Understanding The Utility Of A Commodity

This intimate relationship between man and nature, his activity and the objects of nature, is the ‘appropriate’ relationship because worker is not capable of creating without nature, that is, without the sensual external world. Hence, the world is the material into which man invests his labor, through which he produces things, and without it he cannot live. However, in a capitalist society, such relationship does not exist and man is alienated from nature, from the products of his activity or work. Under capitalism, workers produce for the market rather than for their own use or enrichment. According to Marx, the object produced by labor in modern society stands as an alien being to the worker. His labor is embodied in the product he created, and this product is an objectification of labor which represents a loss to the worker, as well as servitude to the object. Hence, alienation occurs when worker lacks control over the products of his labor. Additionally, during the process of production, man’s labor are seen as much an object as the physical material being worked upon, since labor is a demand in modern society, which can be bought or sold. The more objects the worker produces, the fewer he can personally possess, and therefore the greater is his loss. For instance, in

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx identifies a dichotomy that is created and bolstered by the capitalist mode of production. In this mode of production, the dichotomy presents itself in a division of labor that forms of two kinds of people: capitalists, the owners of the means of production, and laborers, those who work under the domain of the capitalist. Marx harshly criticizes this mode of production, arguing that it exploits the laborer and estranges him from himself and his fellow man. According to Marx, this large-scale estrangement is achieved through a causal chain of effects that results in multiple types of alienation, each contingent upon the other. First, Marx asserts that under capitalism, the laborer is alienated from his product of labor. Second, because of this alienation from his product, man is also alienated then from the act of production. Third, man, in being alienated both from his product and act of production, is alienated from his species essence, which Marx believes to be the ability to create and build up an objective world. Finally, after this series of alienations, Marx arrives at his grand conclusion that capitalist labor causes man to be alienated from his fellow man. In this paper, I will argue in support of Marx’s chain of alienations, arriving at the conclusion that laborers, under the capitalist mode of production, cannot retain their species essence and thus cannot connect with one another, and exist in a world

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

This assessment of turning objects and persons into something of value is a fragmented yet archetypical manifestation of Marx’s greater philosophical works. The literary criticism that implements Marx’s theories of socialism and dialectics is the basis on interpreting literary works.

Marx believes that money has a misused transformative power in Bourgeois society, one which he argues, that we are currently subjected to. He claims that, “Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which

Next I would like to define and connect means of production and capital. The means of production refers to institutions or establishments, such as: factories, offices, or any places of business that are privately owned. Marx sees financial interest in these foundations as deficient in relation to the return on investment created by the workers who make them valuable. Under Marx’s theory of value, these establishments are only valuable as a result of the workers’ labor and not the financial or capitalistic investment. Capital can therefore be defined as the money

Marx’s conception of society has its grounds in a theory of action: as he put it, human beings make their own history. But Marx goes on to argue that they do this is circumstances which are not of their own choosing, and he develops an analysis of how action is organized by these circumstances as material conditions of production which structure and determine the social relationship that are primarily generated by the particular material forces of production utilized, which include not only raw materials but also the technology which is used to extract and work them into products (Jenks 15).

Marx makes the distinction between use-value and exchange-value when he writes, “As use-values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value” (MER 305). The food industry brings this to the forefront with how they treat their products; a chicken farmer yells “smells like money” as he passes by chickens in Food Inc. The chickens, albeit a use-value when they are consumed for nutrition, are seen as solely an exchange value by the corporate farmers. The chickens’ value is not manifested until the transaction between the farmers and the large firms5.

yield in wealth of the yield they take as compensation for their attempts. This extra work has been portrayed by Marx and others as surplus work. The extra thing made by surplus work was portrayed as surplus thing. Additionally, the social estimation of the surplus thing (as regularly chose in market exchange associations) was portrayed assurplus regard. Shortly we have most of the fixings critical to a by and large strict significance of class process. Class process is the social method that results in i) people performing surplus work, ii) the surplus things (of this work) being appropriated and iii) the movement of the surplus regard (fit as a fiddle or in monetary edge) to other

We see a point of commonality where the relation of the Marxism theory of commodity

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,

Marx viewed the ‘commodity’ as the most elementary form of modern wealth. The essence of the commodity is the

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

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

One of the theories the Frankfurt school scholars accept and discuss furthermore is Marx’s theory of ‘commodity fetishism’. According to Karl Marx, Commodity fetishism is “… in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor”. Commodity fetishism refers to an object being idealized for its astonishing features made by human labor that gets exchanged to monetary value once it hits the market and becomes fetishized. In short, the object’s value comes from the commodity, rather than from human labor that produced the object. Commodity fetishism is a topic where it critically challenges us especially since we live in the 21st century where media influences people