Capitalism

Capitalism
The most influential understanding of capitalism within cultural studies
has come from the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Marx. Here capitalism is
grasped as a mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means
of production. In the past this would have included factories, mills and workshops
while today it signals multinational corporations. Class conflict is a marker of
capitalism whose fundamental division is between those who own the means of
production, the bourgeoisie, and a working class or proletariat who must sell their
labour to survive. Today the class structures of Western societies are considerably
more complex and internally stratified than Marx described them. Class is now identifiable not simply through direct ownership of the means of production but
through share distribution, managerial control, income, education and lifestyles.
According to Marx, while the legal framework and common sense thinking of
capitalist societies may declare that workers are free agents and the sale of labour a
free and fair contract, this obscures the fundamental process of exploitation at work.
This is so because capitalism aims to make a profit and does so by extracting surplus
value from workers. That is, the value of the labour taken to produce goods, which
become the property of the bourgeoisie, is more than the worker receives for it. The
realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods
(which have both ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’) as commodities. A commodity
is something available to be sold in the market place and commodification the
process associated with capitalism by which all spheres of a culture are increasingly
put under the sway of the market. Commodity fetishism is the name Marx gives to
the process through which the surface appearance of goods sold in the market place
obscures the origins of commodities in an exploitative relationship.


(adapted from: The SAGE Dictionary of Cultural Studies, by Chris Baker)