Das Kapital

A table, Marx writes, is an ordinary thing of wood until it goes to market, and then it stands on its head, sprouting out of its wooden brain ideas stranger than if it had begun dancing of its own accord. Das Kapital opens on that image and never lets it go, because its whole argument is that everything for sale hides something: a life's hours, a bent back, dissolved into a price until no one can see them there anymore.