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There are two aspects to the commodity, says Marx. One is obvious, its “use value,” an object that “by its properties … satisfies human needs.” The other, its exchange value, is more mysterious because it embodies a whole lot of social designs which are not so obvious when experiencing an object in its use value, or even its price as a sign of its exchange value.

Take the table in front of your eyes, says Marx. “It is absolutely clear, that by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless, the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing.” Its meaning is in its use, and its usefulness has been rendered in its making.

But then there is the second aspect to the table. It has been sold and bought, and so has the spoon lying on the table – and on the same measure, money. This is its exchange value. However, if the use value of a table stares you in the face, the social processes for the determination of its exchange value are more elusive. There is more to money than meets the eye. Tables are dearer than spoons because tables take more labor to be made. Labor is a “physiological fact … of the human organism … essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, and sense organs.”¹⁷⁷ More such embodied effort is required to make a table than a spoon.

In the capitalist modernity of Marx’s analysis, both tables and spoons are made in factories, where the capitalist class owns the infrastructure and tools of production. The table is not sold simply for the value of its labor because the capitalist also extracts surplus value, a bounty for having control of the means of production. In this way, the laborer makes the capitalist richer, more able to expand the owner’s means of production. The laborer earns just enough to consume and so never acquires means of production. The capitalist reinvests their surplus. Hence, expanding inequality.

This everyday thing, the wooden table, “as soon as it emerges as a commodity, … changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”

Now the mystery can be revealed, a mystery that Marx famously terms “the fetishism of the commodity.”

[T]he socially useful character of private labour [such as when a person makes a table] is reflected in the form that the product of labour has to be useful to others, and the social character of the equality of various kinds of labour is reflected in the form of the common character, as values, possessed by these materially different things, the products of labour [exchange values, where tables and spoons can be traded on the same terms] … It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities – the money form – which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers … Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social products; for the characteristic which objects of utility have as being values, is as much a social product as is their language.¹⁷⁸

Or even, perhaps, more social than language: “Table” in text mainly refers to its mundane use value, conceptually replicated for all the tables in the world. Tables in wood require multimodal parsing if their multifaceted social meanings are adequately to be revealed for what they are.

Back now to Mr Peel and the mistake he made in Western Australia.^§AS2.3 When they got there, his laborers considered themselves “free” to take land, means of production capable of supporting their own subsistence. Of course, this was a perverse colonial freedom because it treated the ancestral lands of First Peoples as simply free and for the taking, terra nullius or “empty lands” in the legal theory of colonial appropriation. Notoriously, Mr Peel was a perpetrator in the Pinjarra Massacre of 1834, when more than thirty Bindjareb men, women, and children were killed by a militia in which he participated.

However, among his own people, in his attempt to transplant capitalism Mr Peel had failed to understand that capitalism talks freedom but requires unfreedom, the unfreedom that comes with having no means of production. This is how workers have to become, by dint of sheer material necessity, wage laborers in the employ of capitalists, making tables, spoons, or whatever. The so-called “freedom” of the labor market Marx renamed, in the interest of unconcealment, “wage slavery.”

Reframed in the terms of our grammar, there is a transposition between rhetoric and reification, where the rhetoric aligns with the immediate appearances of objective reality (freedom, of sorts), but belies its underlying designs (slavery, of sorts). And more: text lets you get away with reification a little more easily (“table,” in passing), while the object form may suggest a deeper parsing.

The meaning of table-as-use is not the same as its meaning-for-exchange, says Marx, and in the case of exchange, price hides a multitude of evils. No comprehensive sense can be made of the table’s meaning-for-exchange without an analysis of the whole social context of the commodity form, including the structures of inequality that drive the capitalist system of production and markets, its purported freedoms and underlying unfreedoms.

To reframe in the terms of our grammar, the distortion that occurs is a consequence of the incomplete transposition of meanings when we don’t get past the immediate objectivities of the world. We live our everyday lives in the phenomenal world of things and their exchange values on the market, the superficialities of their prices, but don’t as a matter of habit go further into their meanings. The immediate presence of things and the market for their exchange seems insurmountable. We don’t get past their reified meanings. As a consequence, interests are concealed.

We could, however, parse the system that underlies trade in tools, and spoons, and everything else. In another layer of grammatical analysis, we could analyze the interests embodied in those same meanings, and the messy transpositions between immediate speaking-to (rhetoric) and deeper meanings-in (by parsing reification).

When we analyze these ordinary things for their immanent social grammar, interests are revealed, and the implications are political. But mostly we don’t do this. We just keep going about our everyday lives, without interrogating the wider and deeper meanings in differential interests. So, society in its current form goes on, meaning what it does, as it does, one commodity transaction at a time.

If Mr Peel’s beautiful illusions were shattered in Western Australia, we may ask: what then, are the general conditions for tearing aside all such illusions? How do we overcome their seeming “objectivities,” the reifications in the status quo?

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¹⁷⁷ Karl Marx, 1867 [1976], Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by B. Fowkes, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, pp. 163–64.

¹⁷⁸ Ibid., pp. 166, 168, 167.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 242–245. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Karl Marx’s “Commodity Fetishism” §AS2.3a