'fetishistic inversion': it is as if the dialectics of the commodity-form presents us with a pure -- distilled, so to speak -- version of a mechanism offering us a key to the theoretical understanding of phenomena which, at first sight, have nothing whatsoever to do with the field of political economy (law, religion, and so on). In the commodity-form there is definitely more at stake than the commodity-form itself, and it was precisely this 'more' which exerted such a fascinating power of attraction. The theoretician who has gone furthest in unfolding the universal reach of the commodity-form is indubitably Alfred SohnRethel, one of the 'fellow-travellers' of the Frankfurt School. His fundamental thesis was that

the formal analysis of the commodity holds the key not only to the critique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the abstract conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intellectual and manual labour which came into existence with it. ⁸

In other words, in the structure of the commodity-form it is possible to find the transcendental subject: the commodity-form articulates in advance the anatomy, the skeleton of the Kantian transcendental subject -- that is, the network of transcendental categories which constitute the a priori frame of 'objective' scientific knowledge. Herein lies the paradox of the commodity-form: it -- this inner-worldly, 'pathological' (in the Kantian meaning of the word) phenomenon -offers us a key to solving the fundamental question of the theory of knowledge: objective knowledge with universal validity -- how is this possible?

After a series of detailed analyses, Sohn-Rethel came to the following conclusion: the apparatus of categories presupposed, implied by the scientific procedure (that, of course, of the Newtonian science of nature), the network of notions by means of which it seizes nature, is already present in the social effectivity, already at work in the act of commodity exchange. Before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market. The exchange of commodities implies a double abstraction: the abstraction from the changeable character of the commodity during the act of exchange and the abstraction from the concrete, empirical, sensual, particular character of the commodity (in the act of exchange, the distinct, particular qualitative determination of a commodity is not taken into account; a commodity is reduced to an abstract entity which -- irrespective of its particular nature, of its 'use value' -- possesses 'the same value' as another commodity for which it is being exchanged).

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