At the base of this social relation is nothing less than the building block of capitalism, the commodity and its attendant social relations, which Marx likens to the biological cell in its relationship to life. Marx’s treatment of the commodity form involves a number of rhetorical techniques, prosopopoeia (personification) chief among them. The transformation of a simple useful object into a commodity effectively personifies it, so although “the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing . . . as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it 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.”33 The commodity is a thing that speaks to others for us, and speaks for others to us. When I buy shoes with my wages, I am trading some portion of my own time and the goods or service it might create for a related portion of time that the shoe factory’s workers devoted to making my shoes. While the presence of profit-seeking owners makes these exchanges unequal in terms of actual hours worked, not to mention conditions of work, the important point is that the act of exchange brings my own activity into relation with other people who are unseen and whose contributions I might easily overlook. Because the act of exchange is mediated by money, it occurs indirectly, separated into two acts whose connection is not always obvious: an act of selling my time and an act of buying the product of some other person’s or persons’ time. Money and commodities stand in for (and act on behalf of) other people in this scenario, such that we never actually meet or see those with whom we are brought into relation by the market. There is thus, in capitalism, a constant alternation between what Marx calls “personification of the thing and a reification of the person” as commodities come to act as stand-ins for us.34