PHIL3395: Marx

Novy SP09

Notes on Lee Chapter 2 “Labor and Alienation”

Commodification

1. “Capitalism is a form of economic exchange premised on the generation of profit over investment through competition for … commodities”

1. Commodity: anything that is understood as a saleable unit

2. Dialectic of the Modern Commodity

i. Love

ii. Job Interview

2. All value is transformed to exchange value: He who dies with the most toys wins.

3. Primitive Communism: value of exchange is a sign of the relationships that characterize society

1. Intrinsic Value: derives from use value and its confirmation of these relationships

Money & Division of Labor

4. Means of production: site, raw materials, equipment, labor and identifiable market

1. Presupposes the appearance of a social relation of owner to “free laborer”

2. “Free Laborer’s value” = Ability to “dispose of his labor-power as his own commodity”

5. Mass production: individuality as extraneous in favor of substitutability

6. Value of the laborer: both the wage and what the wage can purchase

1. Commodities: individuate without individualizing the worker

2. Individuality is asserted through the means of individuality’s annihilation – consumption

Alienated Labor

7. Antagonistic struggle – “Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist”

8. Wage must insure reproduction, consumption, and profit

1. Aspiration to be like the capitalist, the “empowered other”

2. The worker’s wish to survive insures the capitalist’s victory

“It is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and … it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker”

3. Maniacal psychology– a willingness to sacrifice mind and body for a wage

9. Law of political economy (26 iv)

Alienation as Emasculation

10. Worker’s product (1) represents the worker to herself as mere labor, thus as (2) substitutable, & so (3) forces individuation via consumption; (4) leaving her alien to the activities of species-being

1. Alienation can only be experienced by beings of praxis

11. Women are commodified as a reproductive resource and hence a necessary material condition of – but not necessarily the subject – of praxis

1. Under capitalism, women begin as animal whereas men are reduced to animal

Alienation, Consumption, Family

12. Commodification of the family: the subsistence needs that govern the original structure of the family become a primary source of vulnerability to market forces

Marriage as Prostitution

13. Relationship is premised on an exchange value assigned to wife qua woman – her value as an instrument in production

14. Nature of the exchange is specifically material

1. Instruments are women’s bodies – sexual & reproductive services

2. Women are commodities to be exploited in common

i. Substitutability of material bodies for sexual/ reproductive labor

15. Men and women’s bodies represent substitutable labor and so are equally prostituted

1. There is both alienation & oppression for women: emasculated prostitutes