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The Quiet Birth of the Commodity.――Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 1. Marx's Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 1 begins by analyzing the commodity as the smallest unit for understanding capitalist society. Since wealth in capitalism manifests as a collection of commodities, the nature of the commodity itself must be clarified to grasp the mechanisms of this society. A commodity possesses two aspects: use-value, its usefulness, and exchange-value, its capacity to be exchanged for other commodities. Use-value is concrete and qualitative, but it alone does not constitute a commodity; it only becomes a commodity within the relationship of exchange in the market. Behind exchange-value lies a common standard, which Marx calls value. The substance of value is abstract human labor, abstracted from individual differences, and its magnitude is determined by socially necessary labor time. Here, the decisive criterion is the social average, not individual effort or subjective evalua
tion. Furthermore, Marx demonstrates that value, which is fundamentally a relationship between people, appears in the market as a relationship between things. He suggests that this illusion later leads to the discussion of commodity fetishism.