Last Edited Aug 24, 2025: Made some small grammar edits.

“The less you eat, drink, and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

― Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Whether you like or dislike him, Karl Marx is one of the most influential figures in modern intellectual history. Along with his good friend, philosopher, and collaborator Friedrich Engels, their analysis of capitalism and the political economy is profound and complex. It is riddled with numerous philosophical ideas, metaphors, and contradictions that continues to be studied by many intellectuals today.

Together, Marx and Engels laid out the foundations for modern sociology. Their ideas led to the reinvention of many policies within the social, political, and economic arena. Their thoughts also led to numerous revolutions. Marx and Engel’s intellectual influence cannot be ignored or denied. Their ideas must be examined carefully.

Today, I will introduce some of the basic ideas of Marxism. I will talk about class struggle, fetish commodity, labour theory of value, labour exploitation, alienation, all the way to the famous Marxist notion of revolution. The discipline of Marxism has evolved a lot since 19th century. This post won’t cover much on how these ideas have changed over time. But I will try to lead us into the territories of psychoanalysis near the end.

Marx once pointed out how to be radical is to grasp things by its roots. So today, let us together, grasp capitalism by its roots.

_{As a gesture of gratitude, I want to thank those who inspired me in writing this post. Whether you are the professor who introduced me to Marx 10 years ago which kick started this piece, the stranger who can’t stop talking about Sonny Angels and Labubus, the charming lady I once met who told me she studied sociology (Eashel lol), or those who unknowingly gave me the perfect real life examples that I ended up using in this piece of writing—I want you all to know that I appreciate you! 🫡}

Labour Theory, Value, and Exploitation

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” —Adam Smith

One of the main ideas we need to understand in Marxist thought is Labour Theory of Value (LTV). LTV consists of concepts between the transformation of money (M) into a commodity (C) and back into money (MCM); and the transformation of commodity into money, and back into commodity (CMC). LTV is often used as a loose concept that is applicable to many different socio-economic systems, and not just capitalism. However, Marx never called any of his ideas “Labour theory of value”. It is something intellectuals used to associate Marx with; and is most famously seen in the works of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. But since it is a helpful concept to understand Marxist positions, I will use it to show you his ideas on labour and value along with his famous concept of labour exploitation.

While LTV is associated with economics of Smith, the most important thing we need to know is that Marx was not an economist—even if his works led to sharp responses from (bourgeois) economists. Marxist ideas should be considered as a form of philosophy where he was deeply fascinated with surplus value (profit) and how commodity objects (the things we buy) are produced by workers that capitalists hire to generate even more money (MCM). In return, Marx argued that this materialist system creates every social relationship between people, all the way to how people view themselves and how they communicate, have relationships, and thinks.

The basic principle of labour involves how humans take natural resources and transforms them into merchandises and other goods that are sold. In modern society, the capitalist buys labour power to produce goods to sell, where the capitalist makes surplus value on the products that the labourer produces. Another important characteristic of capitalism is privatization, which means that nearly every company is privately owned where all the products produced are owned by the capitalist.

Value is distinct from price. Value sets the price of a commodity, such as how money is used to represent the value of an object. The general value of an object does not change unless something affects how it is produced. If a town sells apples imported by horses, it is safe to assume that the value of apples will remain relatively constant unless something significant changes. For example, if this town suddenly builds train tracks or new bridges, the value of an apple might drastically change due to how it gets transported. As a result, this may change the price of apples.

Most importantly, in order for the capitalist who is selling apples to make a profit, they would have to set the price higher than however much they paid them for. The capitalist who sells the commodity object at a slightly higher price than what they bought them for does not set the price above the “value” of the object. Rather, they make a profit because they bought them for less than what they are valued; such as from the people who put the labour into it and produced them. In this sense, the farmer who is selling the apples functions similar to the modern employee. We will get a better understanding of this as we move along.

One problem that I just introduced is the concept of value and its relationship with commodity objects. Marx makes a distinction of value by categorizing it between “use value” and “exchange value”. A hammer has use value because it is a tool used to construct objects. The reason people would purchase a hammer is because they have a use for it. But if a hammer has use value, why would anyone sell it in the first place? A commodity object is produced when the seller makes hammers for the sake of it being sold for a profit. For the seller, this hammer holds exchange value. Money (capital) is used as a representation of such value as a currency for exchange.

Many of us today understands Adam Smith’s concept of value through supply and demand. If the supply for a commodity was limited and people wanted it, the value would increase. And if the commodity were abundant and no one wanted it, the value would decrease. Marx however, saw a more original cause which determines value. It can be best seen between commodities where supply and demand are equal, yet still costs differently. If value is determined by supply and demand that are in perfect equilibrium, why would commodities have different prices? If a piece of lettuce and a race car are both in equal supply and demand, shouldn’t they cost the same? Marx argues that what sets the value of commodities isn’t simply determined by supply and demand or any necessary subjective market forces. Rather, value is created from all the different types of abstract labour that are put into producing that commodity.

Let us start understanding this through “skilled” and “unskilled” labour. The idea here is that, a skilled labourer has a higher value in society because they require more labour time to be produced. For example, since a doctor requires a lot of labour time to train, where they have to go through so much formal education and training, they would be valued more in the market. By contrast, an unskilled labourer such as a janitor requires far less training, hence less valuable. They will have to work three or four times as much to make the same amount of capital as those who had much more labour time invested into them. Thus, we can say that the value of a doctor equals to all the labour time it took to produce them where their services and labour becomes a commodity object to be sold. Labour produces value which sets the price of a certain product (in this case, the doctor; or in previous case, the race car vs lettuce). The more labour time spent to produce another form of labour or commodity, the higher value the commodity would be and the more money it would cost for the commodity and/or their services.

So far, everything should be easy to understand because we experience them everyday. Before we return to labour and value, let us also understand two basic types of exchange in commodities known as CMC and MCM. In CMC (Commodity, Money, Commodity), commodity is turned into money and transformed back into commodity. In this scenario, nothing of value changes because you are exchanging a commodity object for another with equivalent value. For example, if I’m a farmer and I have grown more apples than I can consume, I can trade these extra apples for money which lets me use it to buy spare tools of an equal value so I can grow more apples. In this scenario, the value between the apples and exchange for tools are equal. Only that the way I use them are different.

In MCM (Money, Commodity, Money), money is used to buy a commodity which gets changed back into money where the amount exchanged might not be identical on both ends. A good example of this in modern practice is investing. In MCM, the goal is to accurately speculate and make more money than what I initially put into my investment and not gamble my money away. If I use money to buy a pair of expensive limited edition sneakers, my hope is that I can sell them for even more money in the future. But there is also a chance that I may lose money due to its decrease in demand.

One of the main problems Marx has is with MCM and how money is used as an end in itself to generate even more money. For Marx, the most valuable commodity in capitalism is labour power. Imagine that I am no longer buying a pair of limited edition sneakers as my commodity object. Rather, I am a wealthy person who is now using my money to start a new business where I purchase workers with the goal that the labour I buy will help me produce commodities to sell. I am now turning labour into a commodity by using money to buy people with specialized labour skills (engineers, doctors, scientists, teachers, etc.) so they can help me produce even more money for me.

Suppose I am a capitalist who is about to invest millions of dollars in my new company where I want to buy labour to help me build houses to sell. I am going to hire project managers, supervisors, carpenters, excavators, electricians, plumbers, dry wallers, painters, and many different trades. In an ideal capitalist world, the wages I pay them in exchange for their labour power to build these homes will give them an ability to buy their own food, have a place to live, and hopefully allow them to own a home and build their own family. The wages I pay them lets them reproduce children who creates more labour for society in the future. But the problem Marx saw was that the labour that I hired these people for actually creates much more value in these houses than what I paid them for. Yet, this extra value is not kept or owned by the trades, but are privately owned by me, the capitalist, who keeps it all for himself. This extra value that is produced from their labour power that I keep is called “surplus value” (profit).

But now that the trades have finished building these houses for me, I decided to not sell them, but rent them out instead. This makes me a landlord who rents out these privately owned homes to people who must pay me a set amount of rent every month. This rent (capital) is earned by the tenant who works every day, where they sell their labour as portions of it are kept by their bosses as profit. And at the end of each month, they must also pay me a portion of this labour as rent. Regardless of whether the rent I acquire from these tenants are enough to support my ownership of these homes, the rent they pay me is actually an exchange of no particular labour value.

This is because as a landlord, I did not exercise any labour to create value in these homes since I hired people to build it for me. The people who created value of these homes were the construction workers who built it—people who I paid them for far less than the value of the actual house that they produced for me. In fact, it might make more sense for tenants to pay the workers who created the value of the house than someone like me, who did nothing other than spend the millions that I earned from reaping off surplus values via investing in the labour power of companies from another industry. Yet, the tenants do not pay the workers because I own the title of the properties.

The landlord’s job does not produce any value because the value was created by the people who exercised their labour to build the homes. As landlord, I’m simply there to extract the tenant’s hard earned money that they produce every month so I can go on vacation every day. Even those who attends these homes for regular maintenance, the DIY materials I might buy, or the future trades I might hire to help me renovate them are likely paid for with the wealth I extract from these tenants. Meanwhile, the state government enforces and supports my private ownership, where if these tenants don’t pay, they will be evicted by the police; even when housing is a fundamental right and a necessity to human life.

While this latter example of landlord and tenant resembles closer to the ideas of Smith than Marx, it is one reason why leftists are against markets that turns housing into an investment rental since they are designed to siphon wealth from the working class (you also see similar structure in franchises such as McDonald’s). Meanwhile, the same thing can be seen in big banks that approves mortgages to homeowners who lives in the home, or landlords who rents out their properties. Just like landlords, financial banks creates no value on their own where it relies on extracting other people’s labour so to accumulate wealth such as by charging interest. And by the time the landlord pays off their $800,000 house, they may have paid an extra $50,000 in interests; even when the house was mostly paid by extracting wealth from tenants. Perhaps this is why we often see cultural traditions that encourage people to rent and own a home through ideologies of “individualism”, “independence” and “freedom”, even when these are ideological fantasies so to make people sustain the power structures of capitalism. The housing market requires people to endlessly buy and consume in order for capitalists to accumulate wealth. I will return to this concept of ideology later.

In capitalism, most labourers cannot solely live on the type of work and commodity objects they produce.
If all someone does is grow apples, they would also need a house to live in, clothing, and other types of food to eat. Hence in capitalism lies the “free market” where we exchange commodities for money and buy what we need and want. At certain points, our labour and skills can become so specialized that we don’t even know how to make other commodities or what we are making as a whole. We can think of engineers who are assigned to design one specific micro part of a machine, where they don’t exactly know how the entire machine might work on a macro level. Loosely speaking, this is what Marx refers as the “alienation of labour”.

One of the fundamental goals of capitalism is to produce commodities as cheap and as efficiently as possible, where businesses competes in the market while making as much money as they can. It does so by finding new ways to reduce labour when producing a commodity. What used to take 10 months to build a house can now be built in 10 weeks using prefabricated methods. Since labour is the most expensive part of a commodity object, the less labour required to build a house, the cheaper it may become.

When capitalism reaches a point where maximum efficiency is squeezed out of every worker, they will turn to machines, computers, and AI which would help do most of the heavy lifting labour. The purpose is to make more wealth while creating cheaper labour through the process of automation. As labour is reduced, people who contribute to the production of these commodities becomes simplified, where their labour become less skilled. And the less skill the labour has, the lower their wages will be and the easier they can be replaced. Many of us can already see how this will lead to bigger issues in society, where the wages people earn will no longer be able to provide them with adequate food, housing, and the ability to support a family. In some industries, people are even paid to produce products that replaces their own labour. We can think of the tech industry where people are hired to advance artificial intelligence that will likely one day replace their own jobs.

As less people are needed to develop computer programs, do data entry, build a house, teach, diagnose health symptoms, manufacture t-shirts, microchips, or grow crops, it will lead to significant job loses where people are required to move to other industries that might be experiencing the same thing. This is why so many jobs today are under threat with the surge of AI. Job markets will be filled with more people trying to sell their labour and compete for opportunities that will become increasingly scarce. Whereas companies will focus all their energy on finding ways to extract more wealth from their labourers and machines so they can create wealth for themselves—as opposed to helping workers create their own.

Automation becomes a big part in reducing labour power so that products can compete at a cheaper price and be manufactured more efficiently. But it can also produce a form of exploitation where workers are paid significantly less than what they produce with their labour. Perhaps we can think of Apple and other big corporations who outsources cheap labour in other countries to produce their commodity objects of iPhones and MacBooks. We can even think of big oil companies or businesses “donating” (investing) money into universities to produce more workers so to help them make more money in the future.

This is the basic principle of what Marx refers as the exploitation of labour. It is an exploitation of labour in the sense that, as someone who just graduated from business or trade school, no matter how much I get paid by the capitalists who hired me, the work and labour I do for them are always worth much more than what I am being paid for. The capitalist who privately owns the company reaps and takes a portion of my labour power and pockets it for themselves behind my back.

If every coffee sells for $7, and you were a barista who gets paid $18 an hour and trained to make 30 drinks in one hour, your employer would only need you to make three drinks in one hour for them to cover your labour cost (whether this wage is livable is a another problem altogether). The money made from the remaining 27 drinks are used to pay for your benefits, store lease, maintenance, tax, insurance, and other utilities where the final portions of it pays the people who hired you. The remainder is known as profit that companies keep. What we can see with this example is how there is a class hierarchy where you have the worker, manager, district manager, vice president, CEO, investment shareholders, etc. who reaps a portion of labour power from the workers—the people who actually makes the shop run. And as wealthy capitalists invests money into the company that earns them even more, it grants them the power to buy more labour power by hiring more people; or develop machines that replace them so to produce more money.

In a similar way, an average oak tree found in the forest won’t have much value until someone puts labour into it by cutting it down, processing it, and turns it into material goods. In turn, these materials gets bought by suppliers and sold to builders which gets transported to a job site. The carpenter will take said materials and puts even more labour into it which transforms it into something else for a home builder. The act of putting labour into an object increases its value. This allows the builder to sell the entire package for significantly more money to a buyer—a price that represents the actual value of the house through all the labour put into it by the workers. And whether this home builder, such as myself who invested millions to buy materials and hired trades workers, pays them enough so they can live a good life is another question altogether. Luckily, I’m a douche bag and there are no minimum wage laws, so I pay them $1 an hour to keep all the surplus value for myself!

This is one reason why Marx was supportive of work unions where he saw how the power of united workers can negotiate better and livable wages from their employers. For example, an entire country’s unionized teachers that goes on strike can send a very powerful message to the state government who reaps their labour for helping the country produce future labourers. But little did Marx realize that even many unions today have become more like a corporation trying to make a profit off their labourers than it is about fighting for their wages. We can see some trades unions hiring numerous new apprentice workers and have them work under one journeyman. But when these apprentices gain experience and their wages increase, they will be laid off where unions hires more apprentices to keep labour costs down.

Every person in society is measured by their ability to work and produce commodities. In contemporary society, we often talk about the “1%”, “middle class”, and the “working class”. Marx however, only identifies two social classes: the “proletariat” working class and the “bourgeois” capitalist class. If you are someone who sells nothing but your ability to work, then you are in the working class. If you are someone with capital who buys labour power to work and make money for you, then you are a capitalist.

The Fetish Commodity

“If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?” —Karl Marx

Now that we have a basic understanding on labour theory and how capitalists buys labour to make profit, let us try to understand some of its social dimensions. When Marx speaks about the value in commodities, he is not simply concerned about the capital values that are found in commodity objects or in labour, and how capitalists reaps a portion of said value for themselves. He is also concerned about the actual social relationships that lies within the commodity objects we buy, which gets concealed as a “secret” through the function of ideology.

Let us first understand what fetish commodity means. Fortunately, Wikipedia’s definition is quite accurate (this an old definition that is no longer found on the site):

“…Commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value.^“

Fetish commodity is when people ignore the social relationships that lies behind every commodity object they consume. Commodities makes it appear like its value changes based on supply and demand, even when its actual value changes due to its shifts in underlying social relations—namely its abstract labour. In fetish commodity, we believe it is the object via supply and demand which holds value, even when it is the social relations behind it which holds and produces its value.

Marx did not like the idea that the social relationship between labour and products are concealed behind the commodity object like “magic”. The idea of fetish commodity highlights how we buy into something where its original labour and social relationships are hidden behind the consumed product—such as the brand new house you just bought might be built by temporary workers. This secret concealment of the commodity object functions as a form of ideology. It is like watching the new fancy commercials selling their latest revolutionary phone or laptop that will change the future of humanity, where the commercial might’ve been edited by five unpaid or poorly paid interns.

Suppose you went to buy a new Apple iPhone, did you think about the person who made the phone when you bought it? Did you think about all the abstract labour and social relationship in producing each and every single part of the phone or laptop? Truth is, most people did not think about all the labour time and social relations behind the product, such as the worker assembling the phone, the people who designed each piece of hardware, where they came from and how it was made and got transported, which are all concealed behind the product you just bought. In fact, the iPhone may even be produced by poorly paid individuals hired by the capitalist (they are). And when you bought the phone, all you thought of was the phone itself—almost as if you are fetishizing over this shiny new object over its social relationships. For Marx, nearly everything people buy functions in similar ways—whether this is a new house, a cup of coffee, or lettuce at the grocery store. When you buy a product, you are buying into an object where you “forgot” what lies behind it: which is all the abstract labour time, social relationships, or the different forms of exploitation and violence it might’ve produced.

Moreover, what we begin to see is how fetish commodity creates an inverted relationship between object and subject within a commodity producing economy. Such inversion takes place when the labourer as subjects becomes a commodity object where they can be bought and consumed by the capitalist. At the same time, it is also the commodity produced by the labourer that commands the social relationships between people they buy, detaching them away from the social relationships that lies behind it; where people might’ve risked their lives to produce. Instead of seeing the market as social relationships between people which creates all these products in the market. Capitalism makes it seem like it is a relationship between the consumer and commodity objects. This type of logic is the fundamental function of ideology which conceals the conflicts and contradictions that lies within social relationships behind not just all the objects we buy, but the cultures, laws, and rules we abide to in our everyday lives.

One result this leads to is the way commodity objects becomes the deciding factor between how social relationships are established. For example, we can think of how the social relationship between two merchants revolves around commodity objects. We can see something similar between the real estate agent with their client through the home that they are buying, where their relationship is determined by the commodity object of the home. Or the relationship between the manager and employer; the latter who hired the former to produce a form of commodity labour (i.e. services, etc.). It is also like two people who takes interest in the commodity fetish of various sports, or things like cars where they become friends or starts a romantic relationship that is defined by these interests. It can even take form as going to concerts with your friends where the performer functions no differently to the commodity object or product who conceals all the labour behind it which made the concert along with the phenomenon of “fame” possible.

Furthermore, we can even see some of this in dating where people view themselves and others as products to be consumed where they exchange various values that they have. For example, people may see their personal qualities, the money they have, sex, occupation, physical appearance, etc. as a form of value where they trade for things they want from the other person. They become something like a commodity with use and exchange value—some of which are determined by market forces and ideologies. Labour value may come to influence and determine what love and relationship might look like, where some might want to marry a doctor or lawyer, or someone with “high value” that is determined by society, and not by the person. Dating culture and love becomes affiliated with economic exchange. It transforms into something like an “economy”, even when this is far from the experience of love. And just like the work place, people might compete with others for certain individuals, where some will try to become a commodity object or a competition to be won over by others. As a result, we might end up being in a relationship with someone who resembles more as a commodity object than an actual person—which is a side effect produced by alienation.

Perhaps we can now see how our social relationships between two parties are defined through their fetish of commodity objects or how much (value) someone else has; and less from any meaningful social bonds where people share what they do not have such as their deepest fears and vulnerabilities. Instead of being a social bond between two people, it becomes a bond between people and commodity objects, to the point where the relationships in our lives are seen as a commodity to be invested in and bought.

Base, Superstructure, and Alienation

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.” —Karl Marx

One definitive outcome that fetish commodity produces is what Marx famously refers as alienation. It is a term borrowed from German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, where the subject gets alienated from themselves and leads to an experience known as “estrangement”. Early in this post, I introduced this concept of alienation through the context of the worker who gets alienated by their specialized labour power and what they’re able to produce within the system. Shortly after, I spoke of how the fetish commodity of objects would also define and invert our social spaces with others. But since people’s labour is bought as commodity that gets fetishized, exploited, and transformed into even more money, Marx argued that their life will also be inverted, defined and alienated through this system of production.

The base system of production in labour and surplus value creates commodities in the superstructure that makes people reinforce this base system. From consumer products, ideology, culture, tradition, art, all the way to the people who graduate from schools and institutions ends up reinforcing the same productive system—even if it appears to oppose it and strives for great change.

Not only are people seen as commodified labour to help produce surplus value for the private owners, people are produced out of this structure in school who takes part in commodity exchange and becomes alienated by labour. Here, we can think of society as a gigantic production factory where not only capitalists buys labour power, but manufactures people and their world views, cultures, behaviors, religion, political orientations, and even some of their conscious thought patterns. This is where we enter the territory of Marxism and the critique of ideology.

The job which defines me and a good chunk of my life is determined by my work “superiors”. As a contributing citizen, I must spend a good chunk of my time living a life defined by my boss whose job is also defined by upper management and shareholders. While your bosses might be equal to you in every way by law, they actually have influence over what quality of food and clothing you can afford, what kind of house you can or cannot buy. They can even determine whether you can afford children and have a healthy family.

In order for us to survive, it can be said that we must give up our freedoms in order to gain freedom. We do so by selling our labour to our bosses, where a portion of our labour gets reaped by them. By working for another person who defines the premises of my labour and what a chunk of my life should look like, I lose partial control of who I am and my own life. My labour might even start to define who I am and my place in society. I may even struggle to survive and work 7 days a week to make ends meet. Eventually, I might start to see my work alienated self as my identity, such as how my job, what I study, and how the traditions I grew up with defines who I am.

As a result, self-development in life becomes a form of self-denial where the subject denies their alienated being who has been separated by their labour and capital. Even self-employment and entrepreneurship becomes self-exploitation. We live in a society where we are taught and encouraged to produce, consume, save, and spend our capital, so that production is driven towards endless growth so to accumulate capital. We are required to constantly grow and become efficient producers of more commodities. Companies will even find ways to make people more productive by giving them breaks and setting up recreation rooms at the work place. Even health scientists devotes their time to learn ways to help people cope with all the problems they might face so they can remain productive and efficient in order to sustain the demands of society.

Even during our time off work, we are encouraged to consume and buy commodities. This is to say that capitalism can only survive through constant growth production and consumption—sort of like how inflation is inevitable. It consists of endless productivity and efficiency.

To be sure, this level of control that the capitalists have on the labourer’s life isn’t simply on a physical level, but also on an ideological plane where the subject is bombarded by cultural norms, the news, social media, other people, and different cultures; where much of it are used as a tool to normalize exploitation and transforming the subject into labour who are sold and bought. Just like fetish commodity, these cultural ideologies conceals the actual social relationships behind every thing we do in our lives.

We can see this in The Lego Movie (2014) which depicts a humorous version of these ideas where President Business tries to control and exploit the world. The film makes it clear how everyone in the city enjoys following instruction manuals and listening to their favourite song on how they convince themselves that “Everything is awesome, everything is cool when we are part of a team!” (link), even when the world is full of social antagonisms and class conflicts, leading itself to destruction by President Business. This song is a metaphor of capitalist ideologies which convinces the characters that their world is “normal” (everything is awesome) and conceals the idea that the Lego world is controlled by President Business.

The film depicts your everyday law abiding citizen who can’t think beyond the instruction manuals that society or schools had taught them who they are, and where they fit in. They are produced out of them like a product in a factory. In time, these instruction manuals and other people define and alienate them. Meanwhile, Emit the protagonist is encouraged to think outside the box so to become a master builder where he can freely think and create at whim without abiding to instruction manuals and ideologies through alienation.

As humans become commodities who are seen as labour in an economy that gets bombarded by the production of ideology, Marx saw how it would devoid people of their abilities to think critically about their life. They will no longer have time to think for themselves, theorize, sing, love, or consider what is best for them. Instead, they let the system, ideologies, or their labour to think for them—like how people in The Lego Movie follows instruction manuals. The only desire they satisfy are societal demands and not the desires that the alienated subject wants. They are born and trained to become pure labour and turn into people who are somewhat devoid of individuality and character.

Like the citizens in The Lego Movie, many people ends up liking the same popular song or pop singer in real life. All our contemporary music sounds similar because producers recycle popular cords to gain popularity so to make lots of money. In fact, it gets to the point where people becomes something like these trendy pop songs. Meanwhile, creative arts lack creativity, depth and imagination because they are produced to be sold and cater to certain audiences and desires. We also see it in fashion styles which gets recycled over and over again. Even “life styles” that are presented to us through various sources are sold to us as ideology that we consume and replicate in our lives (i.e. Western lifestyle, Eastern Lifestyle, Modern lifestyle, all the way to rap videos trying to sell you the gangster, drug addict, luxury, and big butt lifestyle).

People become something like a zombie who lives mindlessly imbedded into the world of ideologies of capitalism incapable of critically thinking outside its system. They become what philosopher Byun-Chul Han might refer as a work zombie, a gym zombie, a money zombie; or a commodified zombie waiting to be bought and sold—whether it be their labour or their bodies. And anything that is in demand will be for sale.

Even universities have become dominated by the influence of labour, capital, and surplus value where they are similar to a trade school as people attends to improve their job prospects. International and higher education degrees becomes a way to extract capital off students and their labour so to sustain the university system (i.e. they get bad pay for being a teaching assistant). At the same time, the university becomes a factory where labour power is bought which hires professors who teaches students disciplines, ideologies, and subjects that produces them as the future labourer who must transform their life to sustain the production of capital. They learn to become “productive members of society” and how to sell themselves to get their labour power reaped off of them.

Consequently, there is less room for knowledge for knowledge sake. Instead, people sees education as an “investment” for their future where they see themselves as labour to be sold in the market. Everything is anchored into the production of capital and labour, where knowledge gets sold and bought for. Going to school must yield to some monetary value as the end goal. Even the professor’s success in getting a tenured job at the university is measured by the quantity they publish and how often their books are read, bought, or cited. Everything is entangled with production, transactional exchanges of value, and the accumulation of published work and credentials. Just like the accumulation of capital.

Marx takes on the position that humans are animals who are produced by ideological and productive forces in capitalist societies. It is just like the people in The Lego Movie who sings their favourite song and follow instruction manuals that is drummed into their brains. Marx brought up the idea of how the capitalist will profit off the labour of their workers without their conscious awareness due to the effects of ideology which conceals its underlying social and labour relations. We are all raised and trained within the system and believe this is how everything works and that it is “normal”.

As a result, the productive dimensions of society generates an entire superstructure which trains people into submission through indulging them with dominant ideologies. They do this so people would serve the capitalists who are in power to help maintain control over the masses. Obviously, this is not to say that we should all be jobless and not contribute to society. What Marx really puts to question is whether the work people do equates to any forms of equality, and how anything in modern society offers any forms of “freedom”.

For underneath all the relations between labour and the subject, Marx discovers that society had always consisted of antagonisms between workers and their capitalist masters that would eventually lead to conflicts. He saw how capitalism consists of economic divides between social classes and argued that the wealthy capitalists might eventually own all the labour and the means of production (the “1%”), where the workers own nothing as the basic needs for the average person becomes increasingly difficult. Such inequality gets perpetuated and passed down from generations to another through ideological and cultural practices as the norm without anyone questioning and challenging them.

It is the normalities of everyday life which perpetuates the ideology of capital between base and superstructure. Violence runs right underneath our lives without our awareness. This can be seen in every sector of our culture and traditions; from the arts, music, education, all the way to the sciences and our relationships. The superstructure which sustains what people sees as “normal life” might be the idea of graduating high school, going to university, getting a job, getting married, and buying a house. It could be following a guided timeline or some definition of economic success that are set by the capitalists and cultural gatekeepers. Eventually, such definition trickles down to the masses which becomes the “ideology of everyday life”—just like the instruction manuals and song everyone likes to sing in The Lego Movie. What people deem as “success in life” is defined by our abilities to sell our labour and have it reaped off of us while we acquire, accumulate, and circulate capital. Society trains people to believe in it so they would grow up and help sustain the social hierarchies of power, control and class conflicts within the system.

However, Marx also points out that people would eventually come to a collective consciousness and realize how a portion of their hard work are being reaped by the capitalist where they would start a revolution to establish socialism—something which would eventually evolve into communism; a society where the state, private property, and capital no longer exists. Moreover, he saw how capitalism would collapse under its own internal contradictions from its class conflicts and gradually transform into socialism; a system that prohibits reaping labour value off workers. The control and power of the means of production along with the surplus value that the capitalist kept is given back to the workers. But unlike what most people think, socialism is not when everyone gets paid the same regardless of their occupation. There are still social hierarchies in socialism with many similar characteristics to capitalism. And how a real socialist society might work out in reality will depend on who you ask.

Ultimately, Marx saw how this turns capitalism into a gigantic never ending machine which would endlessly perpetuate itself out of control, producing social hierarchies and separation while being maintained together by the state government through endless production of ideologies of normality as its superstructure. The goal of the capitalist state is to keep its system intact and under control, even when it is designed to fall apart and self-destruct from the struggle of internal conflicts between the labourers and capitalists. The apparent ideologies produced, and even the unification of political groups and parties functions as an illusion that conceals over the masses in a sort of constant dreamlike and magical experience (fetish commodity). The state becomes a massive ideological machine that maintains the illusion of reality as uniformity and consistent—even when it is characterized by difference and class conflicts.

The Question of Revolution, Marxism, and Beyond

“The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.” —Karl Marx

This is where we begin to see the complexity of Marxist thoughts on how the system utilizes fetish commodity, alienation, and ideology to turn into a self-perpetuating system that becomes out of control. Production must never end and must continue to grow where everything and everyone must be sold and bought. And along with it, we also get the growth of pollution, economic, mental, and climate disasters. It even gets to the point where the ideology of Marxism becomes a commodity to be sold to the masses. In North America, this can be seen in neoliberal political parties who claims to be “left wing”, even when they are nearly all right leaning.

Often times, politicians likes to associate left wing politics with people who wants to start revolutions and produce violence. But unlike what most people think, Marx was not trying to propel people into violent revolutions. Neither did he intend communism to be a dictatorship or authoritarianism like what you see in some countries today (they’re not communists). His entire opus and analytic methods sought to show us how the antagonisms, conflicts and oppositions produced through capitalist societies will eventually lead to the shift on how social and material objects are produced. These radical shifts in production and ownership is what he refers as “revolution”. While history taught us that nearly all revolutions were violent, it doesn’t have to be this way.

To be sure, what made Marx so influential wasn’t simply his discoveries on alienation, exploitation, and class conflicts, but the way he interpreted these socio-politico-economic relationships. This method was led by his skepticism and suspicion on how commodities are sold and bought which made societies the way they are today. Such method of skepticism and suspicion became so well known that philosopher Paul Ricceuor referred to it as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (hermeneutics is the study of interpretation). Such unravelling of underlying meanings and antagonisms that lurks behind every socio-political phenomenon may very well be known as the spirit of Marx. It has become a method of analysis which shared commonalities with intellectual figures during Marx’s time such as Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche.

No doubt, Marxist doctrine had profound influence in modern intellectual and world political history. It led to the Cultural Revolution in China, where many people died while trying to purge the remaining capitalist ideologies within their society so to establish communism. Through a series of significant events, it created contemporary China, which still resembles all too closely to (state) capitalism, opposite to what their government party name suggests; and whether China is a socialist country remains debatable. Marxist thought also led to the famous event in France known as “May 1968” where civil unrest almost led to the collapse of the country’s economy. Such event influenced many renown French philosophers at the time including Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, and the Nobel Prize winner Jean-Paul Sartre, who ended up declining the award.

After countless events influenced by Marxist thought, perhaps some of the questions that he begged us to ask is: If capitalism and the history of society is produced through internal conflicts between class struggles where the working class would become aware and start a revolution, why does capitalism still dominate our world, even after so many economic crises which threatens its system? Why had all “revolutionary” attempts to overthrow capitalism ended up becoming capitalist states? Why did people’s attempts to end capitalism led to more capitalism?

There are many different answers and perspectives to these questions that I will not answer today. But perhaps the simplest answer is, “because communism and socialism doesn’t work”. Yet, given our current economic and political landscape, these are some of the most important questions that people should ask because capitalism as we know it, also doesn’t work. For capitalism is no longer anything like what Adam Smith or any classical intellectuals would’ve imagined. Hence, people coined the term “crony capitalism” which describes a society where private business figures, corporations, and celebrities have become so powerful that they can influence the outcomes of democratic elections and government state decisions. Is capitalism really better than socialism? Is it better than communism? Does the problem lie within the structure or in people?

One well known approach to why capitalism had always turned into more capitalism; or why communism along with all its apparent revolutions had always failed, is from Slavoj Zizek, who is best known for fusing Lacanian psychoanalysis with Marxism by arguing that capitalist ideologies are found in the everyday split subject’s unconscious fantasy. This is best seen in his magnum opus called, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989).

Another intriguing Lacanian approach to this problem is from Alenka Zupancic and her book called Disavowal (2024), where she argues that one of the fundamental problems of capitalism lies in the experience of disavowal which is the primary symptom of perversion. Just as the split subject wakes up from a dream so they can continue dreaming in real life, Zupancic argues that most people recognizes all the “real” issues of capitalism (climate change, war, inequality, etc.), while disavowing such facts so they can continue dreaming and carry out their ideological everyday capitalist “reality” of being productive members of society. From this perspective, perhaps when we recite cliches about our world that “Life is not fair” or “Life is cruel”, we can really see that life is unfair and cruel. But that’s because we made it this way where we decided to do nothing about it.

While the approach is vastly different, similar to Marx, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was also influenced by Hegel and his ideas on alienation. One prominent idea Lacan tried to show was how the subject is always alienated by the Other (or Freudian super-ego) which produces the unconscious mind. Just as the Other obliterates the subject at a conscious level, capitalism too, obliterates the subject and alienates them through labour. In order for there to be an unconscious subject who functions within the structures of capitalism, they must always give up on something. In Marxist terms, this “something” is surplus value: the profit that gets reaped off the worker which ends up producing the commodity object. In Lacanian terms, this surplus value is known as “surplus jouissance” which creates the product that causes desire (a) so to be sold and circulate the economy.

Lacan coined this process as the “capitalist discourse” and gave credit to Marx for its discovery through his groundbreaking analysis of capitalism from a book called, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867). Such discourse was included along with Lacan’s other discourses: the master, university, hysteric, and the analyst. But unlike Marx who thinks the capitalists controls the means of production and labour power, Lacan argues that even the wealthiest individuals who believes they have control over the means of production are under control by what lies unconscious to them: the structure of law and ideologies which governs capitalist societies. Or in Lacanian terms, the symbolic Other/super-ego—or the function of language in relation with the unconscious mind.

Nevertheless, it was Marxist analysis who laid out a new intellectual approach to modern sociology. Today, this approach is known as dialectical historicism (or dialectical materialism). It also became an interdisciplinary endeavor where scholars around the world combined Marxist ideas with other branches of intellectual disciplines. Some of these reinvigorating approaches can be found in the Frankfurt School among scholars such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse; and also independently from figures like Franz Fanon, Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, and Raymond Williams.

Certainly, Marx was famous for proclaiming that he was not a Marxist. One way we can interpret this is how Marx saw that he was merely analyzing society and what was happening underneath all the relationships between labour and value. This is to say that there is nothing inherently “Marxist” about the antagonisms of class societies and all the conflicts they produce among each other. Rather, they simply exist within societies as such, and not just within the structures of “capitalism”. For class antagonisms can also be found even in medieval times such as in feudalism between the nobles and the king. Today, while Marxist thought remains profoundly influential in the world of philosophy, economics, sociology, social and political science, its doctrine has become more like a ghost that haunts our contemporary world. It lurks at the margins of our political systems by challenging its positions and historical becoming. And it is this mode of political thought, analysis, and criticism that Marx had radicalized in his works.

The weapon of criticism is criticism itself. But what does it mean to criticize? Does one hate what they critique? Many psychoanalysts considers criticism as a form of hate which is really just an extension of love. If this is true, then we can only imagine why one might criticize society the way Marx did—someone who ended up dying stateless. Theory and criticism can only grip the masses once it demonstrates ideas that challenges our everyday beliefs and ideologies; and it demonstrates such ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical, which grasps the matter by its root. And for Marx, the root lies within humans who are lost in the world of ideologies.

Perhaps in order for society to make real progress, we must rethink what value and social relationships mean in a world where everything is up for sale—from our labour, all the way to our bodies, love, integrity, and moral compass. Through this journey, one might encounter opposing theories of values such as the Subjective Theory of Value (STV) which still all too closely resembles to Smith’s theory of supply and demand. Certainly, some dimensions of “value” are subjective in the sense that it is determined through personal preference. “Value” can be artificially inflated and deflated through personal interests or subjectivity, even when it’s fundamental labour value might be low (i.e. collector items that takes little labour to make and are cheap to sell, but carries high prices in the aftermarket). But what produces subjectivity? What is demand? What is desire? Can subjectivity and desire be manufactured through ideologies? Is this why advertising and marketing exist?

Marx once brought up an important idea on history and the return of history in a new or different way. That humans make history, yet it is also their own particular history that makes people who they are. In a grand scale, this is the history of war and revolutions; all the way to the small scales of history of individuals and all their forgotten and repressed memories. All of which would reoccur in a different way, producing humans and societies as they are as intelligent animals. For Marx, history is the history of class struggle and conflicts between humans. It is the struggle for the past; for ownership, law, equality, but also for difference, survival, and the struggle for power and control. It is by recognizing and challenging these contradictions that are concealed behind our everyday lives where one may open up new possibilities for a better future.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”