On Commodity Fetishism and Repression by Michael Billig

Note: This is old and I don’t exactly agree with some aspects of it, but there are seeds of good stuff and it’s some of my only writing on Marx.

Part 1:

Billig starts by challenging the idea that Marx’s analysis is outdated and introducing his paper’s goal of re-examining the concept of commodity fetishism. He believes Marx had insights of a ‘shared forgetfulness’ that today’s commodity fetishism is built upon which he uses the freudian term repression to describe.

He then dives into ideology by explaining the crucial role commodity fetishism plays in developing a theory of ideology in capitalist society. To do this, he must explain Marx and Engel’s conception of Ideology.

“For Marx and Engels, ‘ideology’ is a critical concept in that it was based upon making a distinction between the nature of social reality and the widely experienced distortion of that reality.”

…

Marx and Engels, in their most extended discussion of ideology in The German Ideology, argued that beliefs and philosophies are socially constructed and that they reflect the conditions of life from which they emerge

‘Life is not determined by Consciousness, but consciousness by life’

The concern of Marx and Engels is with the social construction of ‘untruths’. In other words, their concern is with the ruling classes distortion of social beliefs to the point of being unable to accurately analyze social conditions.

Billig writes that Marx and Engel’s analysis of ideology in The German Ideology contains a ‘social psychological gap’ when they failed to apply their concepts of ‘ideological reflexes’ and ‘phantoms in the brain’ to the conditions of capitalism. However, Billig states that Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism and Capital draws attention to a specific form of distortion or ‘ideological reflex’. Billig also suggests, as he will later expand on, that this distortion of reality, commodity fetishism, rests upon a shared forgetfulness(repression).

Billig finishes this part of the paper saying:

Nevertheless, it will be argued that the Freudian notion of repression needs to be re-interpreted in terms of social practices, including dialogic ones. By doing so, the forgetting which lies at the root of commodity fetishism can be seen as something routine and socially shared, and thereby integrally linked to everyday patterns of contemporary life in the consumer societies of the ‘West’.

Part 2: Commodity Fetishism

Billig starts this part by recounting Marx’s short, yet very impactful, remarks on commodity fetishism in Capital. Marx argues that ‘taken for granted assumptions of common sense’ conceal our true social conditions. A commodity appears trivial and easily understood at first glance. We all know what a table is, we can determine its physical properties easily, but considering this table as a commodity with value entirely changes what is contained in this seemingly simple table. A price or value is assigned to the table based on its relation to other commodities. Again, this is seemingly easily understood, but this understanding requires a distortion, or repression. If a commodity’s value is derived from labor, it should be understood in terms of the social relations to produce it. A commodity being understood in relation to other commodities, whether it’s money or other goods, causes the social relations that produced it to be forgotten.

Billig then explains how money ‘conceals the social character of private labor’ rather than disclosing it as it’s supposed to do. In comparing different values of commodities, we forget the social relations that produced it, which makes our understanding of a commodity (and our social conditions) insufficient. Billig believes there is still a ‘gap in Marx’s social psychology’ because of his imprecision in explaining how this widespread forgetfulness or unawareness operates. However,

He offers a clue: when proportions of exchangeable products ‘have, by custom, attained a certain stability, they appear tp result from the nature of the product.

Billig states that these brief remarks. contain an ‘implicit psychology’: customs set routines (which is allowed by the common sense assumptions mentioned earlier). This ‘common sense’ drives our awareness of these routines and customs away, or represses them.

In this way, there is a link between custom and lack of awareness, so that an unconsciousness is built into the accomplishment of social customs. Capital, having offered an extraordinary insight, then gives few details how the link between routine and unawareness is actually accomplished on a day-to-day basis in capitalist relations

Part 3: Consumption and Amnesia

Billig starts by trying to determine the relevance of Marx’s analysis in ‘consumer capitalism’. He outlines the popular idea that, while Marx’s analysis was great in his time, it does not apply to late capitalism because consumption has in a sense replaced production as the central(basal) relations of our society. With ‘consumer capitalism’ in this view being defined by different relations, thus being fundamentally different, they assert that Marx’s implicit psychology of commodity fetishism is not appropriate for today, but only of his time.

Billig then introduces another position asserting that Marx’s analysis is more relevant now than ever because of the transcendent properties further acquired by today’s commodities. One’s sense of identity, sense of self in ‘consumer capitalism’ is ‘bound up with the regular acquisition of material possessions’. Billig argues that this connection of consumption to sense of self implies a forgetting, a repression, ‘strikingly similar’ to that which was described by Marx.

Marx’s method of analysis is then described in a few short remarks,

Marx’s method of analysis was to start with a critique of theory. He then worked outwards to see how the criticized theories reflected, and reinforced, the conditions and assumptions of the time.

The German Ideology suggested that Hegelian philosophers and religious worshippers fell victim to the same distorted views of our conditions, the same ‘inverted fantasies’. Similarly, bourgeois economic theory and ‘ordinary common sense’ share the same distorted assumptions of commodities. Both common sense and bourgeois economists are misled by fetishism to forget the production of commodities i.e. the creation of value.

A similar method of ‘moving between theoretical and social critique’ can be applied to analysis of consumer capitalism to show that the ‘theory and practice of consumerism’ shares a similar forgetfulness, or repression to that of bourgeois economists and Hegelian philosophers. The claim that Marx’s social psychology implied in his remarks on commodity fetishism are outdated because of consumption replacing production as the base relations is ironic in that they reinforce just the ideological distortion and forgetfulness Marx was speaking of.