Deciphering the Commodity: The Social Code of Value

Commodities are economic and symbolic objects, two aspects that merge in Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism, where two ontological and phenomenological planes operate. Their subject is the twofold social objectivity of the commodity as the product of labor and the object of exchange deriving from the dual nature of capitalist social relations as the real subsumption of labor under the command of capital in production and as market reciprocity in circulation. The reconstruction of the logical structure of Marx’s analysis of the commodity allows for grasping the form of value and the fetishistic character of capitalist society. Value emerges as the objective abstract form of capitalist class relations acting as an automatic social code of equivalence between abstract labor in production and solvent social needs in market exchange. The disjunctive synthesis between labor exploitation and the formal equality of exchange constitutes value as a real abstraction in capitalism.