I suggest you go to Counterpunch and read the whole article, but here we see the benefit of Marx’s analysis of capitalism.
“In Stack’s “manifesto”, he quotes Karl Marx. Ironically, Marx is useful here. Explaining how human labor-power is objectified in commodities, which then become realized as social relations once they are put to use, Marx demonstrates how through our labor, which is our dominant mode of social relation, we are all connected. Marx was fond of using linen as an example. A weaver’s social value is realized after a person wears a coat made by the tailor. That is, these heretofore unrelated persons now share a common relationship. If we expand upon this and ask how many people today are involved in producing the coat we wear, from the electricity that powers the sewing machines to the petrol used for delivery, the answer is infinite; the answer is all of us. Marx further explains how once the “universal equivalent”, or money, is supplanted as a metric for our labor, that organization of production tends toward profit rather than collective good.
This is a powerful tool in understanding how we share a common relationship with a destitute Greek worker or an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and/or other psychological disorders. With wages earned from our labor we purchase German goods, exacerbating the economic imbalance between Germany and peripheral countries like Greece, thereby adding to the extreme suffering Greek workers are being forced to endure. It can explain how a solider, upon his or her return home, cannot easily reveal that the jingoist notions of freedom, liberty and security we are all imbued with had no role to play in the killing that we as a society, at least through our taxes, tacitly asked of them. It can further explain how police can criminalize the indigent for their own victimization. As Stack described, the loss of jobs from L.A. caused some Los Angelians to lose their already precarious footing in American society, namely Blacks and Latinos. Combined with systemic, inter-generational poverty and racism, it is all too easy to mistake the symptoms of this malaise for its etiology.”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
3 comments
February 25, 2013 at 9:03 am
Stig
Another example of how money’s universality has been corrupted, and its relationship transformed from production, towards consumption, is seen directly in what it affords. Food, a product that really is something consumed, we do eat it after all, has a built in limitation; you may only eat so much at one sitting. Yet now if you have the cash, you can set a banquet that, could feed hundreds, perhaps even thousands, but it would be only for yourself, and if you so wish, the apple you found in the mouth, of the feast’s 600 pound, roasted pig center piece, maybe all you really want, and the rest can be left to rot. It is your money and you can do with it what you want, but as we are finding out, this perversion has consequences and in a world overflowing with food, for now at least, starvation runs rampant over it.
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February 26, 2013 at 9:57 am
unapologeticallyleft
Reblogged this on unapologeticallyleft.
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February 27, 2013 at 8:10 am
The Arbourist
@Stig
Consumption, conspicuous or otherwise, is one of the problems of *any* society. With a capitalist ethos in place, it is dramatically worse as it is one of the prime factors in determining social status.
This would be the part where staunch defenders of capitalism blame those who it exploits for not being innovative, motivated or rich enough to fend for themselves. It is a focus shift as systemic problems get laid at the feet of individuals.
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