trade” and “food or raw materials as objects of trade”
(Oxford English Dictionary).
The act of trading one good for another is an
ancient one, and the act of using currency to pur-
chase a grown or manufactured good is almost as
ancient. The act of commodification (sometimes
referred to as commoditization) is significant, then,
because it is a modern metamorphosis of an ancient
idea. Today, it is not only grown and manufactured
goods that can be bought and sold: Ideas, social
relationships, even individuals can now be viewed as
commodities—goods available for trade or purchase.
Commodification, in effect, turns people and ideas
into goods and machines.
The idea of commodification was first broadly
explored when, in the Communist Manifesto (1848),
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, noted that every-
thing—not merely food, clothing, and other tangible
goods—can become a commodity in a modern,
industrial, capitalistic society. It is important to
remember, however, that a commodity derives its
value not from what it can do (use value) but from
what it can be sold or traded for (exchange value),
often in order to attain some sort of perceived cul-
tural prestige or social status or identity. To Marx
and Engels, people (more specifically, the modern
working class), as well as the goods they produce,
have become commodities themselves, since people
“live only so long as they find work, and who find
work only so long as their labor increases capital.”
In other words, industrialization has increased the
amount of commodities that can be produced (and
often increased their exchange value as well), but
the machine cannot run without the human being.
However, the commodity costs money to produce,
and so it must always be sold at a set minimum price.
The human being, though, has no set minimum
price, requiring only “the means of subsistence that
he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation
of his race.” As a result, the laborer himself becomes
a commodity in that his wage is tied to his use in
producing the original good. In other words, the
“worth” of the laborer is directly associated to the
worth of the good (and the exchange value of the
laborer is nearly always lower than the exchange
value of the good).
However, more and more the workers are sepa-
rated from the means of production: Workers in a
capitalistic society often have no connection to the
commodity they are producing; the commodity will
often not be purchased or utilized by the laborer’s
own community. Rather, they work for a company
that is not connected to their community, producing
commodities that have no relationship to them, by
using machines that they merely operate. Eventually,
this leads to the Marxist concept of alienation, in
which laborers feels disconnected from their own
work, from what they produce, and ultimately from
other human beings in their community (since the
product of their work is purchased by others and
made by machines).
The idea of alienation is important to under-
standing commodification because it deflects the
focus of production from the human being, making
him a minor part of the process. When this happens,
goods can take on a life of their own, almost seem-
ing to appear magically on the shelf of a store, where
someone will purchase the good, often without hav-
ing any idea where, how, or by whom it was made.
The process of production (including the human
factor) is hidden, and the commodity itself appears
as a “natural object,” as if its existence is a matter of
natural means, as opposed to manufactured means.
When this occurs, it is often referred to as “com-
modity fetishism” (Marx, Capital) or “reification”
(Lukács, History and Class Consciousness), within
which the material world is viewed as objectified
and out of society’s control; the primary human
actions in a reified world are those of buying and
selling.
In recent years, the concepts of commodifica-
tion and reification have been analyzed within the
sphere of popular culture. For example, theorists
such as Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
(1944) have identified the emergence of “the culture
industry,” which views popular culture as a “factory,”
mass-producing goods for society’s consumption.
This easy consumption of goods—being a “good
consumer” in a capitalistic society—results in satis-
fying a perceived need for “culture,” and that being
able to purchase and thereby participate in this cul-
ture will therefore create happy citizens.16 commodification/commercialization