The Best Summary Of Marx, Ever

Let's take a break from posting incessantly about consumer electronics to talk some philosophy and political economy. Marx is actually not so bad to read once you try to write it yourself in English like a sensible person, so here goes...

Marx’s theories of political economy revolve largely around commodities, which are any objects that satisfy some human desire. Commodities have a dual nature as use-values and exchange-values. Use-value is the commodity’s direct ability to satisfy such desires via its application or consumption. Exchange-value is the commodity’s relative worth as compared to commodities of other kinds. This exchange-value is manifested in its monetary price. The exchange-value, being dependent on markets rather than pure usefulness, is unrelated to its worth as a use-value. A commodity exists in either of these forms and can be transformed from one to the other by the act of buying and selling. So long as it circulates among sellers, it remains an exchange-value, but when it is put to fulfill its natural function, it is then a use-value.

The main problem with capitalism according to Marx is that it estranges the worker from his labor. This is done in a number of ways. First of all, as the worker does not own the goods he produces, he is contributing more and more objects to a world that does not belong to him. Each object he creates which is not his expands the relative strength of the unattainable world in comparison to the world that is his.

The second kind of alienation relates to the motivation behind his labors. Under capitalism, the only motive for a worker to produce is his own survival, the challenges to which are forced upon him by external forces. Since he has no choice but to produce, his labor is essentially coerced and therefore does not belong to him but to the coercing forces. Rather than gaining things from his efforts, he gives his efforts to another and they are lost to him.

Another kind of alienation is loss of the worker’s human identity, or ‘species-being’. Marx says that man’s identity is completely tied to using the immaterial (labor) to convert ‘nature’ into objects. He makes the (somewhat dubious) claim that this transformation is man’s sole purpose in life. Since a man is alienated from his labor, he is subsequently alienated from his human identity.

The fourth kind of alienation Marx describes is the alienation between human beings. Because the worker loses his labors and his identity to an external master, who is necessarily another human being, he is naturally alienated from this master that takes so much from him.

Ultimately, the problem with alienation is not that it deprives men of goods and economic well-being (although this is important), but that it deprives a man of his humanity. A working man is essentially rendered a machine, devoid of the few things that can be said to truly belong to a person. The capitalist system forces a man to surrender his free will and his life activities, effectively enslaving him, with the important difference that at least slaves can claim to have a purpose and identity that belongs to them. Because of these deprivations, he argues, capitalism is the greatest form of exploitation.


This exploitation should be evident, he says, but it is obscured by a capitalist preoccupation he refers to as fetishism. Marx’s fetishism is the obsessive behavior by which members of a capitalist society measure everything in terms of money. Under capitalism, the cycles of life are understood by market forces that motivate the flow of capital and commodities, the most notable property of any object being its price on the market. Marx says that this outlook on economics and society is a fetish because it distracts from the true nature of the goods society depends on, namely the goods’ nature being the product of labor which is exploitative and alienating to the worker. This fetish allows the structure of the capitalist system to dictate the course of people’s lives.


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