Karl Marx's Summary Of Capital, By Karl Marx

In Karl Marx’s Capital he analyses the intricacies of capitalism and its effects on the social relations between people and products. Marx’s chapters “Commodity of Fetishism” and “Working Days” in particular parse through and deconstruct the complex model of a commodity and its crucial role in capitalism. In order to do this, Marx introduces the notion of a use-value as the base foundation of a commodity. Marx then further relates this idea to exchange-value of a commodity. The exchange-value is incredibly important, as it is the driving force behind capitalism. In the first chapter Marx examines how commodities, once in the marketplace seemingly adopt innate value wherein the consumer does not equate the objects value with the human labour expended, but rather that the item

When an object reaches the market it has already gone through several steps, distancing it from its original producer/maker. Therefore, when the consumer sees the object, it is a social relation between product and person. Furthermore, the objects in the marketplace are in material relation which each other due to exchange-value. This is problematic for several reasons. First, the separation that takes place from the maker from his object causes the consumer to forget the original value of that item. The system of maker to middleman to consumer masks what actually gives that item its value, which is the labour expended in order to make the object. Therefore, the consumer does not see the human social relation and instead it is a relation between consumer and object. Secondly, due to this dissociation from maker and object the consumer sees the object as having an innate value. The consumer forgets the value comes from the labour and instead sees the object as possessing its own value altogether. The practice of giving an inanimate object power or inborn value separate from human involvement is what Marx states is commodity