The Consequences of Capitalism: A Marxist Analysis of “The Gift of the Magi” Anonymous College

Marxist philosophy believes that society views the world through a completely economic lens. Marxism dictates that society is separated into two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie utilizes ideology to suppress the proletariat mainly by manipulating their perceptions of their free agency. One ideology that the upper class perpetuates onto the working class is that of consumerism. Consumerism is the belief that the quality of the items one acquires can improve one’s worth. As Marxists believe of all ideologies, consumerism is an unconscious belief that is so deeply entrenched in society that it affects the decisions that every human being makes. This creed creates the concept of commodity fetishism which describes how “[p]eople in a capitalist society thus begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labor expended to produce the object” (Modules on Marx: Fetishism). By reducing the human experience to the pursuit of economic prosperity, the concept of commodification was created. Commodification goes the extra step of reducing a person’s value to their monetary value. These three concepts together have the power to dismantle nature’s purest...