Capitalism presents itself, Marx said on more than one occasion, as an 'immense accumulation of commodities'. In a full-scale commodity producing economy, what comes to matter about each separate article is not so much its constellation of uses as its value as an item of exchange, its function as a 'material depository' (Marx again) of exchange value. The commodity's value is generated from its shifting place in a complex, self-contained world of money equivalents. So that finally the usefulness of petroleum presents itself as merely the outward and accidental aspect of something more basic: the article's price.

LRB 21 April 2005 | PDF Download