Have we started pricing ourselves?
Reference to 'The Great Philosophers omnibus'
I read something by Karl Marx that I can’t get out of my head.
He says capitalism traps the “use value” of human beings inside “exchange value.”
At first it sounded abstract. Then it started feeling personal.
We live in a time where everyone is told to be an individual. Be unique. Build your brand. Stand out. Don’t be basic.
And yet, miss work for a week and you’ll see how unique you are.
There’s always someone else. Someone cheaper. Someone faster. Someone hungrier.
Marx makes this distinction between use value and exchange value.
Exchange value is simple. It’s your price. Your salary. Your market rate. The number someone is willing to pay.
Use value is harder to measure. It’s you when you’re not performing. The way you make your friend laugh. The weird connections your brain makes. The fact that you can care about things for no reason at all.
But the system doesn’t really care about that version of you.
It cares about output.
What can you do?
How much can you generate?
How efficiently?
And if someone else can do it for less?
Well.
He says something else that feels almost obvious once you notice it.
Under capitalism, objects exist to be sold.
A chair isn’t primarily a place to sit. It’s ₹3,000.
A shirt isn’t fabric and labor and design. It’s ₹500.
If two things cost the same, they become equal in the market. Completely different objects, same price, same value.
That’s wild if you think about it.
All that difference flattened into a number.
And then you realize that’s how labor works too.
Two workers producing the same output? Equal.
It doesn’t matter who they are. It matters what they produce.
The logic that turns a shirt into ₹500 turns a person into a unit of labor-time.
The part that bothers me most is that we’ve internalized this.
We quantify ourselves before anyone else does.
We talk about “investing” in relationships.
We ask what something is “worth.”
We feel guilty when we’re not being productive.
Even rest has to be optimized now.
It’s like we can’t just exist. We have to justify our existence.
And maybe that’s what Marx meant by trapping use value inside exchange value.
Your humanity gets filtered through market logic.
You are valuable but conditionally.
Valuable if you produce.
Valuable if you perform.
Valuable if you sell.
And if you stop?
That’s the part nobody says out loud.
I don’t know what the solution is. Marx thought he did. I’m less sure.
But I can’t unsee the question now:
If everything has a price, what happens to the parts of us that don’t?
And more uncomfortably
Have we started pricing ourselves?