Marx's 'Capital' and ethical theory: A critique of fetishism in Bentham and Kant

In current discussions of Marxism and ethics, there has been little attempt to draw upon Marx's systematic critique of political economy. I argue that the critical method of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value can be generalized, yielding a critique of canonical modern ethical theories. By showing how Marx's use of the concept of fetishism of commodities is central to his critique of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, I provide a perspective for a Marxist critique of Kantian and Benthamite utilitarian ethical theories.; Marx's critique of political economy involves a reinterpretation and reconstruction of the labor theory of value formulated by Smith and Ricardo. Marx shows that exchange-value is a social form of appearance of the relations between the producers, rather than a "natural" property of all products of human labor. It is the latter interpretation of exchange-value, Marx argues, that led the political economists into the paradoxes of profit and wages and contributed to the decline of the classical school of political economy. This "naturalistic" interpretation of value is, according to Marx, a theoretical reflection of the fetishism of commodities.; I claim that similar theoretical expression of commodity fetishism is manifest in both Bentham's and Kant's projects of ethical theory. Bentham's articulation of utilitarianism as a calculus of pleasures and pains involves the notion of pleasure as a homogeneous quantifiable property of perceptions. I argue that this concept derives from the view of money as a "natural" phenomenon, a view which is the effect of fetishism. Kantian ethical theory reproduces the conception of a transcendental activity which is basic to the critical philosophy. I interpret this Kantian conception as absolutizing features of commodity production, like abstract labor, which are social forms of the capitalist labor process. This, alongside Kant's naive views about the "preeminent value" of money and "natural price," led him to formulate an ethical theory affirming, in his own words, the absolute worth or "dignity" of the person as noumenon against the "price" of man as phaenomenon.; I conclude that Marx's method provides grounds for a critique of Kantian and classical utilitarian ethical theory.