Akademik

A commodity is the form a product takes when the material means of existence are organized through exchange. Commodities have two values: their immediate use in satisfying some need or desire, and their use as vehicles of exchange. Money is simply a measure of the second kind of value, enabling different goods to be commensurated in the market. Commodity fetishism is, in Marxist thought, the process whereby the products of labour come to appear to have an independent value separated from the labour of the people who created them. The role commodities have in exchange disguises the way that their value ought to be entirely derivative from the labour that produces them. In the analysis of Lukács all human relationships come to be treated as commodities, a species of false consciousness characteristic of capitalist ideology.