What is the nature of the commodity?

Teach Yourself Marxism

Within capitalism, the commodity is central to determining what is produced and shapes how we view the world

Can we protect any area of life from commodification? Marxist theoretician David Harvey writes, “All human activity has been brought into the domain of the market.”

It’s not just goods and services that are commodities. The natural world has been privatised and flogged off, its resources consumed and depleted.

Caring for children and the elderly has become a source of profit. Sexuality is turned into a commodity which can be sold or used to sell and is torn away from any idea of a whole person.

Every human need can apparently be met through buying a product which we are told will make us sexier, happier, healthier and more successful. Online influencers monetise desperation to sell fantasies of wealth and power. 

For historian Ernst Fischer, “We have become so accustomed to living in a world of commodities, we exist in such a turmoil of alienated objects offered cheaply for sale, that we hardly ask ourselves any longer what it is that magically transforms objects of necessity (or fashion) into commodities.”

So, what does lie behind this transformation? After all, people have made things and sold them for millennia. There was a thriving trade in enslaved people, in sex and in the products of colonialism long before capitalism became dominant.

But capitalism is radically different from previous societies—it is a system of generalised commodity production.

The nature of these commodities is at the heart of Marx’s great work, Capital. Everything we produce has a use value—it relates to a need, whether it is of the “stomach or the imagination”, as Marx wrote.

But a commodity is produced for its exchange value. And to be exchanged, commodities must have something in common—amid the vast array of differences, the similarity is the labour that went into making them.

As new ways of capitalist production spread, people no longer owned the objects they made. Workers were forced to sell their labour to factory bosses, so they did not own what they produced.

The basis of something’s value in the marketplace is the labour time “required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production”. Marx called this socially necessary labour time.

But the exchange of commodities requires another commodity to act as a universal equivalent—money.

Money does not just buy commodities, status and power—it appears to create wealth all by itself, through investment and interest. 

The value of commodities flows from labour, the “relations between men in their productive activity”, but this relationship is hidden. Relationships between people become relationships between things and their values.

Marx described this as commodity fetishism. This phrase relates to the way in which human powers are assigned to inanimate objects, and social organisation appears to be independent of human control.

Pundits talk of “the markets” causing prices to fluctuate, necessitating welfare cuts or causing factories to close. It hides the fact that markets are made up of human activity.

This commodity fetishism can leave us feeling powerless and pessimistic about resisting and creating alternatives to capitalism.

But working-class people constantly strive to create spaces where things which cannot be bought—community, friendship and love—can flourish. And collective organisation at work can begin to replace powerless and pessimism with solidarity and confidence.

Strikes can demonstrate that human labour is the source of profits, breaking down commodity fetishism.

In a socialist society, democratic planning will allow real needs and interests, not the value it can be exchanged for, to determine what is produced.

We will be free to create things that are “beautiful and useful” in the words of poet William Morris—and to free ourselves from the rule of profit.