to conceptualise them in the form of ideas which are only the immaterial,
abstract aspect of language.
This is where a concept that Marx and Engels had still not formulated at
the time of The German Ideology– fetishism – comes in. Readers will remember
the analysis of fetishism offered in the chapter of Capitaldevoted to the
commodity: ‘the definite social relation between men themselves...
assumes... for them the fantastic form of a relation between things’.^36 This
false concretisation is, in fact, a second-degree abstraction – i.e. a bad abstraction.
By naming them, language abstracts social relations from the concrete reality
of the phenomena that constitute them – linguists call this an ontological
metaphor^37 – and fetishism abstracts from these conceptualised relations a
false concrete reality, which takes the form of a second degree of ontological
metaphor. This is how transcendence is generated, for, at the top of this
conceptual pyramid, we will find the grand abstraction: God. As commodity
fetishism, fetishism is associated with the capitalist mode of production. But
it is not unconnected with language, as is indicated by the continuation of
the text I have just quoted, which is one of the few passages in Capitalwhere
reference is made to language:
The private producer’s brain reflects this twofold social character of his
labour only in the forms which appear in practical intercourse, in the exchange
of products.... Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into
relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as
the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is
true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values,
they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this
without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description
branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into
a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get
behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which
objects of utility have of being values is as much men’s social product as is
their language.^38The Marxist Tradition • 95(^36) Marx 1976, p. 165.
(^37) See Lakoff and Johnson 1980.
(^38) Marx 1976, pp. 166–7.