English Texts

the mercantile form. In a society that is reduced to
a single individual – Robinson Crusoe’s economy –
there is also a need to distribute social labour among
the different needs that society has to meet, but
here the relations between Robinson and things are
‘simple and transparent’, and so the total labour will
be distributed directly as something social. Likewise,
in Mediaeval European society, the peculiarity of
the different natural individual labours is compatible
with their direct social distribution, so that the
relations between people as producers are identified
with the personal social relations feudalism consists
of. The same thing happens with collective labour
in the productive form based on family production:
the expenditure of each individual labour is directly
socially determined as part of the natural whole of
social work of the family unit. And the same thing would
happen, fourthly, with the alternative case analysed:
in global collective society or association of free men,
the planned distribution of social labour will also be the
distribution of the qualitatively determined labours
of each person. On the other hand, in commodity
production of the capitalist kind – since Marx considers
that the forms of commodity production before
capitalism only played a subordinate role in the context
of their corresponding dominant mode of production
(ancient, Asian, etc.) – the price of the commodities
appears in bourgeois awareness as a natural necessity
because ‘the objective appearance of the social
characteristics of labour’ is presented to them only
as the appearance of a reality but without an
understanding of that reality – and indeed their attitude
to earlier social forms is the same as that of Religions
with regard to other Religions: their own is the true
one because it is natural, the others are false because
they are artificial – and so it is impossible for them to
ask the crucial question correctly: why does production
take the commodity or value form in capitalism?
Because they do not understand that, economists think
that value is an attribute of things, whilst use value
seems to them an attribute of man (utility seems to
them to be something that involves the individual who
uses) which does not depend so much on its properties
as things; in other words: exactly the other way round.’
The scene we are describing has the same plot,
let us follow it alongside Marx’s narration and his
conclusions in a world ‘exactly the other way round’.
The scene begins with the ‘merchant’ going round
the antique shop of the ‘economist’. On the door a poster
reads: ‘El Chepa. I pay more than anyone for all kinds
of furniture and antique objects.’ The merchant enters
the establishment and walks through the realm of the
commodity, he is surrounded by sumptuary and utilitarian
objects of all kinds, and art objects. The ‘economist’,
engaged in a not quite ‘clean’ manual task, watches
him closely. From among all the commodities our
buyer has set his eyes on a religious figure, a kind of
episcopal reliquary in which the little saint is raised
on an enormous column that serves as funerary urn
and pedestal. The object has an obviously phallic
shape and before our eyes conjures up those
adjectives Marx applies to the fetishist character
of the commodity: phantasmatic, mystical, magical,
etc. The conversation of the two sycophants in front
of the little idol into which the commodity has been
transformed goes on for some time. The ‘merchant’
and the ‘economist’ converse and weigh up the
value of the product they have before their eyes
and at the same time gesticulate about its weight,
the origin of the hand carving, the symbolic value
given by its former owners, the different offers already
made for the fetish, etc., while, I repeat, they weave a
conversation typical of a buying and selling transaction,
bringing into play a representation of the social
character of the market. More than that, the parody
of their behaviour emphasises that if this scene at
the ‘summit’, in the highest of markets, is possible it is
due to the whole social and historical development,
hence the setting as an antique shop, because the
economic exchange is sustained by hundreds of
years of history. It is true that the antiques also allude
to the different stages of society which we may
regard as precapitalist, with allusions to Asian
antiquity, feudal society and even the family societies
that subsist in economic systems based on farming
and fishing, with those intersections between religious
objects and farming tools. Even the controversy
Marx takes up on the bases of the theft of the Roman
economy are embodied in the presence of various
objects – busts of emperors, oil lamps, coins, etc. –
but especially in the rarefied, illegal atmosphere that
imbues the whole scene and which will later confirm
the second setting of the representation, when
everything develops inside a gaol. Before that step
we must not forget to point out the allusion to Robinson
Crusoe who appears represented in a picture just
behind the ‘economist’ and which often frames the
main reflection of the scene. That fact that, unable to
find pictorial representations of Crusoe, the costume
designers modified a whole representation of John
the Baptist adds a certain irony to the scene. That
religious objects or pictures with holy subjects
predominate makes sense since it is a Spanish antique
shop where religion is the supreme old commodity.
Moreover, the allusion to the religious behaviour of
the economic laws of capitalism is evident, and so,
with the preponderance of religious objects of
Christianity the shop has been adorned with the odd
African idol and the body of some Eastern goddess.
The economic transaction ends up giving pound for
pound, note for note, the value of the commodity and
our buyer leaves the shop with the fetish at the ready,
as if he were carrying a weapon and not a religious
figurine. The second part of the scene, with the
reincorporation of the commodity into the social life
of the market in the arms of the ‘merchant’ takes
place in the yard of a gaol which is presented as an
example of the ‘world exactly the other way round’.
It is a very busy prison where a large number of affects,
communications and economic transactions are
coming into play. The irony of presenting the gaol as
the ‘society of free men’ which Marx talks of refers
directly to the critical analysis Marx himself makes of
capitalist society. Moreover, this joke is the plot line
of the film Nuestro culpable, to which the scene belongs.
To return to our story, we watch a second sycophants’
dialogue. Now the ‘merchant’ is in litigation with a
group of prisoners where we can identify the ‘worker’,
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