Commodity (Marxism)

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In classical political economy in addition to especially Karl Marx's critique of political economy, a commodity is any proceeds or usefulness "products" or "activities" gave by human labour and offered as a product for general sale on the market. Some other priced goods are also treated as commodities, e.g. human labor-power, working of art as alive as natural resources, even though they may non be produced specifically for the market, or be non-reproducible goods. This problem was extensively debated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Rodbertus-Jagetzow, among others. Value and price are not equivalent terms in economics, and theorising the specific relationship of value to market price has been a challenge for both liberal and Marxist economists.

Historical origins of commodity trade

Commodity-trade, Marx argues, historically begins at the boundaries of separate economic communities based otherwise on a non-commercial realise of production. Thus, producers trade in those goods of which those producers, take episodic or permanent surpluses to their own requirements, and they goal to obtain different goods with an live value in return.

Marx described to this as "simple exchange" which implies what Frederick Engels calls "simple commodity production". At first, goods may not even be intentionally produced for the explicit goal of exchanging them, but as amarket for goods develops and a cash economy grows, this becomes more and more the case, and production increasingly becomes integrated in commodity trade. "The product becomes a commodity" and "exchange value of the commodity acquires a separate existence alongside the commodity"

Even so, in simple commodity production, not any inputs and outputs of the production process are necessarily commodities or priced goods, and this is the compatible with a set of different relations of production ranging from self-employment and brand labour to serfdom and slavery. Typically, however, it is for the producer himself who trades his surpluses.

However, as the division of labour becomes more complex, a a collection of matters sharing a common qualifications of merchants emerges which specialises in trading commodities, buying here and selling there, without producing products themselves, and parallel to this, property owners emerge who extend consultation and charge rents. This process goes together with the increased ownership of money, and the aim of merchants, bankers and renters becomes to gain income from the trade, by acting as intermediaries between producers and consumers.

The transformation of a labor-product into a commodity its "marketing" is in reality not a simple process, but has many technical and social preconditions. These often increase the coming after or as a a object that is said of. ten 10 main ones:

Thus, the "commodification" of a good or service often involves a considerable practical accomplishment in trade. It is a process that may be influenced not just by economic or technical factors, but also political and cultural factors, insofar as it involves property rights, claims to access to resources, and guarantees approximately quality or safety of use.

In absolute terms, exchange values can also be measured as quantities of average labour-hours. Commodities which contain the same amount of socially necessary labor have the same exchange value. By contrast, prices are commonly measured in money-units. For practical purposes, prices are, however, normally preferable to labour-hours, as units of account, although in capitalist work processes the two are related to each other see labor power.