The Dictionary of Human Geography

Comp. by: LElumalai Stage : Revises1 ChapterID: 9781405132879_4_C Date:31/3/09
Time:21:45:54 Filepath://ppdys1108/BlackwellCup/00_Blackwell/00_3B2/Gregory-
9781405132879/appln/3B2/revises/9781405132879_4_C.3d

had already recognised a new sub-discipline,

economic geography, that was to be ascience

rather than an encyclopaedia of facts for

improving the bottom line (Sapper, 1931,

p. 627). tjb

commodity With its price tag, said the great

German critic Walter Benjamin, the commod-

ity enters themarket. The Oxford English

Dictionarydefines a commodity as something

usefulthat can be turned tocommercial advan-

tage(significantly, its Middle English origins

invoke profit, property and income); it is an

article oftradeor commerce, a thing that is

expedient or convenient. A commodity, in

other words, is self-evident, ubiquitous and

everyday; it is something that we take for

granted. Marx (1967 [1867]) said that com-

modities were trivial things but also bewilder-

ing, ‘full of metaphysical subtleties and

theological capers’.

Commodities are everywhere, and in part

define who and what we are. It is as if our

entire cosmos, the way we experience and

understand our realities and lived existence

in the world, is mediated through the base

realities of sale and purchase. Virtuallyevery-

thingin modern societyisa commodity: books,

babies (is not adoption now a form of negoti-

ated purchase?), debt, sperm, ideas (intellec-

tual property), pollution, a visit to a national

park and human organs are all commodities.

Even things that do not exist as such appear

as commodities. For example, I can buy a

‘future’ on a basket of major European

currencies, which reflects the average price

(the exchange rate) of those national monies

at some distant point in time. Other commod-

ities do not exist in another sense; they are

illegal or ‘black’ (heroin, stolen organs).

Others are fictional (e.g. money scams and

fraud). Visible or invisible, legal or illegal, real

or fictive, commodities saturate our universe.

Commodity-producing societies – in which

the dominating principle is commodities pro-

ducing commodities – are a quite recent

invention, and many parts of the world, while

they may produce for the market, are not com-

modity societies. Socialist societies (and per-

haps parts of China and Cuba today) stood in

a quite different relationship to the commodity

than so-called advanced capitalist states (cf.

socialism). Low-income countries, or the

third worldso-called, are ‘less developed’

precisely because they are not mature com-

modity-producing economies (their markets

are undeveloped or incomplete, as economists

might put it) – they are not fullycommoditized.

So the full commodity form as a way of

organizing social life has little historical depth:

it appeared in the West within the past 200

years. And over large parts of the Earth’s sur-

face the process ofcommodification–ofever

greater realms of social and economic life being

mediated through the market as a commodity –

is far from complete. Perhaps there are parts of

our existence, even in the heart ofmodernity,

that never will take a commodity form.

A peculiarity of a commodity economy is

that some items are traded as commodities

but are not intentionally produced as com-

modities. Cars and shoes are produced to be

sold on the market. But labour – or, more

properly, labour power – is also sold and yet

it (which is to say me as a person) was not

conceived with the intention of being sold.

This curious aspect of labour as a commodity

under capitalism is as much the case for land

or Nature. These sorts of curiosities are what

Karl Polanyi, in his bookThe great transform-

ation(2001 [1944]), called ‘fictitious commod-

ities’. Polanyi was of the opinion that market

societies that do not regulate the processes by

which these fictitious commodities become

commodities will assuredly tear themselves

apart. The unregulated, free-market, com-

modity society would eat into the very fabric

that sustains it by destroying nature and

by tearing asunder the most basic social rela-

tionships (seecapitalism).

The commodity raises the tricky matter of

price, which after all is themeaningof the

commodity in the capitalist marketplace: how

it is fixed, and what stems from this price

fixing. For example, the running shoes that a

poor inner-city kid in the USA yearns for are

Air Nike, which cost slightly more than the

Ethiopian GNP per capita and perhaps more

than his mother’s weekly income. Or consider

the fact that a great work of art, Van Gogh’s

Wheat field, is purchased for the astonishing

sum of $57 million as an investment. The

problem of the determination of prices and

their relations tovaluelay at the heart of nine-

teenth-century classicalpoliticaleconomy,

butit is an enormously complex problem that

really has not gone away or in any sense been

solved. The ‘metaphysical subtleties’ that Karl

Marx refers to are very much about the mis-

understandings that arise from the way we

think about prices, and what we might call

the sociology or social life of commodities.

But if there is more to commodities than their

physical properties and their prices, which are

derived from costs of production or supply

and demand curves, then there is a suggestion

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 99 31.3.2009 9:45pm

COMMODITY