Diamonds Are a Capitalist's Best Friends
Everyone knows that we as humans need only a few material things for survival (food, clothing, and shelter). Yet, the capitalist society in which we live today is centered around the production, marketing, and exchange of commodities (no matter how trivial and useless they may be). It follows then that capitalists, in their constant search for profit, must engineer reasons for us to buy their products. They must convince us that while yes, we can live without them, we cannot live happily without them. They do this by attributing seemingly magical personalitites to those products. This fetish, which is exemplified in every diamond ring, converts societal relations involving people into relations involving things. Since labor has become abstract, we are no longer conscious of the methods of human labor that produces commodities, and we are thus left with only the market factions to classify the value of these goods-and the qualities of our lives. To deepen our understanding, let us first examine what a commodity is and why it's so special. A commodity is anything produced for exchange-by its properties it satisfies some type of human desire. The odd thing about a commodity is it leads a "double life" so to speak. It is a pr
X hours of one kind of quality-less labor equals X hours of another kind of quality-less labor. Activities involving unlike skills, tools and operations can be thought to be the same-so that different products can be considered as equal. In this way, the purpose guiding labor is 'objectified'-it goes into the object. " During the Great Depression this is precisely what happened. Once a product has been put up for sale it obtains an attribute that is not naturally there -exchangeablitiy. The material objects in pre- and post-production differ. To fully grasp capitalist production we must recognize that value and use-value clash-that is, "alien" exchange dominates "natural" use. For a commodity to be bought, it must be or seem useful. One is the proper use, the second is improper. If the basis for comparing commodities is the amount of labor required for each, the question of what kind of labor we are dealing with arises. Much to its mortification agribusiness produced an "excess" of milk and pigs, causing prices to fall. Before work begins, the object already has a particular form derived from nature. In the act of exchange all these useful characteristics of the work product have not disappeared, and neither have the concrete forms of the labor required for their production: rather, they are all reduced to one, and the same sort of labor, human labor in the abstract. However, as commodities-as exchange-values-they are reduced to something measurable and comparable common to them all.
Common topics in this essay:
Commodities Capitalists,
,
useful labor,
prices profits,
useful labor treated,
relations involving,
abstract labour,
diamond ring,
quality-less labor,
labor treated,
exchange commodities,
labor abstract,
human labor,
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Acceptance Essays
