You go into a supermarket and you want to buy a head of lettuce. In order to buy the lettuce, you have to put down a certain sum of money. The material relation between the money and the lettuce expresses a social relation because the price - the "how much" - is socially determined, and the price is a monetary representation of value. Hidden within this market exchange of things is a relation between you, the consumer, and the direct producers - those who labored to produce the lettuce. Not only do you not have to know anything about that labor or the laborers who congealed value in the lettuce in order to buy it; in highly complicated systems of exchange it is impossible to know anything about the labor or the laborers, which is why fetishism is inevitable in the world market. The end result is that our social relation to the laboring activities of others is disguised in the relationships between things. You cannot, for example, figure out in the supermarket whether the lettuce has been produced by happy laborers, miserable laborers, slave laborers, wage laborers or some self-employed peasant. The lettuces are mute, as it were, as to how they were produced and who produced them.
Why is this important? When I taught introductory geography classes at Johns Hopkins, I always started off by asking students where their breakfast came from. And they'd say, "Oh, I bought stuff at the deli:' But when I asked them to think back further than that, they found themselves consider a whole incredible world of laboring in radically different geographical environments and under radically different social conditions that they knew nothing about and could know nothing about from staring at their breakfast ingredients or going into the deli. The bread, the sugar, the coffee, the milk; the cups, knives and forks, toasters and plastic plates - to say nothing of the machinery and equipment needed to produce all these things - linked them to millions of people laboring away all around the world. One of the tasks of geographical education is to impart something about the variety of socio-environmental conditions, spatial linkages and labor practices involved in every aspect of daily life, down to putting breakfast on the table every day.
The students did sometimes seem to think I was trying to guilt-trip them for not paying more mind to those poor sugar-cane cutters in the Dominican Republic who earned next to nothing. When it got to that stage they would sometimes declare "Sir, I didn't have breakfast this morning!" To that I would characteristically reply that they might want to do without lunch, dinner, and supper too for a week or so just to learn the truth of the basic Marxian maxim that we have to eat in order to live.
Issues of this kind do raise moral questions. There are those who, for various reasons, propose all manner of codes of moral conduct in interpersonal relations, but who then face the dilemma of whether or how to extend that moral code into the world of commodity exchanges in the world market. It is all very well to insist on "good" face-to-face relations and to be helpful to one's neighbor, but what is the point of that if we are totally indifferent to all those whom we do not know and can never know, but who play a vital role in providing us with our daily bread? These issues are sometime brought to our attention: by the "fair trade" movement, for example, which tries to articulate a moral standard for the world of commodity exchange, and the anti-poverty movement, which seeks to mobilize charitable contributions for distant others. But even these usually fail to challenge the social relations that produce and sustain the conditions of global inequality: wealth for the charitable donors and poverty for everyone else.
A Companion to Marx's Capital, David Harvey (via libcom.org)
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