Questions for this week: Boal; Katz; and, Newkirk

Augusto Boal, in the excerpt from The Theater of the Oppressed, while clearly invoking Freire is also making a particularly Marxist argument. Consequently, I am pasting (below) excerpts from a paper I wrote, many moons ago, on Marx's conception of commodity fetishism. These excerpts will, hopefully, give you all a better, albeit terse, handle on an (orthodox) Marxist critique of Capitalism.

         A commodity is a man-made object of utility, which in its simplest form is encountered as a use-value, i.e., it fulfills a human need. This form, however, must be changed in order for a useful thing to become a commodity. Marx gives the example of a table, a table as a table in its “tableness” is a useful article; once this very same table becomes a commodity, i.e., a product intended for an anonymous other, it is stripped of the identity that its former designation as simply a useful article, afforded it. Its usability, or use-value, is no longer important; rather, it is the ability of the table to be exchanged for something else (once it is encountered as a commodity), for some other commodity that becomes paramount.  

       This, for Marx, is the fetishism of commodities. In this transmutation, the table’s former use-value is usurped by its exchangeability in the marketplace; thus, transforming the table to an exchange-value. The table now stands as merely a value, capable, even intended to be traded, bartered, or sold, i.e., a commodity. In this transaction, the commodity-form finds its value relative to all other commodities. This transmogrification is peculiar to Marx because he asserts that, in the final instance, the only "thing" that can produce value is congealed human labor. More specifically, he argues that a commodity that requires 6 hours of congealed human labor to produce is three times more valuable than a commodity that requires only 2 hours to produce.

        Though this theory seems immanently plausible, capitalism relies on another formula altogether.

Capitalism relies on an inorganic universal equivalent: gold. For capitalists, gold becomes the expression of all abstract homogenous human labor in general, by overshadowing the real equivalent behind any monetary exchange: human labor. This usurpation by money ,as the equivalent-form, opens the door for the exploitation of wage-workers by the capitalist. Money as the universal equivalent is granted autonomy to exert its seemingly unlimited, supernatural power over the worker because of its ability, in a capitalist society, to control marketplace relations.  

       What is more, according to Marx, capitalism, primarily because of the investiture of power imbued the universal equivalent, transmogrifies the proletariat (i.e., the working class) in much the same way that it does the use-value of the aforementioned table.

          Precisely because the goal of a capitalist society is the accumulation of capital, i.e., to establish surplus-value as the source of all incomes, save wages to the wage workers; this accumulation is possibly only through the exploitation of the proletariat. Workers, unlike wealthy capitalists, are without the means to produce a commodity for sale in the market place; therefore, they must, instead, sell their ability to work as a commodity, i.e., their bodies. The ability to work/produce is purchased for an agreed upon wage by the capitalist; this commodity is called labor-power. When the agreed upon wage falls short of the value produced by,  the labor that it was used to purchase, the result is a profit which is created from surplus-value. 

(For example, a laborer is paid $5 an hour for 10 hours to create a commodity that will fetch $70 in the market, the $20 difference, in Marx's theorization, constitutes the surplus value.)