MARXIAN POLITICAL ECONOMY 55 of their labours., but are direct and obvious. Thus,, in this society again, The phenomenon of commodity fetishism has important implications for an understanding of social reality and modern bourgeois ideology. We shall not attempt an extensive, let alone exhaustive, treatment of the implications.but refer the readers instead to the excellent article by NGeras.^2 Commodity fetishism expresses its effects in two ways: as mystification and as domination. Mystification arises from the representation of social relations between persons as between things (their products as commodities), and essentially consists in regarding historically specific social relations as 'natural9 or "eternal9 relations. A classic example is the notion of capital in bourgeois economics. With the separation under capitalism of the means of production from the immediate producer (the worker) and the monopoly of ownership of the means of production by the capitalist class, these means now become capital. In this Marxian conception, capital is clearly seen as a specific social relation. But the bourgeois economist, who regards (though not necessarily consciously) the capitalist society as eternal and natural comes to identify means of production as such with capital, regardless of the society being analyzed. Thus the bow and arrow of the early hunter or the net of the ancient fisherman or the lathe owned by the modern capitalist, are equally capital for the economist. In this way a specific social relation, capital, is rendered into a natural property of means of production. A similar view comes to be held concerning commodities. In the early stages of commodity production, the non-commodity character of the economy pr edominates, and the historically specific character of commodities can still be clearly perceived. With the further development and eventual dominance of commodity production, however, the characters that stamp products as commodities, and whose establishment is a necessary preliminary to the circulation of commodities, have already acquired the stability of natural, self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher, not their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but their meaning.28 This quotation makes an important point: the roots of mystification are to be found not in the subjective inadequacies of the economist, but in the social reality itself. After all, commodities are an objective reality for commodity producers, means of production do confront workers as capital in bourgeois society, and these levels of objective reality, continuously and repeatedly experienced, acquire ^the stability of natural, self-understood, forms of social life.99 It follows, from the mystificatory aspect of commodity fetishism, that a scientific analysis of bourgeois society must go beyond the surface (phenomenal) level of