A Marxist Scrivener Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener captures the anti-capitalist vision found in many of Karl Marx's writings. This essay will discuss the topic of how capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century alienated and exploited the workforce by focusing on Bartleby as a clerk in the law office. Using Lois Tyson's book Critical Theory Today you will be able to understand the main tenets of Marxist theory and how it applies to Bartleby the Scrivener. To begin, one must understand the alienation of the workforce in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx began his studies by focusing on human behavior. He was troubled by the effects factory work had on people forced to sell their labor to big industries. By producing massive quantities of products, workers felt no individual contribution, therefore they dissociated themselves from the products and even from their work. Just as Bartleby was forced to copy day after day, he dissociated himself from his products and his work. His simple phrase "I'd rather not" was the embodiment of passive protest against his monotonous copying. Bartleby, protesting against his work, began to lose its exchange value. An object becomes a commodity only when it has exchange value or sign exchange value (Tyson 62). Bartleby's exchange value was that of his ability to copy. By protesting against this work, the Lawyer had lost any chance of furthering his own financial progress, so Bartleby was fired. Bartleby's alienation also manifests itself in the form of isolation from society. It is no coincidence that this story takes place on Wall Street, which has its own exploitative and alienating personality. Bartleby is sitting at the Lawyer's desk... in the center of the paper... r, the Lawyer. This ideology that supports the socioeconomic inequalities of capitalist countries where the means of production are privately owned forced other copyists to want to side with those in power rather than unite against it (Tyson 58). This alliance with power is just another example of how a capitalist society forces the exploitation and alienation of a group or, in this case, a person. There is no doubt that mid-nineteenth century capitalism alienated and exploited the workforce. Workforce exploitation and alienation still exists today, from clothing manufacturing to electronics manufacturing. Bartleby is no exception when it comes to being a victim of capitalism. Bartleby understood this victimization as the repressive ideology that prevents us from understanding the material and historical conditions in which we live.