The
world economy in the twenty-first century remains as dependent on commodification
now as it did during the industrialization of the world's core nations. However,
the endless accumulation of capital, and increasing proletarianization of an expanding
working class has produced a new step in Marx's theory of alienation; as
workers become increasingly engrossed by the commodities they produce, e.g. new
technologies placing demands on a laborer which increases the synthesis of labor
and existence, the worker becomes an extension of a given commodity, abolishing
any estrangement from the commodity that had arisen from the capitalist
exploitation of wage labor. Are we living in a post-alienated society?
The
operation of the means of production, solely by those wage laborers that have previously
become alienated within the capitalist system, are the very consumers that much
of the world's general commodities are intended to be sold to. The wage laborer
(particularly the unskilled laborer) is thus exploited twofold: as an
individual given limited income for sustenance, while profit is made by the owner
of the means of production from this very human labor (and therefore earning
less than one's worth), and being profited by in the marketplace by purchasing
the very goods that they (as a class) have produced- at a higher price than the
cost of production plus cost of labor, providing the capitalists with further
profit via the income of the laborer. The entrepreneurs of the capitalist world
economy have therefore produced profound psychological effects on the laborers.
Herbert Marcuse, in One-Dimensional Man
tells of these psychological implications:
...the extent to which this civilization transforms the object world into an extension of man’s mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. (9)
If alienation of the laborer in
regard to the commodity produced is questionable, then the commodity must be
the central tenet to the worker's very existence. Marx however, argues in favor
of the existence of the alienation of the laborer, but the capitalist world
economy in the twentieth and twenty first centuries have evolved into the commoditization
of such rudimentary resources such as genetic material and drinking water,
therefore calling into question the intended sanctity between the individual
and the material world, which, according to dialectical materialism, influences
all human thought. Life forms, including human life, are being gradually
commoditized. To seek alienation during the rapidly globalizing twenty first
century is to cease to exist.
Prompting
this synthesis of laborer and commodity is an endless accumulation of capital,
which to Immanuel Wallerstein is the priority of the modern world-system (24). As
long as this endless accumulation takes precedence, the proletarianization of
society expands. But is endless accumulation truly endless? Is there a breaking
point, perhaps in the form of revolution? The exploitation of the working class
in the pursuit of capital has used globalization as its vessel, but what
happens when the mobility of capitalism has reached the final geographic
boundaries?
Imperialism,
insofar as its role as a perpetrator of bourgeois interest, is a tactic, along
with colonialism, allowing the expansion of the capitalist world economy into
unchartered territory. The annexation and occupation of foreign lands during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the oppression of indigenous
populations allowed the United States to express its economic interests.
Capitalism and the pursuit of endless accumulation is inherently mobile, which
requires the bureaucratic elites to justify invasions of foreign lands.
Economic interest has no geographic boundaries. This mobilization is perhaps
capitalism's greatest asset, and is one of the most observable, along with
class struggle.
In
Economy and Society, Max Weber claims,
"imperialist capitalism, especially colonial booty capitalism based on
direct force and compulsory labor, has offered by far the greatest
opportunities for profit" (918). So, if profit takes precedence over
humanitarian needs, is the capitalist commodity a new god in a post-Christian era? Perhaps the progression into a socialistic state will remove the fetishistic drive for commodification and shake it from atop its ivory tower, where, as Tolstoy would have it, the kingdom of god will reside within each of us.
