Desmond McNeill - Fetishism and the Theory of Value: Reassessing Marx in the 21st Century

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I first read Desmond McNeills book around the millennium. It struck me then as a well written and original introduction to Marxian economics . He demonstrates forcefully that Marxs discoveries are not well served by insisting on a narrow economistic approach to them. Marxs theory of value has suffered in particular by neglect of concepts often judged by economists to be too philosophical, sociological or immature when compared with the achievements of Capital.

The notion of fetish is central to these questions, and it takes up the first two sections of the books five sections. McNeill branches out in the next two sections to consider first the implications of treating both money and language as the main means of human communication. This involves a critical assessment of structural linguistics and structuralist Marxism, both of which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, the last time that Marx inspired genuinely new thinking. Second, he argues that the attribution of value just to social relations of production and labour is unnecessarily restrictive, extending the economic discussion to exchange and consumption also. The fifth section is entirely new to this edition, updating Marxs relevance for our century in the context of more recent Marxist-inspired literature on the pressing global issues of environment and financialisation.

This book, more than most, raises the question of its own and its subjects historicity, a question that is foreign to economic orthodoxy and is often neglected by twentieth-century Marxists, but not of course by Marx and Engels themselves. It started out as a London doctoral thesis in 1988. When I first encountered it two decades ago, I could not understand why it had not yet been published, since its scope and quality far surpass the promotion fodder that passes for academic publication these days. In desperation, its author resorted to private publication later. Now at last it has found its rightful place with a serious academic publisher, and I am delighted to introduce new readers to this exemplary work.

There are several reasons why the book might not have found an academic publisher for over three decades. The structuralist bubble burst around 19791980, when the neo-liberal counter-revolution against post-war developmental states was launched by Reagan and Thatcher. McNeills thesis saw daylight just before the turning point of our world, 19891994the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the birth of one-world capitalism , Chinas and Indias emergence as global powers, the internet going public and its transformation by the World Wide Web. Marxism went on the backburner for two decades, losing ground to writers like Karl Polanyi and Marcel Mauss . But the Lehmann crash of 2008 launched a revival of Marxs work, especially in Germany. Now, on the edge of what may be the next Great (or Greater) Depression and with internet optimism nullified by Big Tech and the banks, McNeills timing may at last be right.

The current global crisis is a suitable moment to revive his intellectual project. Moreover, the authors integration of various literatures, including important nineteenth-century and twentieth-century sources, is a powerful antidote to the short-termism and parochialism of late academia. His approach has been unfashionable for too long. Some readers may be sceptical on two more fronts. First, they may imagine that this is a narrow specialist topic. I have already flatly contradicted this, and the rest of the Foreword expands on this view. Second, it may not be a suitable student textbook. This is true. It is mainly for mature academics who appreciate original scholarship, intellectual ambition and fine writing.

In Parts I and II, McNeill starts from the rather vague notion of fetishism that concludes the dense, synthetic introductory chapter to Capitals first volume. With quick, precise strokes, he establishes the words origins in European encounters with the indigenous populations of the Americas and Africa, shows how Marx translated Spanish greed for gold into a local German obsession with private property and charts its journey in Marxs writings from a word to a concept, culminating in the difficult but foundational idea of commodity fetishism in Capital. It is typical of McNeills vision and method that a term coined as a shaky tool for understanding primitive religion should be made the launching pad for grasping Marxian economics .

For he aims to show that Marxs ideas concerning value can only be understood through close examination of the notion that relations between men take the fantastic form of relations between things in societies dominated by capitalism . If Marxs concept of surplus value was, in his own eyes and McNeills , his supreme theoretical achievement, the relationship of exploitation that it highlights is easier to understand than the theory of value that underpins it. The same might be said of the fetishism of interest on capital in relation to commodity fetishism . The dialectic of appearances and social reality is reproduced in Marxs concept of the value-form , the unity of use-value and exchange-value in the commodity under capitalism .