ABSTRACT
The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a radical shift in the concerns of industry: from production to selling and from the satisfaction of stable needs to the invention of new desires. The process of commodification, whereby more and more goods, of more and more types, were offered for sale, marks the ascendancy of exchange value over use value, in Marx’s terms. From now on, it is not so much the object in itself-what function it serves-which matters, as its novelty or attractiveness, how it stands out from other objects for sale. The commodity is a sign whose value is derived from its monetary price relative to other commodities, and not from any inherent properties of usefulness or necessity.
