ABSTRACT
We saw in the previous chapter that Marx opposed the exchange relations involved in commodity production because it alienated the participants from the social dimensions of human life. The market thus is alienation, which takes the form of human relationships being mediated through things (a process also described as reification) and therefore beyond human control, or alien to, direct mediation between humans themselves: ‘because men making exchanges do not relate to one another as men, things lose the significance of being human and personal property’.1 That criticism was somewhat softened by Marx’s recognition that ‘this objective connection is preferable to the lack of any connection’. He then added that ‘The alien and independent character in which [this connection, the market] presently exists vis a vis individuals proves only that the latter are still engaged in the creation of the conditions of their social life, and that they have not yet begun, on the basis of these conditions, to live it’.2
