Your book starts with Marx’s essay on commodity fetishism because the book is organized around the thesis that design culture is best understood from a materialist perspective, and Marx is the person most responsible for the materialist perspective. So what I’m going to be doing today is giving you a really short course in materialism. It’s not possible to really do justice to this in such a short session, but I’m going to focus on the most critical elements of the materialist method and also do so in as clear a way as possible.
In order to really appreciate what Marx is doing, it’s necessary to go beyond what he says here in your reading in order to lay out the most relevant and important parts of Marxism for you.
Let us begin where Marx does, with commodities. A commodity is anything that you or someone else attaches value to. It’s anything that someone might want to possess or use. It could be a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, a pair of shoes, a house, a song, a Chia Pet, a sweaty towel used by Kobe Bryant. What is valuable or meaningful to someone else might be something that you’d throw away. The point is that it has exchange value – that is, someone out there wants it and is willing to provide something in exchange for it.
The other thing about a commodity is that commodity production characterizes a particular economic system – capitalism. While goods and services predate capitalism – feudalism, for example, had people making goods and services such as shoes and raising animals for food – what distinguishes capitalism from all other economic systems is that goods and services (i.e., commodities) are produced not primarily for their use value but for their exchange value. In the words of a former CEO of GM: “General Motors is in the business of making money, not making cars.” GM makes cars not because it has a desire to see all of America driving around in global warming machines, but because they can sell these cars to make money or profit. The cars only have meaning for GM for their exchange value, not their use value (e.g., use values for a car include getting you from point A to point B or providing you a place to have your first sexual encounter).
Another way of saying that capitalism is driven by the need for profit is to say that exchange value trumps use value. Under other economic systems use value is more important overall than exchange value. I had a colleague at my university who was divorced and whose ex-wife insisted that they place their teenage son in a private school because that is what affluent people do, not because the school per se was a better place to educate him.
One of the consequences of this momentous shift in the economic system is that unlike use value which can reach a saturation point for any person or group – you eat enough food and then you’re full – the pursuit of more and more exchange value, the pursuit of profit, has no point of saturation. It can go on forever. Is it possible to have too much food? Yes. Is it possible to have too much money? No.
This is one of the reasons why under capitalism we see an enormous proliferation of commodities, of stuff. Go to Frye’s and you’ll see what I mean. Lots of designers are employed for the purposes of making things more attractive to distinguish them from other stuff. Buy my brand of aspirin, not the other three dozen brands. Buy my car, not the other cars. Buy this sugared cola, not that other sugared cola.
The other reason why capitalism produces so much stuff is because capitalism is also characterized by the socialization of production – that is, the collective and organized working together of workers on a massive scale. The assembly line (which began in the Western world where capitalism first emerged and is now increasingly spread out globally to a global assembly line) creates the conditions for a vast increase in the productivity of workers. When Ford introduced the assembly line to car manufacturing the time to finish one Model-T vehicle went from 12 hours to 1 1/2 hours. Automation is also part of this process. The drive to constantly automate and innovate and find ways to lower the cost of production that is unprecedentedly powerful under capitalism also produces higher worker productivity.
This is what Marx means when he says “as soon as men start to work for each other in any way, their labour also assumes a social form.” (p. 18)
So if you could say that Marx has a mixed assessment of capitalism. On the one hand, it’s good because it creates the material conditions through the highly socialized nature of production for meeting the needs of the people without the need for private expropriation/profit. On the other hand, what’s standing in the way of that is the persistence of private forms of ownership and control that predate capitalism. We have a mix in capitalism of feudalistic forms of ownership (private appropriation) with socialistic forms of production.
Capitalism, in other words, is an historic advance for humanity. This isn’t to say that life and lifestyle under capitalism is better than any prior systems, because in many ways it isn’t, but it is to say that capitalism does have the twin virtues of vastly increasing productivity through the socialization of labor, and it creates the objective conditions for humanity to recognize its interdependence. I say objective because the veil of commodity fetishism obscures this fact.
What commodity production does is create an impression – what Marx calls commodity fetishism – that the commodities themselves take on human like or animate like qualities. Things appear to be the dominant players, not humans. If you’ve ever seen the Disney classic Fantasia where the broom and other inanimate objects start to move and act as if they are living things, you know what Marx is referring to. Terminator is also an expression of this.
Marx borrows the term fetishism from religion in which human ideas about gods and goddesses become separate and autonomous entities from humans and who then interact with each other (Zeus and Aphrodite or God and Satan) and with humans (in Roman legend, the goddess Nemesis, hearing the prayers of those who Narcissus has spurned, gets Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection).
When you go to a store like Wal-Mart, which hopefully you don’t, but if you were to, you’d see aisle after aisle of commodities at exceptionally low prices. The reason that most people who shop there go there is because of the low prices. But what people don’t realize and what more generally we don’t bother to think about when we buy anything, is the social relations and productive relations that went into the manufacture and distribution and marketing of these products. When we buy strawberries, for example, we don’t think about the migrant workers and their working conditions that allow us to have these juicy red strawberries so attractively displayed on the grocery shelves. When Somalia was starving as it periodically does, fresh strawberries are being shipped out of their docks for the wealthy countries while Somalians are dying of hunger.
One of your readings in your book Chap 24, Designing for the City of Strangers, (see p. 260) shows the work of K. Wodiczko who designed a homeless vehicle that is designed to stand out and highlight the conditions of the homeless, in contrast to the overall dominant capitalist logic of making everything seem seamless.
One of the puzzles that economics must solve is how it is decided how much an item is worth. How is it decided how much you must give to get something you desire or need? In neoclassical economics (which is the kind of economics you will learn in intro econ classes in this country) the answer they give is “supply and demand.” The smaller the quantity of something relative to the demand for it, the more expensive it will be. While supply and demand certainly are factors in determining the price of something, it doesn’t really fully answer the question of value.
The other part to their answer to this question is that objects of value such as gold or silver have their value “as natural objects with peculiar social properties.” What is this peculiar social property? Neoclassical and classical economics can’t answer this.
Marx’s answer to this question is a) the only way that commodities can be exchanged for one another is if they all contain within them something in common – what he calls abstract labor, because if they had nothing in common there would be no way to compare their values to each other, and b) that the value of a commodity is principally determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time that went into its creation or production. The second part here is important because if it was strictly the amount of labor that went into something, then someone who is a slow worker would produce the most valuable and costly items, and that is obviously not true. So socially necessary labor time is the standard amount of time and labor that must go into making a given item at a specific point in time.
Abstract labor = human labor that adds value to something and it’s abstract because it is a thing that we all have in common no matter what the labor we’re doing is. Concrete labor was his term for the specific type of labor and skills that go into a specific kind of work. For example, a specific kind of labor goes into designing a building that is different from the work that goes into fixing a car. But what both have in common is abstract (human) labor.
Both abstract and concrete labour mean that the economy (and the society in general) are founded upon social production and that social production is the foundation for all of the other social relations, interactions and ideas that make up our world. This is what materialism is as applied to society.
The social character of production under capitalism means that you can pierce the veil of commodity fetishism if you approach the world as a materialist. That is, as Ben Highmore puts it in on p. 17 in describing Marx’s critique of idealist philosophy: “the world of things and humans is standing on its head.”
Materialism and Idealism are the two fundamental approaches in philosophy. According to idealism, ideas and great people with great ideas are the makers of history. Ideas are the causal factor. Plato, who was an idealist, believed that the idea for a chair precedes any actual chair. By contrast, according to materialism, ideas are secondary overall to material activity and material factors. That is, you must first have a brain before you can have a thought.
“We design culture. Culture designs us.” Of these two, my view and the materialist view, is that culture is overall dominant over design and designers. That is, our culture, which is larger than any one of us or even any of us as a group, shapes us profoundly. What Marx is calling for and anticipated, was that humanity could one day get to the point where it is consciously shaping itself. He called this species being, when all of humanity acts in full awareness of our interconnectedness and the mystery of commodity fetishism is overcome and instead of working without awareness of what we are collectively doing, do so consciously. Instead of the economy operating behind our backs it will be under the conscious control of humanity.