This is a commodities world.

The film, The Joneses, portrays a family built on the foundation of capital. What appears to be a super successful and thriving young family is really a marketing scheme undercover. They are not family members, but coworkers. Their purpose is to sell the life they appear to be living. Everything is for sale in their world, indeed, everything is a commodity. This film is an excellent portrayal of the capitalistic society Marx concentrated his writings on. Much like Marx’s writings, the film depicts a world completely constructed on the collection of things- the acquirement of commodities. The Joneses move into an upper middle class neighborhood and drive brand new cars. They have the latest toys and display their marriage and family life as healthy and thriving, all for the sake of a sale. The neighbors who surround them, trapped in the system of their materialistic existence, seek to replicate the Joneses happiness through the acquirement of similar or better commodities than they have in hopes of obtaining that mirage of content. But sadly, that day can never come. A capitalist system has one main focus-and so do the Joneses-capital. This relentless pursuit of profit leads the Joneses down a pit of estranged relationships, an end that Marx would very much attest to- an end that the capitalist system cannot escape.

Occupation precedes existence....

In our free market economy it is easy for the trained eye to notice the malignant forms of capitalism Marx and Engels had warned about. The detachment that the capitalist machine demands of the employer and the employee further alienate the human family and separates societies into unequal classes that clash in a bloody struggle to survive. With the state of the global economy in shambles and the American middle class spiraling down a turbulent tornado of unending debt and dried out unemployment benefits, one can turn to the communist writings and see this prophecy fulfilled over a hundred years ago. It is the inevitability of a corrupted system. I found these readings particularly helpful to my arsenal of societal scopes in which to view the various problems the world faces. Marx noted that: “Consciousness can never be anything else than the conscious existence and the existence of men is their life process,” (668). In other words and in opposition with previous enlightenment philosophies prior, our occupations constitute our existence. If a man works 15 hour days in a cramped cauldron of a warehouse with no room to grow and only enough free time to eat and sleep the bare minimum, where is his time for personal growth? Where in this day is he allotted the time to ponder and question within himself? Marx argued that he didn’t and this is one of the fundamental errors within a capitalist society. The man is defined by his work. It controls his being and if he is being exploited for profit, treated like everything else in the free market world; as a commodity, then it is not his existence that precedes essence but in fact his occupation that precedes his existence. It is the narrator of his state of mind and in an exploited economic system it can never lead to a happy ending.

Work Cited

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.