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Talking of the French translation of Das Kapital, this was the one translation that Marx himself supervised and saw to print, in 1873. In it the German word Ware is translated as marchandise. Any English-speaker, even with no knowledge of French, can understand straightaway that what is being talked about is something that is bought and sold. In fact in French the primary dictionary meaning of the word is, precisely, “what is sold and bought”.
It is clear, then, that the word “commodity” in the English translations means something that is bought and sold. There can be no argument that this is what Marx meant by the word. A product that is not bought or sold is not a commodity.
There can be arguments about whether Marx’s concept of “value” (as opposed to “exchange-value”) can be applied to everything that is bought and sold and/or under all historical conditions but not about what the word “commodity” meant for Marx. That’s a closed argument.
We now have some more up-to-date figures of the number of times that the QR code was used to directly access a particular “landing page” on our website. Up to yesterday it was 72.
As some 4700 leaflets were distributed in and around the ward, that is 1 in about every 67 leaflets distributed (or about 1 per street). This will be some sort of measure of the number who read the leaflet rather than dump it with all the pizza and other ads that fall through their letter-box.
One peculiarity is that more (41) used the QR after the Election Day than before (31). This suggests perhaps that interest was not directly linked to the election.
The next step will be to distribute a similar number of a similar leaflet over the same period (one month) in a similar area (inner London) when there is no election on.
The area (inner London, Labour Party majority) may have had something to do with the absolute figure, as the Tunbridge leaflet in a different area with a different title and content brought only 4 QR responses from the 2000 leaflets distributed.
Here are some key definitions in basic Marxian economics from An A to Z of Marxismon this site.
Commodity. Commodities are items of wealth that have been produced for sale. Commodities have been produced in pre-capitalist societies, but such production was marginal. It is only in capitalism that it becomes the dominant mode of production, where goods and services are produced for sale with a view to profit.
Under capitalism the object of commodity production is the realisation of profit when the commodities have been sold. These profits are mostly re-invested and accumulated as capital. Commodities must be capable of being reproduced, and this includes the uniquely capitalist commodity of human labour power.
Value. A social relationship between people which expresses itself as a material relationship between things. The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary abstract labour time needed for its production and reproduction from start to finish. Price is the monetary expression of value in a market.
Exchange value. A relative magnitude which expresses the relationship between two commodities. The proportion in which commodities tend to exchange with each other depends upon the amount of socially necessary labour-time spent in producing and reproducing them from start to finish. Commodities sell at market prices that rise and fall according to market conditions around a point regulated by their value and, more specifically, their price of production.
Prices of production. In Marxian economic theory the ‘price of production’ is the price sufficient to yield the average rate of profit on capital advanced. From a business’s point of view this is cost price plus what the market will bear. Actual market prices fluctuate around prices of production through the equalisation of profit rates.
Book Review: Socialism and Commodity Production: Essay in Marx Revival by Paresh Chattopadhyay, Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2018; 308 pp.: ISBN 9004231641.
By George Liodakis
On the issue of commodity production, Engels and many socialist thinkers after him have argued that commodity production preceded capitalism and this implies that the law of value also applies to pre-capitalist societies (p. 101). The author, however, following Marx, points out that commodity production was only partial in pre-capitalist societies, ‘involving the exchange of surplus over immediate consumption, and the basic aim of production was use value and not exchange value’ (p. 230). Hence, the law of value cannot apply to these societies. Commodity production was generalized only under the capitalist mode of production and, therefore, the law of value singularly concerns the historical period of capitalism. As stressed by Marx himself, ‘the law of value for its full development presupposes a society of big industrial production and free competition, that is, the modern bourgeois society’ (p. 116, 149).
Marx also observes that ‘the value form of the commodity is the economic cell-form of the bourgeois society’ and the author correctly points out that, in socialism, ‘the negation of capital automatically signifies negating exchange value or the product taking the form of the commodity’ (p. 63). As regards the ‘associated mode of production’, it is also noted that ‘This “union of free individuals”, the crowning point of the producers’ act of self-emancipation … excludes, by definition, private property in the means of production, the commodity form of the product of labour, wage labour and state’ (p. 232).
Yes, there has been some discussion as to whether products for sale in pre-capitalist societies where production for sale wasn’t the dominant mode (such as Ancient Greece and Rome) would be subject to the same economic laws as in a predominantly production-for-sale economy. For example, some of the products put on sale might be the surplus of a producer over and above their own needs, most of their production being for their own direct use. In such cases, would the price of what was sold reflect the amount of labour-time required to produce them?
I think Engels’s definition of a commodity in his insertion well expresses what the term has always meant in Marxian economics:
“In order to become a commodity, the product must be transferred to the other person, for whom it serves as a use-value, through the medium of exchange.”
I don’t think that Engels’s insertion at the end of the first section of chapter 1 of Capital is at variance with Marx’s view of a commodity as a item of wealth produced, and reproducible, by human labour to be sold (exchanged). This being the case, that peasants and others whose surplus labour is taken in kind to be directly used by their exploiters are not producing commodities is clear. They are not producing things to be sold but directly for use, even if not theirs.
The word Marx used in German for “commodity” is Ware which has the same root as the English word “ware(s)” which in English is associated with something that is for sale (I don’t know about German, perhaps someone can help here). Marx had to find an equivalent in German for the word “commodity” that was used by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and other “Political Economists” whose theory he set out to criticise.
Actually, “commodity”, as its etymology suggests, was used by the Political Economists to mean what modern economists mean by “good” but in their minds was still associated with exchange as they considered this to be natural. Today, in economics, the word “commodity” is used only for some goods, those bought and sold in bulk whose individual items are indistinguishable such as wheat and metals, but is definitely associated with buying and selling.
In any event, in Marxian economics the term is defined as an item of wealth produced by labour that is produced to be sold.
If you want to use “commodity” as an alternative to “good” then, as DJP has pointed out, you will still need different words to distinguish between goods produced directly for use and goods produced to be sold so as to be able analyse the different types of society they imply.
According to this article, there is a reluctance amongst some members of the Ukrainian army to be used as canon-fodder as has reportedly been the case in the Russian army too:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/26/ukraine-frontline-russia-military-severodonetsk/
Ok. Do you think that every useful thing produced by human labour is a commodity?’
My answer is, ‘Yes!’
So this is what you really meant to say. But why didn’t you tell us before that you were defining “commodity” as any product of human labour? We assumed, because you said that you were setting out to provide an incontrovertible proof of the validity of the Marxian labour theory of value, that you would be using words in the same sense that Marx did.
But now it turns out that you are using the word “commodity” — a key concept in Marxian economics, defined in the opening pages of Das Kapital — in a quite different sense to Marx. Marx defines a commodity as a use-value produced by human labour that is produced to be exchanged. This contrasts with your view that a commodity is any use-value produced by human labour. Hence your peculiar statement that commodities would still exist in socialism but that they would not be exchanged (bought and sold) there.
I second DJP’s motion that, before we continue, you re-read the first section of the opening chapter of Capital, paying particular attention to its concluding paragraph:
“A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)[12] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.“
The passage in brackets [12] above was added by Engels to the 4th German edition in 1890 with this explanation:
“I am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that every product that is consumed by some one other than its producer is considered in Marx a commodity.”
Ok. Do you think that every useful thing produced by human labour is a commodity? My answer is, ‘Yes!’
That can’t be right. Otherwise humans would have been producing commodities from the time we first came down from the trees and began using sticks and stones to get what we needed. In fact even before that while we were still up there and picking fruits to eat. Producing commodities would be part of the human condition and so would still exist even in socialism.
Are you sure you don’t want to correct yourself and answer “yes” to the question “Do you think that every useful thing produced by human labour for sale is a commodity?”.
That would still be wrong but not as absurd as what you have just said.
“Russian meddling in the Western Balkans risks pulling the region back into war, Liz Truss warned as she called on the West to not appease Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine. The Foreign Secretary accused Moscow of exerting a “malign” influence over the countries that used to be part of Yugoslavia with dirty tactics on a visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
The Russian government may well be exerting a malign influence over the area but that’s exactly what she is doing. What could be more provocative than to go to Sarajevo to express support for one of the sides (Bosnia) in the civil war that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia, knowing that the other side (Serbia) is pro-Russia? Her recklessness risks restarting that civil war. The permanent civil servants at the Foreign Office must be tearing their hair out at her antics.
Some anarchists took the same position in the First World War. Others didn’t.
You say: “So many things such as pearls, natural diamond, gold, silver, bee wax, natural honey, apples, mangos, food grain, vegetables, water in bottles, oxygen in cylinders, poultry eggs, fishes, etc., etc. are bought & sold as commodities which we can neither produce nor reproduce.”
But then go on to say how they can be — though humans working. Production is not humans creating something new out of nothing. It is humans transforming materials that originally came from (the rest of) nature into something useful for them.
The examples you give are mainly of materials directly extracted from nature, but all the materials humans work on will ultimately have come from nature. It is just that the things you instance can be taken directly from nature. As you point out, this does involve work. And that work can be done again as long as these things can be found in nature, ie they are reproducible.
Marx points this out in the opening chapter of Capital:
“The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother”.
In footnote 13 he expands on this by quoting an 18th century Italian writer who made the same point:
[“All the phenomena of the universe, whether produced by the hand of man or through the universal laws of physics, are not actual new creations, but merely a modification of matter. Joining together and separating are the only elements which the human mind always finds on analysing the concept of reproduction; and it is just the same with the reproduction of value” (value in use, although Verri in this passage of his controversy with the Physiocrats is not himself quite certain of the kind of value he is speaking of) “and of wealth, when earth, air and water in the fields are transformed into corn, or when the hand of man transforms the secretions of an insect into silk, or some pieces of metal are arranged to make the mechanism of a watch.”] – Pietro Verri, “Meditazioni sulla Economia Politica” [first printed in 1773]
Which all goes to show how crazy the whole proposal is. How else could their warships get to the Black Sea if Turkey won’t allow any warships through the Bosphorus? There is another river and canal route, I think, but that would take them from Gdańsk to Kherson which is Russia controlled. A bit of dead-end, then. The Lithuanian Foreign minister clearly hasn’t thought things through. I am assuming of course that he Lithuanian navy would participate in the coalition of the warmongers.
