Karl Marx was one of the first theorists to note than human beings were completely dehumanized under capitalism, and turned into commodities and instruments of production. They were alienated from their own labor while the products that the system created were turned into fetishes and object of worship. Capitalism was not a liberating force, but a system of wage slavery that made workers part of the machinery and whose only god is money. In the absence of labor unions and social welfare programs, they would receive minimal payment for their labor, and often even less than necessary for them to survive physically. Given that the supply of labor was usually far greater than the demand, it was not important to the capitalists that their labor force survived at all, since one worker could easily be replaced with another. Under the system of global capitalism, where manufacturing and service jobs were relocated to countries that paid the lowest wages, with no labor unions or social and environmental protections, this system of exploitation and turning workers into commodities (or dehumanized things) was total. Capitalism’s only purpose was not to liberate humanity but to make a profit for the owners of the means of production, and therefore capitalists were generally antisocial and unconcerned human rights or protection of the environment. Over the last thirty years, they have established a global system that allows maximum freedom for the movement of capital and activities of corporations. For most people, however, wages, incomes and living standards have declined while wealth has concentrated mostly at the top. This has been particularly true of a country like the U.S., where capitalists are completely in control of the political system.
Globalization is a cliché at this point, and a very vague term that actually refers to the global expansion of capitalism. This has been occurring for centuries, of course, as European empires moved into the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions of the world to obtain cheap labor, commodities and raw materials. Over the last thirty years, particularly after the U.S. ‘won’ the Cold War, this system of free trade/laissez faire capitalism has been imposed on the entire planet through the World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). As in the 19th Century, free market capitalism offered maximum freedom, wealth and power to those who owned the capital and the means of production, while eliminating organized labor and social welfare protections as much as possible. It also moved manufacturing and even service sector jobs by the millions to poor countries where labor costs and environmental protections were minimal. In Marxist terms, this process of turning human beings into commodities is not new, but globalization has expanded it to virtually every region of the planet. Today the process is so total and complete that “it is difficult to imagine the people that produce the common things that one buys or the conditions under which they work” (Berdayes 27). They are no longer workers who live in the same cities as the consumers or even in the same countries, and production takes place far out of sight of those who purchase the commodities. In the advanced countries, where the mass media is mostly in the hands of capitalist interests, their most important function is not to entertain, educate or inform but to sell commodities. This has been true from the beginning in the case of movies, radio and television, and capitalists are also attempting to exploit and control the Internet and new social media in the same manner. Mass advertising has always fetishized commodities and turned them into mythical, magical creations and objects of worship, and in turn the mass media programming is designed to keep consumers in the mood to buy these products (Berdayes 27).
Even in the 19th Century, Marx also noted that the overall effect of capitalism was to erode traditional families, communities and religions, replacing them with isolated and alienated workers and consumers. It opposed all forms of ‘collectivism’ except control of the system by large corporate and financial interests, and preferred that the masses just be a collection of anonymous and powerless individuals. Yet this could also lead to a backlash against the entire system in the form of authoritarian movements in religion (fundamentalism) or in secular politics (fascism). Although capitalism was supposed to be the apex of modernity, its dehumanizing effects were so absolute that it could lead to anti-modernism in culture and politics (Berdayes 28). In any case, capitalist ‘freedom’ is an illusion, since it is mainly “associated with the unfettered movements of consumers within an idealized marketplace” (Berdayes 30). As a system, capitalism was far less concerned with human rights, especially social and economic rights, and placed far more emphasis on maximum freedom for the operations of capital.
Global capitalism is not a democratic system but rather an authoritarian and oligarchic one, in which those with the most money control the political system while organizations like the IMF and WTO impose the same system worldwide. Their true purpose is to further the commodification of human life and labor by destroying unions and collective bargaining, eliminating environmental protections and abolishing the welfare state (Berdayes 37). This system is ‘rational’ only to the extent that its rationality guarantees maximum profits for the capitalists while turning people into automatons and low-paid instruments of production. Just as capitalism created national economies in the 19th Century to expand its field of operations, so it has been creating an international system as well. New mass communications technologies have been key factors in making the global capitalist system one of “increasing connectivity and interdependency” (Appelrouth and Edles 558). Marx described capitalism as a machine motivated only by a “never-ending drive for profit”, which restlessly and relentlessly sought cheap labor and raw materials around the world (Appelrouth and Edles, 2011, p. 569). New inventions like the Internet and mobile phones facilitated this process and led to “extreme reduction of distances” in geography as well as consciousness (Virilio 13).
Even in the Western countries, capitalism has led to lower wages and living standards for the majority of the population, while in the poorest regions of the world the “number of people living in absolute poverty continues to increase” (Berdayes 37). In the U.S., the majority of blacks have a lower living standard today than people in China, India and Latin America (Dicken 477). Over the last thirty years, as labor unions have disappeared and manufacturing jobs moved overseas, almost all the new jobs have been in the low-paying service sector. This is also where most women have been employed in recent decades, and Marx would have called them part of the reserve army of labor: a commodity that can be employed at even lower wages than men. Most women in the Western world are now in the workplace, which was not the case even in 1970, and traditionally they were paid at half the rate as men (Dicken 477). This has been another windfall for the capitalists, although the system of globalization has also given them access to a very poor and compliant labor force of billions.
Since the 1980s, the overall growth in jobs in the Western world has been limited while the rate of unemployment is much higher than in the 1950s and 1960s. Poverty and unemployment have been much higher for women, young people and minorities, while inequality of wealth and incomes has increased dramatically (Dicken 478). This is especially true of the U.S. and UK, where capitalist control of the political system is complete and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the capitalist class is as great as it was in the 1920s (Dicken 482). Old industrial cities have been ‘hollowed out’ as the manufacturing jobs moved overseas, while crime, poverty and social pathology have increased greatly. Today the great global cities like New York and London also have some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality in the world. They are the centers of global capitalism in trade, technology, finances and services, while the majority of people live in poverty and survive through drug dealing, crime or other occupations in the ‘informal’ sector of the economy (Dicken 483).
Global capitalism received a great boost with the end of the Cold War in 1989-91, when it appeared that the U.S. would now be the unchallenged superpower in the world. It certainly demonstrated that capitalist interests were in total control of the U.S. government, since they moved quickly to impose free trade and free markets on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Almost all of the property that had been in the hands of the state and the Communist Party now passed into the hands of foreign investors and local oligarchs. Marx would not have been surprised at this, since it was just another example of colonialism, although he also would not have regarded the regimes in the Soviet Union and the satellite countries as Marxist in any way. It may have suited the needs of conservative and capitalist interests in the West to describe them that way, but in reality they were always more like fascist or authoritarian state capitalist regimes. In China today, which still claims to be headed by a Communist Party, the true nature of the system is quite openly and obviously a form of authoritarian capitalism, heavily tied to the global marketplace in trade and investment. To be sure, there has been a great deal of resistance to the U.S. model of laissez faire/free market capitalism, especially in the recent recessions, and it appears the whole cycle of boom and bust is still operating in capitalism, just as Marx always described it. Since global capitalism is so similar to 19th Century capitalism, much of this opposition is expressed in Marxist terms, such as the exploitation and commodification of labor. A global capitalist class that is no longer tied to any national economy has also come into being in the last thirty years, although the global working class (about 80% of the planet) is still fragmented along national, religious, ethnic and linguistic lines. This is one reason why the opposition to total capitalist domination of the world political and economic system has seemed so weak and ineffective. They may or may not realize that they have been turned into spare parts and commodities by the capitalist system, although there is considerable discontent under the surface. On the whole, they do realize that their incomes and living standards are extremely poor compared to the class that owns the system, and as Marx noted over a century ago, this can lead to revolutionary possibilities. During depressions and periods of mass unemployment, mass discontent rises to critical levels, and this latest global depression has been the most severe since the 1930s. It is also quite obvious that governments were pressured to provide the large capitalist institutions with trillions of dollars while imposing austerity measures on the common people. It was in disasters like these that Marx foresaw the greatest opportunities for revolutionary change that would free the majority of people in the world from their condition as capitalist commodities and instruments of production and consumption.
WORKS CITED
Appelrouth, Stuart and L.D. Edles. Sociological Theory in the Classical Era: Text and Readings, 2nd Edition. SAGE Publications, 2010.
Berdayes, Vicente, “What is Globalization? Ambiguities of the Contemporary World Scene” in Jung Min Choi et al (eds), Globalization with a Human Face. Praeger, 2004: 25-45.
Dicken, Peter. Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy. The Guilford Press, 2011.
Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2005.
