How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph) or (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things what are at the same time supra-sensible or social. (1.4.4)
This is Marx's view of commodity fetishism. A commodity takes on, like the added meaning invested in a fetishized object, the value of the labor that went into making it. A Dr. Pepper can is no longer just a can: it's a product for sale at such-and-such price, and as such, it represents something about the work that went into it versus the work that went into a Pepsi can at a different price. It's as if the commodity bears a magical reality.
Quote #2
In other words, the labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labour appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things. (1.4.6)
When you go into the supermarket and look at various commodities on the shelves, you see relationships between people (the various workers) manifested as objects for sale in competition with one another. You don't typically see the workers themselves.
Quote #3
Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it. Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead; it rather transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product: for the characteristic which objects of utility have of being values is as much men's social product as is their language. The belated scientific discovery that the products of labour, in so far as they are values, are merely the material expressions of the human labour expended to produce them, marks an epoch in the history of mankind's development, but by no means banishes the semblance of objectivity possessed by the social characteristics of labor. (1.4.8)
When a shopper hands a cashier $15 of the money commodity in exchange for another commodity, say a package of paper towel rolls, the shopper generally doesn't think the commodities are tradable because they both represent labor time. That knowledge, the labor theory of value, is a secret hidden by commodity exchange. At least that's what Marx thinks.