The whims of commodity: commodities' production as production of social relationships - Karl Marx, in a very different social context, showed how the process of commodities’ production is, at the same time, a process of social (re)production, a process in which not only commodities, but also social relationships are shaped. We start from that, still valid, assumption, trying to understand in which ways it has to be restructured in a context characterized at least by two main metamorphosis: on the one side the dichotomy between the labour and production process and the process of consumption cannot be considered as clear and as strong as in Marx's socioeconomic context; on the other side, the terrain of global value chains has more and more involved new ‘resources', consisting in human basic faculties (language, communication, sociability, cognitive and social abilities, etc.). In the end of the paper, we try also to the contradictions these new developments of the connection between commodity's and social relationships' production are causing, in terms of risks of auto-destruction of the moral bases of the capitalism and of persistence and growing economic and working practices trying to avoid capitalist exploitative mode of organizing them.
Keywords: Consumption, production, social relationship, individualisation, commodity