In Capital, Marx argues that social relationships are determined by people’s material experiences and conditions. “Material conditions” are the conditions that shape one’s access to the means of subsistence: food, water, and shelter. Changes in material conditions over time create contradictions in social relationships, by which Marx means that how a society is organized around its material conditions may induce ideological inconsistencies. This is called dialectical materialism, a notion derived from Marxist thought’s roots in Hegelian dialectics. One example is that economies dominated by capitalism experience a “period of monopoly” followed by an economic bust (587). Between this and the fact that capitalists “acknowledge no authority but that of competition” (477), economic busts and unregulated competition lead to fewer and fewer businesses, despite the espoused capitalist ideal of a free market where many people can participate on more or less an equal level.

Such contradictions also lie behind the social relationship of the employer and the worker. For instance, at the core of the whole process of commodity production and exchange, there are contradictions between

use-value and value, between private labour which must simultaneously manifest itself as directly social labour, and a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour, between the conversion of things into persons and the conversion of persons into things (209).