| This question <107|115> overall <108|110> Hans: <105|113>. |
| Question 233: Which evidence prompts Marx to say, at the beginning of the Commodity Fetishism section, that the commodity is “complicated” or “mysterious”? |
| [109] Hans: Mystery of the Commodity. Although Jeff says otherwise in [107], there is no mystery in Marx's mind about the source of value. In his theory, commodity prices come from labor content. Here Marx differs from mainstream economics, which says that commodity prices come from the marginal utility of the consumers. In Marx's theory, the utility of a commodity determines how much of the commodity will be produced, but it does not determine the price. |
| The mystery, for Marx, is rather: if the market rewards the producers for their labor, why do they not know this? Why do they think the value of the commodity somehow comes out of the commodity itself and not from their labor? Jeff wrote expressly: “Neither the time nor the effort put into making this commodity add to its value.” |
| Our social relations are not transparent to us. This is a problem. If we do not see what is going on in society, we are not the masters of our own relations, but the pawns. |
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