Individualism and “Independence” Is an Illusion, Commodity Fetishism Hides the Essential Truth

In society today, people all have the experience of being “independent” from one another. When the rent is due, you pay it, not someone else. When you are hungry, you pay for your food, not someone else. The money you use to pay for these things, you earned it by working, not someone else. So for many people they have the experience that they live or die by the sweat of their own brow. But this independence is merely an illusion.

When you walk into a store, what do you see? A bunch of stuff and a bunch of numbers. You go through the store and pick out what you want or need, and use the money you have to purchase it. It appears to you, that your ability to acquire these things is a consequence of your efforts. You exchange the money you have earned for the object that you want or need. It appears to you that you have traded something. One object for another object. But if you look even just a little deeper you will see something else going on.

Have you ever checked the sticker on the fruit you eat? Have you ever looked at the tag on the clothing you purchase? If you were to do so you would see that the objects that you have purchased and own were actually produced by other people. Without those others who grow and pick the fruit, you could not eat. Without those who sew the fabric which makes your clothing, you would not be clothed.

This is what Marx meant when he said that the commodity acts as a fetish. BA clarifies that:

[Marx] wasn’t talking about deviant sexual behavior. He was talking about the inverted sense of reality whereby people view what are fundamentally relationships among people, social relationships, as if they are relations between things, and they don’t see the underlying process and division of labor—which, indeed, in today’s world is on a world scale—through which all these things are actually produced and distributed.

Just think for a second how prevalent this notion is. We live in a culture that promotes an obsessive occupation with the “self” and an all-consuming focus on the individual. We are constantly bombarded with the notion that what makes the capitalist system great, and in particular U.S. capitalism, is the provision for freedom and flourishing of the “individual.” The U.S. is a country where everybody can make it “if you try.” And on the news, social media, and television they are constantly parading around examples of individuals who “made it.” We hear people say “I'm a self-made man,” I'm “financially independent,” “I'm doing my own thing,” “I'm claiming my agency.” When in reality, the phone you are tweeting on was produced by people in China, the raw materials mined by children in Congo, the coffee you are drinking produced by laborers in Ecuador, the bananas picked by workers in Honduras, the clothing you wear sewn by women in Bangladesh.

Bob Avakian cuts through the surface of things to reveal a very deep and profound truth that:

people live in societies that are organized as systems—systems that are grounded in the ways people interact with each other, and with the rest of nature, in order to meet their basic needs and provide for future generations. And those systems have certain basic relations, and ways of functioning, that are independent of the will of any particular individuals or groups of people, even those who occupy the dominant position within those systems.

When you stop and think about it for a minute, it becomes very clear, that of course people must work together to produce the basic requirements of life and to produce new generations. Without that all life would come to a halt. But even this basic truth, that this is in fact what is going on every day, is hidden from us by the very process of commodity production and exchange. Well what do I mean by that? And this gets to something even less clear, more hidden, that “systems have certain basic relations, and ways of functioning, that are independent of the will of any particular individuals or groups of people, even those who occupy the dominant position within those systems.”

A fundamental truth that everyone in this country knows, is that in order to get the basic things you need to live and survive you need money! As the song goes:

♫  Cash rules everything around me
C.R.E.A.M., get the money
Dollar dollar bill, y'all  ♫

This money is itself a commodity that you use to exchange in order to get other commodities. Whether it be paying the rent, getting the food you need, medicine, clothing, or any other thing. You must have that one thing, money, which can be exchanged to get everything else you need. And there isn't some money tree sitting somewhere and there isn't a bunch of land that is sitting empty for you to grow some crops or hunt and gather the basic things you need to live. So you are forced whether you like it or not to enter into relations with other people in order to get that money. This brings me to another point made by Bob Avakian:

Since the break-up of early communal societies among human beings thousands of years ago, economic systems have been based on the exploitation of the many by the few: a situation where these “few” who own and control the major means of production (land, factories and other production facilities, machines and other technology) are in a position to force others to work to create wealth for them—and if these “others” do not do this, they will not be able to survive.

Under a capitalist system, unless you are someone who owns those means of production and therefore are in a position to force others to work to create wealth for you, or unless you possess a special or rare skill, then you are in the position of having to “sell yourself” (not your actual self but your ability to work) to someone who does own those means of production. This itself is a commodity exchange, where you exchange your ability to work for a wage. Then, the capitalist who bought your ability to work puts you to work in their factory or on their farm or whatever, they put you to work not to produce things that you yourself will directly use, but have you producing commodities. Things which are produced to be sold to be used by others. This the way everything is produced in society.

So all the way on the other side of the world, women in Bangladesh work 11 hours a day producing clothing to earn a wage to feed their family, and you are working wherever you can to earn a wage to feed yourself and your family, and when you get to the store you are exchanging the labor you put in, with the labor they put in. But even then, we don't just directly exchange our labor with each other, it goes through a series of steps. You can think about, for example, how a company like H&M contracts out to a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and in turn that sweatshop purchases cotton fabric from some supplier, who purchased that in turn from a factory which processes the raw cotton, which in turn purchases from a farm which grows the actual cotton. In the film Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About Bob Avakian makes the point that at each one of these steps:

someone steps in and says 'wait a minute that's mine I hold it I own it I'm gonna sell it. Not you made it, me who made you make it.' That someone is the capitalist. That's the system we live under we don't work and exchange our labor directly, we don't even exchange the products of what we produce with our labor directly. Some capitalist takes that each stage says 'this is mine' and sells it to someone else and down the line it goes each time going through another capitalist. [transcription by writer]

BA repeatedly emphasizes that none of this is obvious when you walk into a store. The fact that we are coming together to produce the basic requirements of life, and that in order to do that we must enter into definite relations that are independent of our will is not at all obvious. When you go to the store you don't think “I'm exchanging the labor I put in to acquire this money, with the labor that someone else put in to produce the commodity I'm purchasing.” You say “I'm exchanging money for stuff I want or need.” Again in this way, the commodity acts as a fetish, disguising the relations among people, as relations among stuff, relations among things.

This goes to the point Bob Avakian makes in Breakthroughs about his refutation of “Karl Popper's attempts to discredit the whole Marxist analysis of surplus value and the understanding that value is determined by the socially necessary labor time that goes into the production of something, and Popper’s insistence that instead it was supply and demand that set the value.” You could imagine Karl Popper setting up shop in the middle of the Sahara desert, and arguing that a glass of lemonade is worth a million dollars, while the price of sand is nothing. Karl Popper's insistence that supply and demand is the regulator of value brings us right back to the question of commodity fetishism, in which the relationships between people appear to be relations between things. It is in the first chapter of Capital where Marx made the point that the exchange value of a commodity,

at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, … a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.

For Popper, the commodity acts as a fetish, where the value appears to come from the commodity itself, rather than being socially determined  by the socially necessary labor time required for the production of a commodity. This is another way of viewing the relations between people as essentially a relation between things.

***

"A lot has changed in my own thinking, being able to, and cannot help but to, see frameworks in people's thinking, whether in an Op-Ed or talking to someone."

Where we are in the study of Breakthroughs can be concentrated in the bolded part at the beginning of the subhead “The Breakthrough With Marxism”:

And, as the productive forces are continually being developed, through human initiative and action, within any given system a point is reached at which the production relations become more a fetter on the productive forces, than an appropriate form for their further development, and a revolution becomes necessary to resolve this contradiction. This revolution is made in the political realm, in a concentrated way in the overthrow of the old political power and the establishment of a new system of political rule whose fundamental requirement is to transform the relations of production in line with the way in which the productive forces have developed.

This understanding is more or less, not a memorization of the understanding, as there is much to go deeper into this. We’re not all there, and I think we should help each other as a cohort with a good spirit of comradeship and struggle.

This month has been one full of ruptures and ongoing work for the collectivity of the Tour. The articles that BA is contributing are very important and living. The way he continues to hammer at why, in order to make any kind of change that is fundamental and worth having, we need to transform what exists in actual reality: “In today’s world, to fundamentally change society, you must seize power—overthrow the existing state power and establish a new state power.” I can say a lot has changed in my own thinking and being able to and cannot help but to see frameworks in people’s thinking whether you’re reading an Op-Ed or talking to someone. People aren’t just matter and ideas. There’s a coherence to people having modes of thinking that is in accordance to the economic base, even while not every idea is directly tied to that. It’s a whole package of thinking that does involve a lot of individualism, idealism, and big reluctance to confronting actual reality as it is constantly moving and changing. The main point I want to get at is that collectively, I do think we are beginning to get a materialist grasp of dealing with reality through the Breakthroughs and discussions on BA’s articles from the past month that have forced some to dig deeper by getting more into BA. It’s interesting for me to step back sometimes and see how these discussions and wranglings are led, even the workshops I’ve overheard the Tour get into, as people are wrangling with the problems that the discussions have been getting into, whether that is conscious or not, for any individual.

The Democratic Intellectual and the Shopkeeper

(In Breakthroughs BA cites Marx from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,  making observations about the democratic intellectuals and shopkeepers both being part of the petite bourgeoisie and how while they are as far apart as heaven from earth in their education and social position,  the democratic intellectuals in their thinking do not get beyond the limits which the shopkeepers do not get beyond in their daily living.  That the democratic intellectuals are driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the shopkeepers.)

It was very helpful to get the supplemental excerpts to read and listen to on this.¹ It’s interesting reading the quotes by Marx in Grundrisse and The Eighteenth Brumaire. With these new tools we’ve developed through some basic science being applied to society and history, you can see Marx was very revolutionary, that he’s actually working on revolution and communism. It’s nice to step back and appreciate that. And then there’s BA, who’s continued that work from its scientific foundation, who has enriched it but also the New Communism has ruptured with some secondary tendencies in the communist movement that have run counter to its scientific core and foundation, where the means need to correspond to the ends. The scientific method and approach runs through this new communism. And it’s a whole different thing when you begin to actually see it, rather than saying it in your head, which if left at that, will ultimately become a religion and a chain on your thinking. It’s very liberating to begin to understand this and to see why for example does BA keep going back to this question about the democratic intellectual and the shopkeeper. It’s very hard to wrap your head around that. I can see the difference of them being “as far apart as Heaven and Earth.” But what is it that they have in unity theoretically and practically?

In Ruminations and Wranglings, BA writes, “...let’s focus first on the very insightful observation by Marx that the petite bourgeoisie 'believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within the frame of which alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided.'” What I’m getting is that these “special conditions” are the ones unique to the class of the petite bourgeoisie but the petite bourgeoisie views these “special conditions” this class has been privileged with as the general conditions of society, meaning overall in society. They are caught in the middle. Some have ownership and they all get a portion of the wealth created by society. This affects their thinking as a social group. What people in this social group spontaneously strive for with their “solutions” are ideas divorced from reality but “correspond to the spontaneous strivings and inclinations of people in this (‘middle class’) position can somehow be imposed on all of society, and will fix society’s ills, or at least ameliorate and mitigate the objectively profound contradictions which rive society and repeatedly give rise to antagonistic conflict, in which this 'middle class' generally finds itself caught...in the middle.”

What the democratic intellectual and the shopkeeper find in common with the former theoretically and the latter practically are the same problems and solutions.

Even in regard to how they see the problems, as well as the solutions which they believe they have found, these democratic intellectuals come up with ideas and theoretical propositions which ultimately are in line with where “material interest and social position drive the latter [the shopkeepers] practically.”

The petite bourgeoisie is, as BA quotes from Eighteenth Brumaire, “a transition class, in which the interests of two classes—that is, the bourgeosie and the proletariat—‘are simultaneously mutually blunted.’ It is for this reason that the petit bourgeois democrat ‘imagines himself elevated above class antagonism generally.’”

BA points out,

Here Marx is speaking to the fact that the petite bourgeoisie is a class which has no future, as such, and is incapable of ruling society, as such, although representatives of the petite bourgeoisie may actually come to preside over society, or lead society, on behalf of the proletariat or on behalf of the bourgeoisie—

They can move back and forth. “They imagine that they can wave the magic wand of petit bourgeois idealism and eliminate objective class conflicts and the antagonism and struggle to which these conflicts give rise, repeatedly, in one form or another.”

BA goes on to quote Marx:

The democrats concede that a privileged class confronts them, but they, along with all the rest of the nation, form the people. What they represent is the people’s rights; what interests them is the people’s interests. Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes.

The petite bourgeoisie also, “as Marx puts it, personal ties all appear as personal, not as fixed by custom and tradition, or even law. This too is part of what 'seduces' the democrat.” People are seen as independent and autonomous rather than “enmeshed, and confined within definite production relations, of which the developed, money-based system of exchange is a subordinate expression” and they see this in contrast to the feudal system, and they see this system as the inevitable, natural order of how human beings by their “human nature” are destined to live.

But as Marx refutes, “they [the masses of people] can do so [change their social-class position], en masse, only by destroying these conditions and relations—only by overthrowing the system which embodies, and enforces, these conditions and relations.”

BA concludes in this section:

So, from all this, we can see the extreme relevance of these statements by Marx, from the Grundisse and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in relation to—and as dissection and refutation of—commonly held notions that prevail in society today, whether in the form of more developed theories and philosophies, or simply popular prejudices and misconceptions, about the nature of things, and “human nature” in particular, and about the possibility—or, as it is often spontaneously conceived, the impossibility—of revolution and communism.

A Pressing and Urgent Need

From what I understand about communism, understanding itself is not an end but a means. I think there are many many examples of people’s understanding, including revolutionaries and the good-willed of society, running up against roadblocks and obstacles, stuck and not digging deeper to the underlying forces and changes in society and applying a consistently, systematic and comprehensive outlook of communism. This “consistently” and “systematic” and “comprehensive” is something I’m just seeing. Before I thought of it as a big bad-ass thought that just encompasses everything with the mantra “Communism is a science.” But it really is, and the science is there to back it up, and you can use that science to deal with any contradiction, not just the negative necessities. So, you start to see things in a radically different way. I’m seeing people and things and relationships and even what it means to go out into the world and enjoy the arts and what nature means, not as some way to escape the realities of the world but as part of the needs human beings have to have joy and have wonder and awe, not as just getting charged back up so you can run into the ground again. It’s stuck with me what someone asked in an earlier discussion, I think in the summer, “Why do we get tired?” and struggled over how BA has said we need to wake up itching for ideological struggle. When you start to see how the relations of production have been a chain and a fetter on the historically evolved productive forces, you start seeing it everywhere. And the needlessness for things to be that way that doesn’t just burn your heart in a moral way, but you do feel it bone-deep of its unnecessariness. Now, that “bone-deep” is not something permanent. We still live under this system and this system does have pulls, so it’s not spontaneous. This is not a spontaneous revolution but a conscious one.

I talked to a comrade about this new framework because it’s exciting to shed off or break away from an old mode of thinking. It feels great to not proceed from some moralism or just a “good stand.” The comrade asked what I meant by “stand” and said we do need to proceed from morality, and then we agreed that morality should proceed from science. But I think anyone can say that. You can understand that theoretically needs to be done, but I think the feeling matters, if you can put it that way. I think it’s theoretical/visceral and ideological. You have to believe it and believing what you find to be true through a rigorous scientific method and approach (and saying you have to will not mean that you will).

Breaking From Radical Social Democracy, Feminism, Mere Good Fighters, and More

It’s good we are polemicizing and I am excited to take on the democratic socialists and anarchists and self-prescribed “communists.” I’ve been thinking about these trends as my own thinking has gone through its own transformations. When I talk to people, I start to see frameworks. And then, I think to myself, y’know these other trends out there in the world that we take on...some of those trends are within our own movement. Now, no one is saying, “Look, I’m not a communist...I’m a radical social democrat with revolutionary communist tendencies!” But in terms of frameworks, a whole package, if you will, of thinking, I think that is the case, and I’m no exception.

For the radical social democrat, he finds himself unable to get beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, cannot get beyond “If so-and-so gets this, I want more” or “If I invent something, I want more,” “If I put in so much work for this, I deserve some compensation” and “We have to fight for people’s rights and equality in the name of democracy!” This is radically different than getting to a world where “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

For those proceeding from a feminist ideology, they also find themselves unable to get beyond the narrow horizon of bourgeois right, cannot get beyond “Men are the problem!” or “Let the rapists die or rot in jail” or “We don’t need due process when so many men walk away with the rape of women. We need justice” or “We need women (of color) in seats of power to attain the level of equality of men” or “Who runs the world? Girls!” Well if all the women killed the men, LGBTQ people killed the straight people, oppressed people overthrow and kill off the oppressors, what kind of world would we have where the formerly oppressed are now the vengeful oppressors with the Bible or Koran justifying it all? No, we need to break all the chains and there is a role for women as well as men to make sure there is all-the-way-proletarian-revolution.

And then there is taking the good political stand and being good fighters in the endless struggle against oppression, where your reservoir and base for a mystical revolution lies on the mass approbation and validation of your own struggles by the masses and tailing spontaneity, where morality is not based on science but based on what you want to do at any given time without the scientific collectivity based on the breakthroughs up to today. The “movement” is everything and the final aim is nothing. Materialism gets thrown out as a matter of class struggle and Marx is reduced to class economics. I’m not polemicizing against any individuals but it is a matter of line. It’s something I’m seeing and it’s everywhere.

With all of these frameworks, the view is that the best we can do is work within what exists, instead of transforming it to what could and ought to be. It really is a shackle. You are a slave to the confines and conditions, the terms and limits of the mode of production, ultimately.