“Money is the token of, and the key to, every human capacity” (Berger, 143). This quote successfully illustrates how capitalism affects the way that every human thinks. The concept of money now controls our lives to the point where every human ability is based around it. If we examine the time period before the rise of capitalism, we can see that money did not used to be as important is it is today. There was an egalitarian state where men and women were interdependent, there was a dividing up of jobs by sex and age, and mainly: there was no private property (Whittington-Walsh). Today in our capitalist society, the means of production are privately owned, leaving the consumers obligated to buy commodities because we are no longer able to make them ourselves.
In Ways of Seeing by John Berger, he explains that never in history has there ever been such a concentration of images around us (Berger, 129). These images are trying to persuade us to buy not only an object but a lifestyle. Just as with oil paintings many years ago, when you buy something today you also buy the look of the thing it represents (Berger, 83). Our capitalist society has made people believe that our possessions symbolize who we are and our status in society. Instead of a painting showing what we possess, we wear or use our possessions so everyone can see. When a consumer buys a product, they believe that they will transform their lives with the purchase and make them richer, but in reality we are losing money and making ourselves poorer (Berger, 131). Capitalists use what Berger calls “publicity” (known as advertisements today) to depict how their product will transform you. Without this publicity, capitalism could not survive (Berger, 154).
An example of this can be seen in the advertisement promoting the new Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York’s SoHo neighbourhood. At first I noticed that this was obviously a very high-end hotel advertisement, but upon further...