How Does The Fetishism Exploitive The Nature Of Capitalism

Division of labour is also credited with the rise of trade between different areas, the rise of capitalism, and increasingly complex manufacturing and industrialization. For Karl Marx, the production portion of Capitalism signalled great trouble. He believed production in Capitalist society worked in a way that the rich factory owner benefited and the poor factory workers lost. In his manner of reasoning, the Capitalist system was inherently meant to benefit the rich and exploit the poor: “All the bourgeois economists are aware of is that production can be carried on better under the modern police than on the principle of might makes right. They forget only that this principle is also a legal relation, and that the right of the stronger prevails in their ‘constitutional republics’ as well, only in another form.”[ii] Marx’s view of society and the world lead him to believe that humans create change in their lives and in their environment through practical activity in the practical world.

Marx believed that machines were a sign of progress in society and he was not opposed to it. However, it has negatively influenced employees globally. According to Marx, these machines caused workers economic impoverishment as it impacted their wages.. The wage a worker received was influenced by the use value and exchange value of the workers labour. Marx claimed that the there is the labour commodity and the capitalist commodity. The workers exchanged their commodity, known as their labour power for the capitalist commodity, which is the money. The wages are the price of the labour that the workers put forth. Often times, they do not pay workers a quality price for what they earn or how much work they do. They are constantly looking for bargains and people who do not sell their work for much. Industry’s try their best to get inexpensive materials, enhanced machines, and cheaper wage workers in order for them to decrease the amount of money coming out of their pockets. Marx believed that due to the unavoidability of capitalism, business owners are basing their business activities solely on the attainment of profit. For that reason, workers will continue to be replaced with machines causing business owners to decrease their spending on a workers’ labor power, leading the unemployment rate to increase. Marx states that value of labour power decreases causing wages to decline.

"Instead of 'exploitation,' growing out of the nature of production, our industrial evolution shows certain evils of competition imposed by an 'unfair' menace." Since Marx was wrong to assert that ownership was the source of oppression, Commons held that appropriation of the means of production was no answer to the laborers' needs. (Dawley, pg 181-183)

In regards to the labour-capital relation within a traditional capitalist corporation Marx & Engels (2007) refer to the dialectic between the capitalists (or bourgeoisie) who own the property and the means of production and the laborers (or proletariat) who own no property and are obligated to sell their labour to the bourgeoisie to gain substance. For Marx & Engels, this labour market is inherently fraught with tension, since the interests of the capitalist and labourers are diametrically opposed, and the balance of power between capitalists and labourers tips further in the favour of the capitalists. Because workers have nothing to sell but their labour, the bourgeoisie are able to exploit them by paying them less than the true value created by their labour. Furthermore, because of the unequal positions of capitalist and labourer, labourers must work for someone else- they must do work imposed on them as a means of satisfying the needs of others. As a result, labourers inevitably experience alienation which Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) summarizes as the separation of individuals from the objects they create, which in turn results in one’s separation from other people, from oneself, and ultimately from one’s human nature.

Marx also proposes the important point that “capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed -- a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market” (F. Engels., K. Marx, Feb. 1847).

Marx’s analysis of capitalism begins with an investigation of the commodity because the wealth of capitalist nations is essentially “an immense collection of commodities” (Chapter 1). Marx differentiates between the use-value and the exchange-value of any given commodity. The use-value of a commodity refers to its qualitative ability to satisfy a human need, while its exchange-value is the “quantitative relation… in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind” (Chapter 1). Therefore, exchange-value is not an intrinsic quality of a commodity; it is only discovered in comparing a fixed quantity of commodity A to a fixed quantity B. Since differing quantities of these two commodities appear to have the same value,

In Marx’s clarification of why he calls this fetishism he at the start points out the mystery of exchange value and those who is not successfully use the right scientific understanding to see the link with abstract human labor. Nevertheless, the analogy has other side of the coin. Just like religious fetishism provides power over its believers, commodity fetishism lets the market “to rule the producers instead of being ruled by them,” or as he says it afterwards: “the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him”.

Karl Marx’s ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ is a concept analyzing the how expropriation of populations within a society effects the development of capitalistic modes of production. The specific expropriation of populations observed by Marx’s ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ concept consists of the historical process by which the working man is separated from his instrument of labor; consequently, leading to a polarized market stratified based on commodity ownership. While defining this stratification system, Marx does not equate commodity ownership to materialistic goods, but narrows the term to only include individual’s interaction with the labor market. Furthermore, this commodity based stratification ultimately fosters the perpetuating

Marx believed that commodities often receive extreme, unnecessary attention, and are valued much more than they should be in terms of their use and actual value, and thus commodities begin to control our wants and possessions. There is an ambiguous relationship of a product and the labor that was put into that product. By only viewing the exchange value, they miss the social relations of production. We are giving great value and causal power to something that in reality didn't really do anything for us at all. We value things more than the process. This concept of commodity fetishism ties in with most of Marx's concepts of alienation, and exploitation because these commodities become so important to the capitalist in that he will go to any

The philosophy of Karl Marx begins with the belief that humans are inherently cooperative with common characteristics and shared ends. To human beings, life is considered an object and therefore, humans make their “life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness” (Tucker 76). In other words, humans are able to think, imagine, and “produce even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom” (p. 76). It exemplifies that idea that humans not only have the capability to create things for survival but express themselves in what they produce, within the standards of the human race or universally. When capitalist wage-labor enters the picture, it forces these shared ends and the freedom of expression in human production to cease, causing a rise of competitiveness among

Karl Marx and John Locke both place a great deal of importance in both labour and property in discussing their political philosophies. At first glance, the two thinkers seem to possess completely different ideas on property, its importance, and the form of society which should grow from it. The disparity in their beliefs is evident, but they share a similar approach to labour and acceptable conditions while constructing philosophies which inherently attack each other. Locke’s suggestion that capitalism is a natural political progression can only be accomplished when the worker himself becomes a commodity to be traded, a transformation which Marx identifies as a major problem with capitalism. In looking at capitalism

According to Karl Marx “Commodity Fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade”.

Not only is the worker alienated from his labour, but he is also separated from the result of his labour - the product. This is the most obvious manifestation of the alienation of the worker; he has no power over what he produces. The wage contract ensures that the products of labour are surrendered to the capitalist, who then sells them on the market, and pays the worker a wage. Marx points out that the alienation of the product is double - not only is the worker separate from his own product, but that product, as increasing the power of capital, actually weakens the worker's position. (4) Marx refers to the product of labour as 'the objectification of labour'. The worker's labour objectified is used against him in a capitalist

A commodity, according to Marx, is an external object that satisfies human wants as a use-value while functioning as an exchange-value that enters into exchange with other commodities (303-304). On one hand, the particular properties of an object, made possible by the particular kind of human labour embodied in it, define the utility of a commodity and hence its use value, which cannot be measured quantitatively due to the incommensurability across the diverse categories of utility. On the other hand, the exchange value, determined by the socially necessary labour time required for producing the commodity (306), establishes quantitative equivalences among the otherwise incommensurable use-values, acting as the only media through which the value of a commodity, independent of its use-value, manifests itself in exchange (305). It follows that to qualify as a commodity in Marx 's definition, an object has to contain human labour in it, must possess some utility, and finally needs to be able to serve as a use-value to others in order for its value to assert itself in exchange (307-308).

Karl Marx makes many important points in his writings about how society at his time was being oppressed by industrialization and the beginning of capitalism. Marx believed man was being alienated from his labor in four different ways. The Alienation of the worker from the work he produces is the first way man alienates himself from his labor. This means man is alienated from the product of his labor. The product's design and the manner in which it is produced are determined not by its actual producers, nor even by those who consume products, but rather by the business owners. The business owner controls the labor and owns the means of production. In other words, the business owner gains control of workers and gains the beneficial effects of his work by