Invisible Hands
Via John Gruber, here is a striking series of photographs of workers in toy factories in China. I wish I had seen them yesterday, because this morning I did a midterm review in my social theory course and, in quick succession, students asked me about Smith’s idea of the invisible hand and about Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism.
Smith argued that the specialization encouraged by a market system liberated people from material want, but also freed them from having to spend all their time being “butcher, baker and brewer” for themselves. He used the example of a day-laborer’s wool coat, cataloguing some of the hundreds of people who directly or indirectly contributed to its manufacture and sale: “The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production …” An implication of Smith’s view is that we won’t much enhance our personal freedom by way of material self-sufficiency or by learning how to do everything for ourselves. Rather, freedom comes from becoming deeply integrated with and dependent upon an ever larger and more specialized system of production and exchange of commodities for money. The market frees you from a vast amount of tedious work by allowing you to buy the results of the much more specialized labor of others and granting you huge opportunity benefits in the process.
Marx agrees with Smith on the benefits of large-scale production and had as little desire for “the idiocy of rural life” as Smith had for the lonely farms of the Scottish highlands. And Marx also agrees that a central feature of market exchange is that people do not have to personally produce the things they consume, or give any thought to the people who do make those things. But for Marx the problem is that those producers completely disappear from view as human beings. The market system draws a veil between producers and consumers (and also between producers and the products of their own labor). The exchange of goods for money in the market effaces social relations between real people. Instead we see—and become fixated upon—the outward manifestations of those relationships, namely the finished goods, their prices, and the money used to buy them. Those things are just manifestations of real social relations, but we lose sight of the web of people engaged in producing these goods, and our own place in that web. And that is commodity fetishism: “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective feature stamped upon the product of that labour.”
The factory photographs are a window into both visions of the market. They are also a reminder that the two views are intimately related. In the Smithian picture, the existence of places like this is precisely what the invisible hand makes possible—it’s the whole point of specialization and a large free market. When Smith’s descendants want to emphasize the many benefits of market coordination, they typically begin with an vignette that makes the same point as the example of the day-laborer’s coat. For example, Paul Seabright’s excellent The Company of Strangers begins with the question, “How did the world know I needed to buy a shirt today?” Charles Wheelan’s Naked Economics asks “Who feeds Paris?”
These examples are intended to be revelatory. The intent is to draw back the veil, to reveal the complex system that lies behind a simple purchase, and to show people how their everyday livelihood is dependent on a preposterous number of other people, essentially all strangers concerned mostly for themselves. On the Marxian view, the fact that such examples are counterintuitive in the first place is an example of the problem. Normally we give no thought to the real invisible hands behind the invisible hand, and neither do we consider the substance of our relationship to them independent of the prices we pay for whatever we buy. For Smith, that’s the power of the market. For Marx, it’s the fetishism of commodities.