ABSTRACT
Karl Marx broached the problem of the damage that capitalism had caused to human life in the context of his analysis of the commodity form. Once use value undergoes its transformation into exchange value, concrete things become abstract, commensurable, and fungible commodities; their unique properties, which satisfy real human needs, are expunged. No sooner does a sensuous object emerge as a commodity than “it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.”1 Along with this abstraction from the sensuous qualities of objects and from their value for the satisfaction of needs, abstraction is also made from the concrete human labour that is involved in the production of commodities. Labour has been objectified and transformed into socially necessary labour-time, or “the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.”2 As a result, the commodity merely “reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”3 Finally, it is also the case that relations between the living human producers of commodities are transformed into relations between things; the circulation of commodities on the market determines relations between individual producers. Under capitalism, commodity exchange manifests itself “as an alien social power” that stands above individuals, producing their “mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them.”4 Commodities take on a life of their own to which human life has become passively subject. This inverted world, which personifies things and reifies people (Versachlichung der Personen5), reveals “the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities.”6
