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This article provides information about the commodity exchange as the key feature of capitalist society:
Beginning with commodity and commodity production as the key feature of capitalist society, they argued that capitalist market relations and values were penetrating ever more areas of life. Exchange was becoming the primary way in which people related to and interacted with each other in a capitalist market society.
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Consequently reification the turning of humans, culture, nature and everything else into commodities whose fundamental substance was exchange value came to dominate relationships and activity within the capitalist society. That is, rather than human relationships between individuals, exchange relationships come to dominate interpersonal relationships. Marx had noted this; but this line of thought was much further developed by the critical theorists.
They looked on capitalism in the twentieth century as extending this to many aspects of society previously untouched or relatively unaffected by exchange relations. They saw aspects of personal life such as love, friendship, and the family being reduced to such form of exchange. Consumption became organised by such forces as well, so that there were increasingly “oppressive uniformities and identities”. The concern was with rising sameness and conformity in society that did not let underlying tensions and contradictions to surface and be amenable to public attention and action.
They viewed such forces as stifling individuality and particularity and producing a certain sameness among all members of society. This aspect of capitalism has developed much more than in the 1920s and 30s, so that this part of their critique certainly has an important resonance in today’s economy, media and society. Consumer and media capitalism have vastly extended their reach into all aspects of the consumer society and life in general, and a critical approach to contemporary society can benefit from and use the ideas developed by these critical theorists.