een specified, they are already clarified (Marx, Grundrisse 771.
Once clarified, they begin to stratify, and those who seize the means of production are well positioned to exploit the surplus labor that inheres in unequal social power relations and fosters the alienation that is the fundamental condition of the workers of the world. The alienation, which proceeds from the relations of social power that structure human experience, is decisive. In Capital, Marx attributes that to the "fetishism of commodities," or the social arrangements that are implied when the products of labor become the primary raison d'être of human interaction and achieve symbolic significance because, by reason of the division of labor that characterizes society, the products can be exchanged and assigned variable values. Marx refers to "value . . . that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic" (778). This is Marx's argument: Valuation conventions so evolve as to assign relative values to labor and to the extended exchange values of the artifacts of labor--extension bein
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