This study will discuss the relationship between Karl Marx's theory of commodities and Luce Irigaray's use (or abuse) of that argument to conclude that women are the basic commodities in a patriarchal society. The study will begin with Irigaray's statement that "Marx's analysis of commodities as the elementary form of capitalist wealth can thus be understood as an interpretation of the status of women in so-called patriarchal societies" (Irigaray 172). First, Marx's critique of the role of commodities in capitalistic society is presented in a far more clear, logical, and comprehensive way than is Irigaray's critique of society as a completely male-dominated world where women are nothing more than commodities to be exchanged by men. Second, Marx's argument about commodities seems to still largely hold true today, while Irigaray's argument (though it was written in the late 1970s) seems to be addressing the state of gender relations either in some earlier era (the Middle Ages?) or in some underdeveloped and unspecified nation. The reader must assume she is writing about Western societies in the late 1970s when she argues that men exchange women as if they were slaves. Related to the latter weakness in Irigaray's argument is a third: the commodities of which Marx writes are "things" which have never had and will never have the freedom to rebel or change their status, while the "commodities" of which Irigaray writes are human beings with the power to rebel and change their status, as they (women) have certainly done, on a massive scale, in Irigaray's own time.
Marx spells his theory out step-by-step. A commodity is "an object outside of us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants" (Tucker 303). The commodity has a use-value, which measures its usefulness in satisfying those wants, and is determined in part by costs to the capitalist. The commodity's exchange-value, which is more mysterious, introduces the fetishistic asp...