Marxism and Love

How much is an engagement ring worth? Priceless? How much does it cost? Cant Buy Me Love by The Beatles doesn't ring true anymore these days. For a long while, romantic love has been diluted to a thing. A thing to buy or a thing to sell. Love in a capitalist society has become a commodity as Marx agrees"but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking" (656). Love or the need to pair up with someone in order to continue the species or join labor forces has change to something else. It is a statement of social statues. A thing to own because I am worth it. I'm also selling myself. I dye my hair, paint my nails, wear make up, and all kinds of creams and lotions to stay young and appealing. The products I use are the best in the market and quiet expensive. I am not an individual but a product that can be measured if needed as Marx said "the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself"(664). I have become a product to want and to desire. In the society we live now I and everyone else in it has become what Fraud might call a fetish. An unconscious attempt to come into terms with what we can no longer understand. We aim to look like people we cant even relate to. We cant afford most of the things we buy and yet we slave to this invisible master who guides our lives. In the hope to find love, happiness, freedom we continue the cycle. We continue to overwork and over-consume. As capitalism continues, we experience a wider separation of classes. This leads to the master and slave model since we no longer have (as it is argue we never did) a middle class. The diamond ring has become to represent, not the union of two people in holy matrimony but the worth of ones labor.