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rally" in bottles rather than from cows. Marx's argument reveals his
own quintessential bourgeois scholasticism. A little bit of the "pos–
itivistic" survey research of American sociologists so reviled by phi–
losophical Western Marxists might help resolve the question of the
reality of commodity fetishism.
Marx's major intellectual achievement was his insistence that
the principles of classical political economy had to be firmly located
in their particular historical and social context, as opposed to the
claims of the early economists that they were timeless natural laws
comparable to, indeed reflecting and partly modeled after, Newto–
nian mechanics or Darwinian natural selection. The core of Marx's
Marxism was his assertion of the dependence of the laws of the mar–
ket on capitalist economic institutions that are historical creations
capable of being transformed as a result of their own operation
which prepares the ground for eventual social revolution . The con–
nection with the older philosophical idea of alienation lies in the re–
jection of the assimilation of the workings of capitalism to immutable
natural forces analogous to the omnipotent deities of religion in their
independence from and control over human aims and actions. Here
is the rationale for the more generalized attack by critical theorists
on the assumption that the sociocultural world is governed by laws of
a deterministic "nature-like" character, the grounds for their
ceaseless polemics against "positivism" and "objectivism" in social
thought, which they manage to find almost everywhere, including in
Marx himself as well as in various later versions of Marxism.
Let us recall the modern social phenomena held chiefly respon–
sible for alienation: capitalism, bureaucracy, technology. Does
anyone today really consider these to be reflections of unalterable
natural laws of the same order as the motions of the planets or the
evolution of new species? Just as nobody deifies them, I doubt that
many people see them as anything but manmade, "socially con–
structed" entities. Even contemporary economists for whom the
workings of the market remain the major organizing principle or
master paradigm of their discipline no longer reify their concepts in
the manner of the classical economists criticized by Marx . Modern
economists regard the "market mechanism" and
homo economicus
himself as conceptual constructs or models that lend themselves to
econometric manipulations permitting wide and varied inferences,
but not as realistic descriptions of the world. The professional
economist's "equilibrium price-auction model," as Lester Thurow
names it in his recent assault upon it, certainly remains open to
