The man, probably limping, was killed by a boulder hurled at high speed by the force of the eruption that practically beheaded him.

The chest crushed by a large block of stone, the body thrown back by the powerful pyroclastic flow, in a desperate attempt to escape from the eruptive fury. It is in this dramatic position that emerges the first victim of the site of the new excavations of the Royal V.

The discovery took place in the area of ​​the new excavations, the Regio V, right on the corner between the Vicolo dei Balconi (the road that the team from the Pompeii Archaeological Park has just unearthed) and the Silver Wedding alley. “We found it in a place where there was a widening and perhaps a fountain –grew out of simple commodity production. The artisans, the outworkers, and the craftsmen of the immediately pre-capitalist society that was transitional from Feudalism, were the immediate precursors of the small capitalist producers who were to follow them. In the pre-capitalist society they produced simple commodities, governed by simple commodity exchange. Based on rudimentary instruments of production, this ensured – overall and as a whole – that exchange took place on the basis of values that directly reflected the socially necessary labour time that went into making them.

The second (and the more important) reason why Marx begins with the commodity, is because it forms the logical starting point for understanding capital. It is not just that capitalist production (historically) arises out of simple commodity production, but also because the