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The Secret Life Of Groceries By Benjamin Lorr

552 Words3 Pages

Looking at Karl Marx, his contributions attempting to explain social changes arising from the industrial revolution linger in current developments and the working class are still very prevalent today. The conflict within the economy, or capitalism, was Marx’s main focus in his theories as he described the two main groups in our economy, the working class and the ruling class. The working class were simply proletariats under the power of the ruling class. These citizens would sell their labor power in exchange for money as they simply operated production equipment, they did not own it. The ruling, or capitalist, class were the more powerful people in the economy that owned these means of production. The ruling class would provide compensation to the working class in exchange for …show more content…

However, the wage minimum held true for the entire working class, which simply means that they must be compensated enough to live off of and pay for necessities. In Karl Marx’s eyes, the concentration of wealth a person obtains, is also the concentration of power they hold in society. Connecting to modernized society, within The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr, we discover Marx’s contributions to Trader Joes. We see the clear establishment of gratification and commodification of many products in the business industry. As stated within the book, “What Joe did - was one of the first to do, if not the first - was to create a store that provides products that reflect an identity, that exist in opposition to some generally homogenized mainstream. In the process, by necessity, he commodified individuality. He learned to sell you, you. If you were the precise person he was after,” (Lorr, 2020, 36). What Joe is doing is simply modifying the individuality of citizens and taking advantage of these differences to sell to a specific consumer

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Marx argued that there are two classes of people that exist in society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie refer to the upper class that own the means of production and whose central concern is the value of property. On the other hand, the proletariat describes the working class wageworkers in a capitalist society. Marx argued that the bourgeoisie simply exploited the proletariat, and the physical labor produced by the proletariat generated more wealth for the capitalist, leaving laborers under payed and machine-like. During this process, Marx believed that through this system of mass production, laborers were stripped of individual imagination and as a result, left individuals feeling alienated to their own emotions and erotic feelings in order to maximize production and wealth.

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In the beginning of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution caused a massive economic spike from small-scale production to large factories and mass production. Capitalism became the prevalent mode of the economy, which put all means of production in the hands of the bourgeoisie, or the upper class. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argue that capitalism centralizes all the wealth and power in the bourgeoisie, despite the proletariat, or the working class, being the overwhelming majority of the population. The manufacturers would exploit the common proletariat and force them to would work in abysmal conditions and receive low wages, furthering the working class poverty. “The Communist Manifesto” predicts that as a result of the mistreatment

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The Industrial Revolution cast its shadow upon European cities and towns. Some enjoyed this shade while others suffered tremendously because of it. Those who enjoyed the luxuries and wealth that the Industrial Revolution provided, the bourgeoisie, depended on the needs of the poor, the proletarians, to increase the size of their monstrous factories and ultimately their wealth and influence. In “The Communist Manifesto” Karl Marx discusses the effects of the Industrial Revolution in further dividing society by creating new social and economic hierarchies. In addition to his observation of the division of labor, Karl Marx believed, that due to the technological shift from craftsmanship to machinery this also caused division of labor and the appreciation of proletarian handmade goods was disregarded.

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The way Marx’s explains class is the bourgeoisie, the rich/noble, and the proletariat are, the poor/working class, and for example, these are the factory owners and wage laborers that contribute to the alienation of a human being. The bourgeoisie look for wage workers to pay cheaply to produce commodities and profit, and worker to work quickly and cheaply. In turn, the wage-worker providing their labor has to work for a living, but also to produce money for the bourgeoisie to increase their margin of capita. To make a profit, leads to paying workers low wages (hourly/monthly/yearly), “The worker becomes poorer the richer is his production, the more it increases in power and scope,” (pg. 4). Marx argues that the more time the wage worker invests producing products the poorer the worker becomes in money and as a

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He argues that with all the pressures of class conflict and the imbalance of capitalism there is no way that this pattern can continue without a major revolution. Marx compares capitalism to anarchy, in the sense that there is no organization within which only causes chaos. The common pattern of capitalism is a boom followed by a bust, and that bust leads to recession and social unrest. This sort of fickle economy, Marx believes, will furthermore contribute to the downfall of capitalism. This socialist revolution would, “abolish private ownership of key elements of economy and change nature of relationships from ones based on marriage and property.”

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Marx begins The Communist Manifesto (1848) with the following phrase: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” In other words, all of history until the present is the history of a series of class struggles. Each society possesses a characteristic structure defined by scientifically identifiable modes of production, of which are splits into the following stages: primitive communism, age of slavery, age of feudalism, age of capitalism, age of socialism and age of advanced communism. In each of these stages, competing socioeconomic interests create tensions and lead to the development of the next stage, with the final stage being advanced communism. Marx asserts that the bourgeoisie are different from the ruling classes of prior historical periods in that they are solely economic; they accumulate more wealth by investing, rather than in the previous feudal society where the wealth was kept in the same place.

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It also accounts for the great divide between the the bourgeoisie who control the means of production and society in general and the working class who struggle to survive by the bourgeoisie. They are the “slaves of the bourgeoisie class, of the bourgeois State; they are in daily and hourly thralldom to the machine, to the foreman, and above all, to the individual bourgeois manufacturer” (Marx & Engels, 11). The laws, justified systems, and government established and run by bourgeoisie members protect the interests of only the its people and exclude those of the working class, hence the class struggle and the creation of class. The people in power control the people below them and subject them to fulfilling their interests with the illusion of ascending the socioeconomic hierarchy. This process strips the working class out of their individuality and humanity, making them mere commodities and part of the capitalist system in Coketown and Western nations at large during the Industrialization

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Capitalism is built on the existence of private firms, where in Karl Marx’s opinion, the income generated is a result of the exploitation of workers. In private firms, workers do not own factors of production and Marx believed that this would inevitably lead to the alienation of workers from their environment and themselves. Unlike in traditional societies, where workers gain satisfaction from creating products of their own chosen specialized fields, in the current context, workers see their work merely as a form of survival. Marx believed that in a capitalistic economy, the rich have power over the middle and lower income classes and that the oppression of the middle and lower classes by minimizing wages to reducing cost of production, will eventually lead to a revolution against the rich and hence resulting in the economy producing products for the needs of the general mass rather than for boosting profits. (Marx, K., & Engels, F. 1948) Adam Smith on the other hand, believes that capitalism is the most ideal economic model that should be adopted by all nations.

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The Bourgeoisie is the product of several revolutions of production and exchange and as the years went by gained exclusive political sway. Marx provides us with a clear indication that the state at this time serves solely to the Bourgeoisie’s interests. The Proletariat exist only as long as they can seek out paid work and unlike the heavy

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Marx believed that the current capitalist society is separated into two classes, the Proletariat society, and Bourgeois society. The Proletarians, as perceived by Marx, are part of the working class that only possess one significant material value, that is the ability to work, or labour power. The Bourgeoise, on the other hand, is the societal class that owns the means of production and hence rule over the Proletarians. As I quote from Marx’s book, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Marx and Engels, 1988, p. 473)

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According to Edwards et al. (2006) Marx thought that within capitalism there would be an increased divide between the bourgeoisie class and the proletariat class in the future. The proletariats are lower of the two classes, the people who have to work for wages in order to survive. The bourgeoisie are the people in society who controlled and owned the means of production in a capitalist system.

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