Society is more than a number of individuals. It is a number of individuals among whom certain definite and more or less stable relations exist. - Paul Sweezy

The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man.

It seems obvious that in this way the economist avoids a systematic exploration of those social relations which are so universally regarded as having a relevance to economic problems that they are deeply imbedded in the everyday speech of the business world. And it is even more obvious that the basic point of view which modern economics has adopted unfits it for the larger task of throwing light on the role of the economic element in the complex totality of relations between man and man which make up what we call society.

Under simple commodity production, to which we have so far largely confined our attention, each producer owns and works with his own means of production; under capitalism ownership of the means of production is vested in one set of individuals while the work is performed by another. Both means of production and labor power, moreover, are commodities; that is to say, both are objects of exchange and hence bearers of exchange value. It follows that not only the relations among owners but also the relations between owners and non-owners have the character of exchange relations. The former is characteristic of commodity production in general, the latter of capitalism only.