| This question <93|95> overall <93|95> Hans: <91|98>. |
| Exam Question 3: What is a commodity? Marx does not give the definition of a commodity but an analysis. How would you define the thing he analyzes? (The answer can be given in one sentence.) |
| [94] Hans: Definition of a commodity The exams this Semester will be a little different than in the past. As in previous years, some of the questions will require you to write detailed answers drawing on the Internet discussion, and these are the questions you have to re-submit per email after the exam. |
| But other questions will be very easy and straightforward: they will be selected from the questions labeled “exam question” in the Annotations, and here only a short answer is required. They will not be accepted for resubmission. I will grade them as either right or almost right or wrong. Question 3 is one of these exam questions, and all I am looking for here is that you say: “a commodity is something produced for sale or exchange”, just as you can find it in the Annotations. Perro's answer [93] would have been graded as “right.” Perro wrote: |
| Commodities are everything made by people in a society in order to be able to sell or exchange these with other people, which also make them able to meet their material needs. |
| If I wanted to go into the subtleties of it, I would say that Perro makes it sound too much as if it depended on the individual whether something is a commodity or not. This is not Marx's view of these categories. A commodity is a social category: not only must the individual have the intention of trading that thing, but this individual must also stand in a social context where these things are generally considered the private property of their producers, and this ownership right can be transferred through trade, and where these things are customarily traded. A number of social prerequisites must be met for things to be produced and traded as commodities. Marx is very aware of these, while we sometimes tend to forget them. But in the portion of the exam in which you are to answer these Exam Questions I am not going after these subtleties. |
| A third portion of the exam will be multiple choice questions, and you should not underestimate those. I am developing some interesting and difficult multiple-choice questions about the first chapter of Marx's Capital. Some of these will test whether you have basic misunderstandings, but others will be such that you can only answer them if you have been reading the assigned readings fairly closely. |
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