Commodities and Commodification Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Commodities are things that are useful, or that satisfy fundamental human needs — such as food or shelter — or more ephemeral needs, such as the desire to appear attractive or successful. As it is understood today, however, a commodity is a product that is bought and sold. This narrowing of the term came about with the rise of capitalism as the central organizing principle of Euro-American economic and social life.

The pioneering critique of capitalism by the philosopher Karl Marx in the mid nineteenth century brought the commodity to the fore as a unit of analysis in the study of capitalist social relations. In that work, Marx suggested that commodities seeming simple utility masked the social and material relations that brought them into existence — especially the human labor necessary to produce them. Although a commodity was useful to the person who bought it because it satisfied some need, it was also useful to the person who sold it because its sale yielded value in excess of the cost of the labor and materials necessary to produce it.

Marx’s theory responded to those of economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, for whom the price of food, clothing, or fuel, for example, was seen as set by forces of supply and demand, and into which the very social struggle over the price of labor did not figure. Struggling to earn a living, individual laborers were blinded to these social relations, which they had in common with other workers, seeing commodities as simple objects of utility and not as repositories of those relations.

Marx referred to this designation of commodities as mere objects of utility as commodity fetishism, sarcastically suggesting that the classical economists description of commodities as containing their own value, although seemingly scientific, was actually fantastical and wrong-headed. Marx drew upon emerging anthropological theory, which described religious practices in European colonies in Africa and East Asia as “fetishistic” because adherents to those religions ostensibly believed that their gods or ancestors dwelt in idols. Economists who treated commodities as having value in and of themselves were to Marx no better than primitive shamans or hucksters peddling a false religion.

By the end of the nineteenth century, rapid industrial development led social critics such as Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen to describe the commodity to a largely middle-class audience as a means of understanding the anxiety deriving from significant changes in social life, and for suggesting reforms designed to stave off workers revolts in Europe and North America. During the twentieth century, women were increasingly positioned as the managers of household consumption, and men and children as the victims or beneficiaries of their purchases. Commodities were seen as bearing more than practical use value; they also carried social values, encouraging their users to be passive, consuming members of society rather than active and productive citizens. This transition has come to be called the ”commodification of everyday life,” or the rise of ”consumer culture, and suggests a loss of personal and civic autonomy. This more reformist analysis of commodification has targeted an audience of consumers in order to alienate them from commodity relations, in the hopes of bolstering political and civic spheres activity, rather than creating the intellectual support for revolution.

Analyses by Frankfurt School theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno sought to demonstrate how this commodification of daily life in a democratic capitalist society naturalized consumption as civic activity. These approaches suggested the possibility of the gradual overthrow of commodity relations as the central organizing principle of social life. Arguing against this, poststructuralists such as Jean Baudrillard maintained that the commodity relation was so fundamental to capitalist consciousness that its alienation offered no prospect of redemption, except by undermining the notion of value itself. The seeming fatalism of this approach has in turn been critiqued by the cultural-studies school, in works by Stuart Hall, Susan Willis, Sut Jhally, and others, which may broadly be understood as supporting a practical critique of consumption in social life, and which have also argued for the study of (and resistance to) the globalization of social and cultural relations under capitalism.

Bibliography:

Appadurai, A. (ed.) (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Apter, E. & Pietz, W. (eds.) (1993) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NJ.
Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (1975) Dialectic of Enlightenment. HarperCollins, San Francisco, CA.
Tucker, R. C. (ed.) (1978) The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. W. W. Norton, New York.