Karl Marx, Commodity Fetishism, An Objective, Valuable For People Things

Producers are enablers. They encourage people to spend money on things they don’t need and aren’t necessities. Consumers are like drug addicts, they shop for things they don’t need and are constantly striving to acquire what they don’t have. “We Americans are beyond a simple, possessive materialism.” (Rose) Americans have developed a shopping problem. We buy things simply for the

The allure of precious metals and the shimmer of precious stones versus the blandness of the essential concepts of life: food, water and shelter, can be a difficult choice for some people. The hypothetical line between what is a need versus a want splits society tenfold, and is a major problem in world civilization today. The choices humans make on a daily basis determine the futures of thousands, so what are the choices in life that are driven by needs and wants? The choices that define needs and wants are greed, the desire to pursue wealth, and the desire to protect one’s self.

Consumerism leads to self-gratification and the loss of life’s important values such as friendship, love and religion; this is an ever-growing issue that manipulates and deceives society and has done so since the beginning of the technological age.

Marx’s commodity theory is a two-category theory; objects become commodities when they have more use than their standard value. When commodities are traded they can either have exchange or sign exchange value. Exchange value occurs when monetary value is placed on an object and is traded and sign exchange value is when a commodity is exchanged social status is obtained (Tyson 62). As Tiana goes along her adventure to achieve her goal of buying a building to open her restaurant she, as well as other characters use their commodities in hopes to gain something in

order to ascertain whether or not the roles of these concepts do help us to

Another facet the piece talks about are why we need to be concerned about this growing trend. We should be distressed about a civilization where entirely everything is up for sale. It is to avoid these two issues, inequality, and a different type of corruption. Inequality would pertain here to citizens, who live in a lower to a middle class; they find themselves living a lot more challenging than those who are wealthier. If we were only discussing items that were expensive such as boats and exotic cars, needing such items would not matter. The difference is, we are discussing that money can purchase more and

Hunger for luxury items and people’s strife for the brands and items they associate with being beyond reach is paramount for this system. It is this drive for items one can’t have that the author feels is one of the benefits of consumerism. He declares, “…the aspiration of the poor to

IT, according to Carr, has become affordable to all and therefore, it has been a commodity. He further argues that the use commodities do not lead to a completive advantage, and believes that IT has become commoditized for the following reasons:

According to Wilkins and Sanford (2009), there are several elements of a consumerism worldview; accumulating and using things brings fulfillment, money is power, we need just a little bit more, people are viewed as objects to consume, and if something ceases to fulfill me or meet my needs it should be discarded. With the idea that by accumulating and using things brings fulfillment, whether it be fulfillment of material things or fulfillment of emotional needs, this worldview neglects to fulfill our deepest emotional needs leaving us always desiring more to fill that void. Money is power leaves people always striving to accumulate wealth so they can have power and control over situations, because you are only important or significant if you have wealth. Also with the consumerism worldview, we always feel that we need a little bit more, because what you already have is never enough, due to material

What also characterizes market society is the emergence of the concept of “fictitious commodities”. Fictitious commodities refer to labor, land, and money (Polanyi 72). “fictitious” implies that they are actually not commodities (Polanyi 72). They are turned into commodities for the effective operation of market society (Polanyi 72). In market society, everything is provided as a commodity. As the major elements of industry, labor, land , and money need to be provided for maintaining productivity and they can only be provided when they are on the market for sale (Polanyi 72). Differently, “Under the feudalism and the gild system land and labor formed part of the social organization itself ” (Polanyi 69). Land were crucial for feudal order, status and function of which “were determined by legal and customary

The problem of such purchasing is that the natural satisfaction of needs is replaced by the artificial. A good example is the marketing of milk products in the Third World. In the 1970s the multinational food company Nestle advertised powdered milk for babies as an alternative to breast feeding in countries such as Kenya. The attractiveness of the product was enhanced by the positive image of development, modernity and technology that businessman projected to mothers. In this case, however, the results were tragic, because the product required sanitary conditions that were not available in those times. Therefore, many infants who were fed in this way faced illness and even death. Far from offering a diversity of choices for the satisfaction of needs, advertisement offers only one message: “purchase a commodity.”

False consciousness refers to the manner in which material, political and recognized practices in entrepreneurial culture deceive the public. False consciousness is resulting from the Marxist belief which recognizes a state of mind of a person or an assembly of individuals who don’t comprehend their class interests. A number of people who are academically affiliated with the Marxist practice trace the notions’ foundation to a philosophy initially established by Marx, well-known as commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is the notion that societies place a worth on merchandises separately from those they intrinsically have. For instance, a diamond, as soon as it grew into a commodity, is not merely a rock with the properties of a rock

In Karl Marx’s quotation from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1884, Marx claims that in a capitalist society, people value commodities more than human life as they are drawn into the belief that having more possessions leads to greater social status. Marx references the idea that everyone has the goal of driving others to “economic ruin” (Marx, 170) which suggests that humans have an innate greedy nature. By comparing the “quantity of objects” (Marx, 170) to “an extension of the realm of the alien powers,” (Marx, 170), Marx’s language in using “alien power” (170) implies that human greed is supernatural and is imposed by forces outside of a person’s control, for example, the desire of societal acceptance. The word

Hydro Flask is one of many different commodities that shape the economic and social world, and it finds its value through its relationship with the consumer. Karl Marx in, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof,” comments, “Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values” (Marx). All commodities in our world are subjective to the consumers, and therefore can’t hold a finite worth. While one might believe that a Hydro Flask is priced at fifty dollars, others might value their

Here the idea of a fetish becomes important. A fetish, by Freud’s description is the male impulse to eroticize objects or female body parts, which derives from a disavowal of a material lack (of the penis on the mother’s body). The second understanding of the word is through Marx’s account of the felicitation of the commodity: at the moment of exchange, the commodity appears to be separate from the workers who product it; the ‘special social character of private labours’ disavowed.