Marxism is one of the most influential philosophical ideas of the last two hundred years providing basis for political revolutions, influencing and promoting worker’s rights, and, in academia, influencing new paradigms of thought and research. Developed by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx, it offers a systematic critique of capitalism: the economic system that continues to shape how most of us in the West live, work, and shop. In his major work Capital (1867), Marx set out to explain not just how capitalism functions, but how it reshapes the people living within it — their relationships, their sense of self, and even the everyday objects they buy and sell. For anyone working in commercial visual communication, Marx's ideas remain strikingly relevant. Firstly, they ask us to look past the surface of a product and consider the social relations hidden beneath it. Secondly, they place consumption within complex social structures and relations in which the designer, the communicator, and the audience are situated. And thirdly, they remind us of our ethical and moral responsibilities as designers and communicators who may, in our day-to-day duties, contribute to the reproduction of capitalism.

Marx discusses a number of concepts related to and embedded within his critique of capitalism. In this short discussion of Marx’s ideas, I will discuss alienation, commodity fetishism and Marx’s ideas about choice and constraints.

Alienation is the estrangement Marx believed workers experience under capitalism: from the products of their labour, from the labour process itself, from their fellow workers, and ultimately from their own human potential. Within capitalism, labour is a commodity which workers “sell” in a market much the same as a physical product is traded. By detaching labour from the product it produces (whether it is a chair, a loaf of bread, a shirt, or even a piece of graphic design) it causes the worker to no longer feel connected to or defined by the object of their labour. 

Alienation is arguably Marx’s most human concept. Writing before he had fully developed his economic theory, Marx argued that industrial labour separates workers from the thing they produce — a factory worker assembling a fraction of a product has no real relationship to the finished object, let alone any say in what happens to it once it is sold. Work, which Marx believed should be a creative and fulfilling expression of what makes us human, becomes instead something we do to survive rather than to flourish. This might feel like a nineteenth-century concern, but it resurfaces constantly in conversations about the modern gig economy, zero-hours contracts, and the design industry’s own relationship with unpaid pitching and speculative work.

Commodity fetishism describes how, under capitalism, the social relations between people (the labour that made a thing) become disguised as relations between things (its price, its brand, its desirability). That is, the value of a product resides within the product itself and not the labour that has produced it. Of course, this has the added effect of further alienating workers from the fruits of their labour. This idea is exploited regularly by brands that are perceived to be culturally very valuable (such as high fashion brands) when pricing goods that may well be quite cheap to produce.

Commodity fetishism is perhaps the concept with the most direct relevance to visual communication. Marx observed that once a product reaches the market, its price appears to be an inherent, almost magical property of the object itself, rather than a reflection of the labour, materials and social relations that produced it. A trainer, a smartphone, a coffee: each arrives on the shelf stripped of its history, dressed instead in meaning supplied by branding, packaging and advertising. Marx described this process as commodities appearing to relate to one another independently of the people who made them, taking on, in his words, “a fantastic form” (1867). Branding and visual identity design sit at the very centre of this process: a large part of the designer’s job, whether we articulate it this way or not, is to build the story that obscures the commodity’s origins and replaces it with desirability.

The relationship between choice and constraint runs through Marx's whole account of class: people make choices, but rarely under conditions they have chosen for themselves. The relationship between choice and constraint attracts on-going debate in social theory and each theory tends to sit within one camp (people have free will and can make their own choices) or the other (social structures constraints and determine people’s actions). Marx was clear not to suggest that people are simple pawns in a capitalistic game, but instead he agreed that people do actually have choice. But, choice is limited by the social and economic conditions that we find ourselves.

Marx did not believe people were simply puppets of the economic system, but he was clear that the choices available to any individual are shaped, often invisibly, by their position within it. Workers sell their labour because they must, not because ownership of the factory or the workshop was ever genuinely on offer to them. Consumers choose between brands, styles and products, but rarely question the underlying system that manufactures those choices in the first place, or who benefits from them. Marx and Engels described the dominant ideas of any era as generally being the ideas of its ruling class (1848) — meaning that what feels like free, personal choice is itself shaped by structures we rarely notice we are operating within. For designers, this is a useful discipline: it asks us to consider not only what an audience wants, but why they have come to want it, and whose interests that want ultimately serves.

Marx's original interest was in a society organised primarily around ownership of the means of production — a fairly stark division between those who owned factories, land and capital, and those who had only their labour to sell. Contemporary sociologists have since developed considerably more nuanced pictures of how class actually operates, particularly in relation to culture, taste and identity, areas Marx touched on only lightly.

Pierre Bourdieu is perhaps the most significant figure to build on Marx's interest in classed societies. In Distinction (1979), Bourdieu argues that class is not only about economic capital (money, property, income) but also cultural capital (education, knowledge, taste) and social capital (networks and connections). For Bourdieu, our sense of taste — what we consider stylish, tasteful or, conversely, vulgar — is not a neutral personal preference but a deeply classed disposition, absorbed unconsciously through upbringing and education, which he termed the habitus. People use taste, often without realising it, to distinguish themselves from those below them and align themselves with those above — hence the book's title. Bourdieu's framework has become hugely influential in design and marketing precisely because it explains why certain aesthetics, fonts, colour palettes and product categories read as “class signifiers” long before anyone consciously registers price or origin.

More recently, the sociologist Mike Savage has extended this project still further. Drawing on a large-scale survey conducted with the BBC, Savage and his colleagues proposed a model of contemporary British society built from combinations of economic, cultural and social capital, arguing that class in the twenty-first century is “more differentiated and pervasive” than earlier, simpler models allowed for (Savage et al., 2013, p. 220). Rather than the two or three broad classes Marx described, Savage's research identifies a much wider spectrum of class positions, from an “elite” with high levels of all three forms of capital, through to a “precariat” with very little of any. For designers and marketers, Savage's work is a useful reminder that audiences can no longer be understood through income bracket alone: two people with identical salaries may hold entirely different amounts of cultural or social capital, and therefore respond very differently to the same piece of visual communication.

Marxism has, unsurprisingly, attracted enormous criticism over the years, not least for underestimating culture, taste and identity as forces in their own right, and for its at times deterministic view of history. However, despite this criticism, the concepts Marx introduced continue to sit underneath much of how we think and write about class, consumption and value today, including the more contemporary frameworks offered by Bourdieu and Savage. Marxism offers designers a useful, if occasionally uncomfortable, framework for thinking about who our work is really for, what it obscures, and whose interests it ultimately serves.

Commercial visual communication exists, in large part, to make commodities desirable — to dress the product in meaning and, in doing so, to quietly obscure the labour and social relations behind it. Understanding commodity fetishism, alienation, and the relationship between choice and constraint does not require designers to reject commercial practice; but it does offer a useful critical lens through which to view our own work. It asks us to consider not just how we sell things to people, but what kind of society we are helping to reproduce every time we do. Bourdieu and Savage's more contemporary accounts of class remind us that our audiences are shaped by far more than income alone, and that taste, culture and social position all play their part in how a piece of design will ultimately be read. Perhaps, then, thinking with Marx — even loosely, even critically — offers designers a way of asking sharper questions about the audiences we design for and the systems we design within.

References:

Bourdieu, P. (1979) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Marx, K. (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Hamburg: Otto Meissner.

Marx, K. (1844) Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) The Communist Manifesto. London.

Savage, M. et al. (2013) A New Model of Social Class? Findings from the BBC's Great British Class Survey Experiment. Sociology, 47(2), 219–250.