Karl Marx’s Capital is the culmination of an effort to historically and theoretically delineate the features of his contemporary Western societies. Political economy describes the conceptual underpinnings of capitalist life; Capital not only tries to situate those underpinnings, but contains the critique of what those structures entail. Marx is at once analyst and critic, philosopher, economist, sociologist, and revolutionary.

Marx, in constructing the general and abstracted political economy of the capitalist mode of production, first defines the core unit of that mode as the single commodity, where wealth is an immense accumulation of commodities.. A commodity, simply put, is an object outside ourselves.

To determine the value of commodities, Marx looks at value and defines two types of value: use and exchange. Use value is …