Expanding the market weakens the producer’s ethical investment in labor

Evidence

The less, as a result of enlargement of the economic circle, the producer knows his consumers, the more exclusively is his interest focused on the level of the price that he can extract from them. The more impersonal and qualitatively empty is the public that confronts him, the more his own orientation comes to rest exclusively on the qualitatively empty result of labor, that is, on money. Apart from those lofty domains where the energy of labor stems from abstract idealism, the worker will impart his person and his ethical interest to his labor to the degree that his circle of consumers is personally known to him, and this occurs only under conditions of smaller scale. Along with the growing size of the group for which he works, and along with the growing indifference with which he is able only to confront it, many factors are lost that once restricted economic egoism. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 698

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the essay thesis on how urban/expanded circles (New York, Brussels) erode the flâneur Julius’s relational grounding; resonates with Simmel’s blasé attitude mechanism in “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” — connects to: Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production; Labor is the commodity whose surplus value is expropriated and realized through market exchange; Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Names the cash-economy mechanism by which enlarged circles strip labor of personal-ethical content, foundational for the money/indifference theme.

Related

• Labor power only becomes a value through the possibility of exchange. (similarity 0.80)
• Labor is the commodity whose surplus value is expropriated and realized through market exchange (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #expands (0.80)
• Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor #expands (0.70)
• Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production #expands (0.65)
• Labor is the commodity whose surplus value is expropriated and realized through market exchange #expands (0.60)
• Labor power only becomes a value through the possibility of exchange. #expands (0.50) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 258