56 SOCIAL SCIENTIST social reality, appearance level being represented by such categories as exchange value at the deeper, underlying levels, of which the surface level is only a manifestation. Marx does not stop at exchange value, but sees it as a phenomenal form of value, and goes on to analyze value relations. It is through this process that he is able to discover the existence of commodity fetishism, and provides a determination of the level of social reality represented by exchange value, this determination residing in value relations. The ideological implications of the mystificatory aspect of commodity fetishism can be illustrated also by an examination of the relation between the capitalist and the wage-labourer. If confined to appearances alone, one would perceive the relation as one of equality. For, after all, both the capitalist and the worker are independent individuals meeting in the labour market as buyer and seller. The worker is selling a commodity, his own labour power, and the capitalist is buying it with the money-commodity. Thus, in the eyes of bourgeois law, they are both equal and independent commodity-owners entering, freely of their own volition, into a contract with each other. And yet this appearance o f equality is deceptive. The worker, if he is to live, has no choice but to sell his labour power for a wage. For he owns only his labour power, not the means of production. The latter, in capitalist society, are monopolized by the capitalist class. Behind the appearance of equality (in the sphere of exchange and circulation) lies the reality (in the sphere of production relations). The wage labourer and the capitalist belong to different social classes, the latter to the class that holds the monopoly of ownership and control of the means of production, and the former to the class that has only labour power to sell. The aspect of mystification is closely related to that of domination. After all, a social phenomenon that is not understood does constitute an alien power. Commodity production requires independent, private producers. Yet this independence is only the mystifying form of appearance of a more basic reality, that of the utmost interdependence between producers. The interdependence is something that is realized ^after the fact". The individual commodity-producer works independently of others, but the price that his product will fetch him is crucially dependent on what the other producers have done, especially those producing the same product. In this ^anarchy' of independent private production, the exchange ratios between commodities ^vary continually, independently of the will, foresight, and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of their objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them."2 41 More generally, objective social phenomena, which are the products of the specific social relations of commodity (and in its further development, capitalist) production, come to exercise an alien or external power and domination over the very bearers of these social relations (the commodity producers.,