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.
This common “something” cannot be either a geological, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use-values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterized by a total abstraction from use-value….
Some topics in this essay:
Commodities Capitalists,
,
useful labor,
abstract labour,
useful labor treated,
quality-less labor,
exchange commodities,
human labor,
labor treated,
labour exchange,
labor abstract,
prices profits,
diamond ring,
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Approximate Word count = 1226
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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