In chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, Karl Marx famously depicts the commodity — the dominant kind of things produced under capitalism — as a mysterious, irrational, and contradictory being. The contradiction is between use-value — deriving from the real, sensuous qualities of a thing and the use that human beings make of it — and exchange-value, an abstract quality that effaces the useful properties of things in order that they can be measured against a common standard for exchange.