Talk:Commodification/Archive 1

Untitled
Is a job an example of commodification of a person? It has a price and transactions (hiring and firing) are conducted with regard to job holders.

Yes, a job is commodifaction because it turns normal labour-power a form of life-activity into a commodity to be brought and sold. --Monty Cantsin 13:18, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I believe it would be more accurate to say that labour is a commodity. More than that, it is one of three commodifications that karl Polanyi said were necessary for capitalism to emerge in the 19th Century. John Olsen, 6 Janurary 2006

Is the "Criticism" section supposed to about critiques of the theory of commodification, or criticism of the phenomenon itself? It's not clear.--WadeMcR 19:56, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

I have removed the "Starwar" vandelism. What are these people anyway. --egc

slavery vs. labor
I'm new to contributing to wikipedia, so forgive me if I am doing this incorrectly, but I wanted to comment on the way that slavery was referred to as an extreme case of commodification:

"An extreme case of commodification is slavery, where human beings themselves become a commodity to be sold and bought."

Especially since this is under the Marxist thread, by no means would slavery represent this, but labour itself would. Human beings are bought and sold from the unionized construction worker to the slave because their labour is what is being commodified, they share the premise that they are selling their labour (granted one is getting a much better price). In fact the slave doesn't receive anything (in theory) for his/her labour, and I'm not sure it would be a commodity to anyone but the slave trader. To the slave, its just slavery.

But I do think that since this is under the subtitle of Marxist Theory, that it should accurately reflect Marxist theory. Karl Polanyi's explanation about capitalism creating fictitious commodities would be appropriate, Land, Labour, and Money:

“To isolate [land] and form a market out of it was perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.” Land is nature, trees, food, rivers and mountains supplied by god or by certain geological processes, depending on what you believe. To “organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy.” Labour is the activity of human beings. Believing we are produced to be sold on the market is not only depressing but highly illogical. Furthermore, the supply of labour is a result of population trends that operate independent of market forces. Lastly, money supply is not produced through the operation of market forces. However, for a period of time in the 19th century, classical economists were successful enough to convince various governments to try the experiment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Esteves.situation (talk • contribs) 00:42, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

good section!
Commodification and commoditization section was excellent. Really well done! Thanks CD-Host (talk) 15:38, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

De-commoditization De-commodification
I was wondering today whether this was also a valid term. For me it would imply the process by which a product might cease to be a commodity. For example some key aspects of a commodity are that it is widely available and one instance of the product is just as acceptable as another. Hence the market tends to pay the same price everywhere. Hence key commodities like oil, sugar, cotton etc. As these resources become scarce then we start to see more complex costs added such as trade barriers, transport costs, political processes such as rules requiring stocks to be held and so on.

Marketing and brand development are sometimes used to try to de-commidify a product for example making out that Nike running shoes possess something different to every other running shoe.

Organic and Fair Trade labels acted to de-commoditize coffee and chocolate.

The word has 13800 hits in the american spelling and 9700 in the british, some relevant examples. http://www.dur.ac.uk/dbs/faculty/seminar-series/?eventno=9272 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7679.2011.00515.x/abstract http://creativekarma.com/ee.php/weblog/comments/decommoditization_of_gasoline/ http://profitablegrowth.com/tag/decommoditize/

I think this is worth documenting simply because I used the term myself today and then couldn't find it on wikipedia.

Also not sure that bundling commoditization under commodification really makes sense. I expected to find more on commodities like oil sugar etc than marxist welfare stuff.

Avowkind (talk) 04:21, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

source ?
Commodification is often criticised on the grounds that some things ought not to be for sale and ought not to be treated as if they were a tradeable commodity--for example education, data, knowledge in the digital age.

Use of the word often above implies several theorists, most likely associated with Marxism (since the point is made under the heading Karl Marx) have argued 'some things ought not to be for sale.' So unless the contributor can provide several references or at least one that confirms its use by several writers in that sense, then either the word often must be changed or the point deleted altogether.

As for Marx's own views on commodification, it has been pointed out by many that there is no moral argument or value judgment to be found in his mature work (Capital).

"Critique, for Marx, is a form of judgment, assessment, or measurement of an existing phenomenon in light of its essence. While all criticism involves judgment, not all judgment is value judgment; it is important not to confuse ‘critique’ with subjective or moralistic evaluations. A value judgment is an assessment that compares existence (what is) with what is thought should or ought to be. Critique, for Marx, possesses none of the moral particularity of a value judgment.

Despite the claims of numerous theorists, including Marxists, there is no moral argument in Capital. At times, Marx points to the consequences of capitalist development for humans and the environment, but his argument in no way rests on a view that capitalism is ‘wrong’ or ‘should’ be something other than what it is, or should be overthrown because it is ‘amoral,’ ‘inhuman,’ ‘unjust,’ etc.

Gary Teeple, Notes on Capital, 2013.

As the 27 year old Marx (and Engels) of the German Ideology made clear: "Communism is for us not...an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.")

commodification = Transformation of a use value into a commodity
Commodification is the transformation of goods and services,

But goods and services are synonyms for commodities(=exchange-value + use-value). Since this is a Marxist related article, we could substitute g's/s's which also refer to commodified goods and services for just use-values so as to avoid confusion. The article on use-value uses precisely these words: "The transformation of a use-value into a social use-value and into a commodity (the process of commodification)"

Changes from Nov - Jan
has made a number of changes over the last couple of days, notably to the lede, see [diff]. I am neutral as to whether these are improvements or not. Maybe someone with a good knowledge of the topic would like to comment? Jonpatterns (talk) 14:24, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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Misplaced section
Hello! It seems to me that the section "Business and economics" belongs in the article on commoditization rather than here? Nikolaj1905 (talk) 08:10, 24 September 2018 (UTC)

I strongly agree! This page differentiates between them well in the section "Commodification and commoditization" but then the "Business and economics" section speaks only to understanding commoditization. If someone else also agrees, then let's move that outta there Mycoolsighman (talk) 22:02, 27 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Given that they make such a distinction about commoditization, the details on commoditization is unnecessary. Cmorris2018 (talk) 13:31, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback! I incorporated the section into the text of the article on Commoditization, and deleted it from here. Nikolaj1905 (talk) 05:49, 29 October 2021 (UTC)