"Until then, we're going to handle this like businessmen, sell the shit, make the profit and later for that gangsta bullshit."

To begin to discuss themes, ideas, and storylines as Marxist on The Wire could be an entire blog in and of itself. The intricacies of the drug trade, the commodification and reification of nearly everything and every person on the show, as well as the inherent problems within every system presented would make for a long entry. In order to try and "decipher the heiroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products" (Marx 91), I will defer to "The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof" by Karl Marx in order to attempt to flesh out the relationships of the dealers to the suppliers, the buyers to the dealers, and those who work for the dealers.

The drug trade on The Wire functions as a hierarchy. The suppliers who arrange the shipments of the drugs are essentially nameless ("The Greek") and few are even allowed to speak to them. Joseph "Prop Joe" Stewart worked with these people and secured large imports of heroin for those like Stringer Bell and Marlo Stanfield (both also kingpins). The chain goes further and further down--the furthest point probably being the "hoppers," the extremely young kids working for the kingpins who are generally lookouts.

Within the hierarchy, these people have no relationship to one another except to further fetishize their product and the production of that product. Their actions are completely related to the fluctuation of the market and each and every player in that game eventually betrays someone in some way in order to get ahead of the other, seek revenge for loss of goods (whether that "good" be an actual person, money, or drugs), or to adhere to a "code" established through the trade itself.

As Marx states:

In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values... A man or a community is rich, a pearl of a diamond is valuable... A pearl or a diamond is valuable' as a pearl or a diamond. So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange- value in either a pearl or a diamond.... What confirms them in this view is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man...

In the case of The Wire, this quote can be applied to the drug trade and those implicit in it. No chemist has ever applied a direct value on the heroin or crack-cocaine the kingpins are dealing. The value of all of it is directly applied through the consumers themselves. No one is exempt from both the fetishism of commodities and becoming the commodities themselves.