Understanding Value and the Fetishism of Commodities

Our second episode covers the first chapter on “commodities,” where Marx begins laying the conceptual building blocks for his investigation. We cover use-value, exchange-value, and value, the two-fold character of labor and its correspondence with different forms of value, and the fetishism of commodities. Throughout, we emphasize the social relations embedded in commodities (relations that, in turn, commodity exchange helps proliferate), as well as how the reality of these relations differ markedly from bourgeois notions of independence, autonomy, and individual choice. In the last part of the episode, we spend time on the first brief sketch of communism Marx gives at the end of the chapter.

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