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eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." He then
alludes to the Feuerbachian theory of religion in referring to "the
mist-enveloped regions of the religious world [where] the produc–
tions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed
with life ." "So it is," he concludes, "in the world of commodities with
the products of men's hands."
But Marx has given us no more than a highly-colored descrip–
tion of the market where, at least in large-scale societies, the pro–
ducers do not directly interact but influence each other only indirectly
through the results of the exchange of their products mediated by
money (and often enough by middlemen) . Where is there any fan–
tasy or mystification in this familiar circumstance? Marx, to be sure, ,
did not like the market nor money as the medium that made its scope
and impersonality possible, expressing his socialist preference for
"production by freely associated men . . . consciously regulated by
them in accordance with a settled plan." No less than Durkheim or
Parsons, Marx was a partisan of consensus, solidarity, and social in–
tegration over conflict, separation, and system integration (the latter
connoting the mediated, indirect and nonconsensual interdepen–
dence of men in society). He differed from them in thinking that
capitalism, commodity production, money, and ultimately the divi–
sion of labor itself were insuperable obstacles to the attainment of an
ideal unity of mankind.
More specifically, Marx contended that the price or "exchange–
value" of a commodity is perceived as an inherent property of the
physical object exchanged rather than as a social meaning reflecting
an actual social relation under capitalist conditions of production
and exchange . But he provides no real evidence that this is so: the
purported resemblances to primitive fetishism or to Feuerbach's
deified projections of the human mind are at best no more than
analogies . I am reminded of the old tale that children growing up in
big cities - children, note, not adults - believe that milk is somehow
produced by the milkman who bottles and delivers it . Marx, to be
sure, ends the famous chapter with quotations from several second–
rate and now forgotten economists who weirdly claimed that "value"
(meaning exchange-value) was an actual property of things in con–
trast to their use-values which are relative to human purposes . But
this is simply an instance of the reification of abstract concepts in the
pre-Lukacsian or Whiteheadian sense ; there is no reason to believe
that the ordinary citizen, equipped only with common sense , saw
things that way any more than he or she thought milk came "natu-
