This question <109|119> overall <114|116> Chris: <83|195>.

Question 233: Which evidence prompts Marx to say, at the beginning of the Commodity Fetishism section, that the commodity is “complicated” or “mysterious”?

[115] Chris: An oasis of relations.   The mystery for Marx is not the use-value, which is something “obvious and trivial” as we can view this as something that satisfies needs in itself or becomes this through human labor. We can understand this, as Marx says, as when altering a piece of wood into a table, it has changed but it is tangible, we can see it and touch it.

The mystery also does not arise from the determinants of value such as labor, quantity of labor and such. So where does this “mystery” arise from?

The mystery lies in the fact that commodities reflect back an objective reality that is not controlled by the producers, the social relationships within commodities can take on many forms. Marx uses the example of the eye and the light of an object, where the eye and the object have physical reality with each other, there is a physical reaction between the object and the eye. The commodity form of the products of labor, and the value with which it represents itself does not involve itself with the physical properties or itself as a physical object. It is therefore the interactions between people that give commodities a relationship between themselves. This is a weird idea that although commodities do have physical properties and can be objects such as a table, it is not these physical properties that wholly determine them but the social relations between people in society.

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