Commodification of Culture

Commodification as a concept was introduced by Karl Marx in his seminal work Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, first published in German in 1867. In Capital, commodification is defined within the framework of the theory of value, through “commodity fetishism.” An object of commodity is defined by the exchange value, rather than the use value, of the object. Commodification, consequently, consists of the replacement of ordinary use value with an upgraded monetary or exchange value.

One can distinguish commodification from mere consumerism. Consumerism refers to an inevitable spending and exhaustion of given, usually natural, resources, such as oil, woods, water, and air. Consumerism is, by definition, related to survival. Contrary to consumerism, commodification is an elaborated and consistent ideology of goods that are not elementary ...