| This question <701|560> overall <145|147> Avatar: <1883|148>. (graded B+) |
| Exam Question 7: 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.) |
| [146] Avatar: The commodity is a basic vessel which other more complex elements in capitalism (money, capital etc.) can be reduced to; the commodity itself is the personification of the rawest element in capitalist production, human labor. |
| Hans: Your original message had “(wealth, capital etc.)”; I took the liberty to change it into “(money, capital etc.)”, since commodity, money, and capital are different social forms of wealth. Economists are interested in the social forms of wealth; they do not study the content of wealth (use-values). |
| Even with this correction, your answer is not a definition of the commodity, but a nutshell analytical statement about it. This is an exam question, i.e., it is an easy question with one right answer. In this case, the right answer is simply: a commodity is something produced for sale or exchange. |
| Why do you call human labor a “raw” element in capitalist production? Perhaps it may seem “raw”, because the laborer is excluded from the control of the means of production, and the benefits of the labor do not flow back to the laborer himself or herself. But this should not cause us to look down on labor. Labor is not the rawest but the finest element in capitalist production. |
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