Capital analyses the capitalist mode of production through the forms that make exploitation appear natural. The commodity is Marx’s economic cell-form: a seemingly ordinary object whose dual character as use-value and value condenses labour, exchange and social abstraction. His method moves from this minimal form toward money, capital, machinery, the working day and accumulation, revealing systemic relations through successive determinations. The iconic concept of commodity fetishism shows how relations among people acquire the appearance of relations among things. Yet Marx’s analysis is not merely ideological; it tracks the material organisation of factories, law, technology and time. The broader bridge is to infrastructure and urbanisation, since capital reorganises bodies, territories and machines according to the extraction of surplus value. Capital’s enduring contribution is methodological: social totality must be reconstructed from its operative forms, and critique must expose how abstractions become materially effective through institutions, habits and technical systems.