Structuralism

Material Production and Consumption

Structuralism as a brand of social theory serves well in thinking about consumption because it is evident that tastes (as distinct from needs) are in some sense “manufactured” by wider cultural and economic mechanisms. Second, the often unacknowledged first structural thinker in the human and cultural sciences is Karl Marx, whose theories deal heavily with questions of material production and consumption. His early writings, especially those with Friedrich Engels, are not fully structural, but display the key characteristic of symbolic meaning to broader systems beyond [Page 1386]the individual. In The German Ideology (1845), Marx and Engels gave the famous structural statement: “Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.” The smallest and most personal thoughts are, at least in part, dictated by structures external to the individual.

Marx's structural appraisal of the modern world includes the systematic alienation of the worker by the capitalist, the fundamental contradiction of capitalism. The worker is cut off from the value produced by his labor. In his work Capital, Marx develops a structural analysis of the precise mechanisms whereby the capitalist mode of production systematically exploits the worker through structural effects such as the prolongation of the working day and the suppression of the wage rate—both allowed by essential attributes of the factory system whereby, again, the capitalist class owns the means of production, which requires the worker to submit to the conditions set by the factory owner, who, in turn, is moved by the structural logic of profit.

One of the most important elements of Marx's mature theory of the structures of capitalism is the way he derives the contradictions of a structural whole—in effect, the whole of the modern world's economic system—from the most elementary unit of economic exchange: the commodity. Simply put, a commodity is any thing (literally, res, as in reification or “thingification”), whether material or immaterial, that has exchange value on an open market. That value may or may not be based on the commodity's use value. In extreme drought, water, which is normally free in nature, can be bought and sold at a price because of its essential use value to human life. On the other hand, a rare vintage of wine, with little or no use value, can command a high price. This strange fact of economic exchange entails a sociology of economic exchange. For any commodity to be exchanged for a value, it must be different in kind but equivalent in value. The modern measure of equivalence between different commodities is the money system, which is a structured social convention that must be well understood by the parties to an exchange. The implication is that for the commodity to have exchange value, it must, in principle, bear a relation to all other commodities in the economy.

...