ABSTRACT
Marx (1986b vol. I: 89) calls the commodity a “born leveler and a cynic” and that phrase could not have truer application than as applied to the evolution of global capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century. By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-4 rst, capital is truly global in comparison to its earlier forms of development. Capital can humble regimes and mighty nation states, including those of its origin. Capital and its commodities create all social relations as exchange, reducing social relations in all their forms to the production and exchange of commodities, however intimate and personal.
