Objectified work

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Under the term objectified work , Karl Marx subsumes, in the broadest sense, all use values that people produce in work processes.

These use values ​​or goods are either used as a means of production for the production of other goods or consumed directly as consumer goods . Marx emphasizes that the concrete human activity is " objectified " in the finished product , whereby the work process becomes invisible and is also suppressed from the consciousness of the producer.

This mechanism of objectification, which is already described in the beginning by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , forms an important starting point for Marx's theory of alienation in early writings and for his theory of commodity fetishism in capital of 1867. Money and capital , according to Marx, are also ultimately to be understood as objectified work, even if you can no longer see their origin from the work process due to their high degree of abstraction .

Karl Marx recognized the special importance of the work objectified in the means of production for the development of human society in the fact that they are capacitors and accumulators for past work that people can bundle in later work processes and set free again with increased productive power.