Capital (Marx)

commodities ‘magically’ seem to control humans into behaving in certain ways - because in the private property society, we need to exchange commodities to survive and meet our needs, we have to produce commodities or otherwise labour in a socially specific way, creating a social division of labour

i think the purpose of this framing is basically to point out that commodities as the social ‘form’ of the underlying material ‘substance’ goods are a socially/politically contingent ontological commitment

cf Subsumption for maybe more specific ideas about how commodity exchange changes people’s behaviours