The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

118 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
tique of the Gotha Programme," in which he attacked the principle
of "equal wages for equal work" adopted by the German socialists
because this evaluated the worker by only one aspect of his existence.
Because of differing individual capacities and conditions,
Marx considered this principle a bourgeois formula for perpetuating
inequality. Inequality could be overcome only if equality were based
solely on human needs (Jayawardena, 1968). The difference between
these two ways of evaluating equality stems from the difference between
use-value and exchange-value. Only with the exchange-value
paradigm can the criteria of equality be reduced to prices and money,
at the cost of reification.
In a situation in which a use-value economy like peasant householding
coexists with and is felt to be imperiled by an exchangevalue
system, these modes of evaluating equality are at loggerheads.
Hence the contradiction signified by "filth" is not only an issue concerning
inequality: filth also puts at issue the market paradigm of
equivalence.
The foremost principle of oeconomia—the householding mode of
production—is to provide for the needs of the household. The sale of
surpluses need not destroy self-sufficiency nor imperil the integrity
of the principle of production for use. In denouncing production for
gain as unnatural, Aristotle made this crucial point: capitalist-oriented
(chrematistic) production threatens the very basis of society.
The fundaments of human association should not be subjected to
the raw economic motive of gain in and for itself.
An identical economic philosophy can be found in the pattern of
motifs presented by the southern Cauca Valley today. The peasant
crops give little, yet they give constantly and regularly within a social
and ecological nexus that continually refurbishes its own roots.
However, for plantation workers the archetypal exchange structure
as symbolized by the proletarian devil contract is radically different.
The worker makes a lot of money by selling his soul to the devil, but
this is reciprocated by nonrepetitive and final events: a premature
and agonizing death and the barrenness of soil and wages. Rather
than an exchange that reinforces and perpetuates a set of perennial
reciprocal exchanges like the peasant's relation to the tree crops, the
devil contract is the exchange that ends all exchange—the contract
with money which absolves the social contract and the soul of man.
This is but one expression of the fundamental contradiction that
structures local society from the viewpoint of the lower classes.
Two opposed systems of production and exchange operate simul-