Commodities

Marxist Notions

Within various branches of social sciences, commodities and commodity processes are the object of inquiry. For instance, commodities appear in economics, geography, cultural studies, as well as multidisciplinary studies, such as political ecology. Because of this wide theoretical focus, the definition of commodity is subject to interdisciplinary debates, as well as those that manifest intradisciplinarily. As result, operational definitions of commodity largely depend on various epistemologies within social sciences. Not surprising, this leads to contention and debate as commodity connotes and denotes different things depending on its context. Regardless of its divergences, however, Karl Marx's and Marxist notions of the commodity and of commodity processes are [Page 215]largely present in its configuration. These notions, in turn, impact on the trajectories that commodities and related studies have taken.

For Marx, commodities are objects that satisfy human needs. Without engaging with the particulars of these needs, Marx argues that the utility of objects, that is their use, is at the core of a commodity's value and therefore comprises what he refers to as their “use value.” Furthermore, he argues that use values can only be realized by using and consuming the commodity. Crucially, in this framework the use value of a commodity is divorced from the labor that goes into producing it. A key component to commodities configured within Marxist political economy is that the use value of commodities comprises the wealth of a society. In contemporary Western society, these use values become the materials of exchange value, leading to an economy predicated on the exchange of commodities. Use and exchange values, labor, and materiality lie at the heart of commodity processes, and emerging from this, a commodity is an object with a use, but also an exchange value.

Much of the theorization of commodities that has informed and otherwise inspired research in social sciences, in particular cultural studies and various branches of both geography and anthropology are encompassed by the concept of the fetish of the commodity articulated, again, by Marx. For Marx, the fetish of the commodity is the process through which labor relations between the people who make objects and the objects themselves are replaced by material relations between objects; the fetish of the commodity occurs when the object no longer represents the people who made it but rather when it takes on meanings and value in its own right. Underlying the fetish of the commodity are the processes of use and exchange value, whereby labor is divorced from the usefulness of an object and displaced from commodity relations. The commodity emerges, appearing as itself, a desirable and valuable object, to consumers without reference to the labor that produced it. The fetish of the commodity has clear geographical implications. The relationship between labor and the commodity is tied to processes of material production, while the relations embodied by the fetish of the commodity are tied to processes of consumption. A commodity's value in this context is negotiated through value of the fetish in places where the commodity is consumed. Geographically, places of production are linked to places of consumption through the commodity and the practices that make up the commodity. In this sense, commodities are intrinsically social, cultural, and geographical, and as a result, they have become the project of some researchers to demonstrate these connections and linkages.

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