Analysis Of The Movie Arrival

In the movie Arrival (2016), Louise Banks, a professor of linguistics is asked by a US Army Colonel to ask the arrived aliens a simple question in their language: “What is your purpose on earth?” From a linguistic point of view, Louise explained the difficulty of expressing the message. She emphasized that the word “your” requires the unknown aliens to have a sense of possession, or ownership. This fact reveals that our understanding of property is all based upon the established social system that functions this way, and might not apply to another society. The idea of ownership is not only critical to philology and study of communication, but also crucial to political philosophy. Among western philosophers, Hobbes, Rousseau and Marx …show more content…
To Marx, the shift from the use-value to the exchange value of commodities marks the social alienation in the industrializing society. “In the course of time, therefore, at least some part of the products must be produced intentionally for the purpose of exchange. From that moment the distinction between the usefulness of things for direct consumption and their usefulness in exchange becomes firmly established.” People are alienated from the social process embedded in the products because their exchange value is no longer correlated to their usefulness and labor value. Communist Manifesto is a political project that urges the working men of all countries to be united. “The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” To him, the idea of private property in the form of bourgeois property is an exploitation of working class, because of its unequal natural. In Marx’s words, “for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work.” Marx believed that the proletariat represents the interest of pure humanity, and their taking over the power from the bourgeoisies and revolting against bourgeois property is the victory of