order. Others are unabashed in their appreciation of the benefits of mystification. The American political-philosophical movement known as neoconservatism (fomented mostly through the work of Leo Strauss) extols the virtues of mystifying a self-destructive public through articulated deception (a “noble lie”) by a vanguard elite. Still, among the vast majority of social scientists, mystification remains a troublesome social process around which conversations about deception, hegemony, and social justice occur.
SEE ALSO American Dilemma; Cox, Oliver C.; Gramsci, Antonio; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Ideology; Lukacs, Gyorgy; Marx, Karl; Marx, Karl: Impact on Anthropology; Marxism; Myrdal, Gunnar
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mantz, Jeffrey W., and James H. Smith. 2006. Do Cellular Phones Dream of Civil War? The Mystification of Production and the Consequences of Technology Fetishism in the Eastern Congo. In Inclusion and Exclusion in the Global Arena, ed. Max Kirsch. New York: Routledge.
Marx, Karl. 1990a. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Vol. 1. New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. (Orig. pub. 1867.)
Marx, Karl. 1990b. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Vol. 3. New York: Penguin Books. (Orig. pub. 1894.)
Robinson, Guy. 1998. Philosophy and Mystification: A Reflection on Nonsense and Clarity. New York: Routledge.
Jeffrey Mantz