Moneybags Justifies Paying His Workers

In today’s capitalist society, those who own the means of production must devise ways to rationalize paying their workers at relatively low wages while still trying to earn a profit for their businesses. In this scenario, I will explain how “Moneybags”, the owner of the means of production, rationalizes paying his workers at a factory that assembles cell phone parts, through a Marxist perspective. According to Marx, every day, the worker’s means of subsistence “must therefore be sufficient to maintain him in his normal state as a laboring individual.” Hence, it is imperative that Moneybags pays his workers low enough to maintain a decent profit margin, but not too low so that the workers cannot subsist and reproduce themselves in the workplace.
In order to discuss how Moneybags justifies paying his workers through a Marxist lens, we must first understand Marx’s definition of …show more content…
As per Marx, commodities have value, representing their intrinsic utility as well as a quantity of human labor related to the given commodities. A thing can have a use value, which “being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, has no existence apart from that commodity,” and an exchange value, “the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort.” While an object’s use value does not fluctuate significantly, its exchange value is relative – constantly changing with time and across contexts. In this scenario, the cell phone parts have relatively low use value since the cost of producing and assembling a cell phone is miniscule compared to its retail value. Therefore, the profit margin of a cell phone can be explained by its tremendous exchange value, as well as Marx’s idea of the fetishism of commodities. This idea suggests, “the