Reified and Deified - Our World of Things
Can you imagine a world without capitalism? Yes? Are you sure the world you are imagining is truly free of capitalism? If not, why is this the case? In my last post we have discovered what value is, we have seen its true face and "history" (if you can call it such), yet we have not really touched its implications. We know what value is and how it manifests itself as the money-form but this still does not touch capitalist reality, we do not know much about how value dominates us. We shall at first again start with Marx own introduction to the fourth section of the first chapter of Capital: "A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." -Karl Marx: das Kapital This is not unknown to us, in my last article we have already seen how value assumes very complicated forms, which are expressed as very simple relati...