Commodity and the Insatiable Apparatus Driving the World Economy

            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.