Daily Inspiration Quote by Karl Marx

A commodity looks simple, but that simplicity is deceptive. For Marx, the everyday familiarity of goods on the market hides a peculiar social reality. Each commodity carries a dual character: it has a use-value, tied to concrete usefulness, and an exchange-value, expressed in money and ratios with other goods. The second quality is not a physical trait of the object. It arises from human labor organized in a particular social form. Value is the expression of abstract, socially necessary labor time, not the concrete work of weaving linen or sewing coats, and so it appears as an immaterial property that things seem to possess.

That is why the analysis turns metaphysical and even theological. Under capitalism, relations among people take the form of relations among things. The power and coordination of human labor become visible only as the price and movement of commodities, which seem to act of their own accord. Marx calls this commodity fetishism: just as religious fetishes are believed to contain powers independent of human makers, commodities appear to have value and agency independent of the workers and social relations that produced them. Prices, wages, and profits then look like properties of things and fair trades among equals, masking exploitation and the extraction of surplus value.

This argument sits at the opening of Capital (1867), where Marx uses dialectical analysis to show that the commodity form is historically specific to capitalism. Only when production is generalized for exchange does labor take on the abstract, measurable character that allows apples, coats, and software to be commensurable. The strangeness he points to is not mystical at all, but the everyday mystification of a society where human cooperation is coordinated by the market. The familiar world of goods becomes a mirror that reflects back our social relations as if they were natural, objective properties of things.