Commodity
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Commodity is a term with distinct meanings in both business and in Marxian political economy. For the former, it is a largely homogeneous product, traded solely on the basis of price, whereas for the latter, it refers to wares offered for exchange.
Linguistically, the word commodity came into use in English in the 15th century, being derived from the French word "commoditι" , meaning today's (2000) "convenience" in term of quality of services. The Latin root meaning is commoditas, referring variously to the appropriate measure of something; a fitting state, time or condition; a good quality; efficaciousness or propriety; and advantage, or benefit. The German equivalent is die Ware, i.e. wares or goods offered for sale. The French equivalent is "produit de base" like energy, goods, industrial raw materials.
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Business usage
In the world of business, a commodity is an undifferentiated product, good or service that is traded based solely on its price, rather than quality and features. Examples include: electricity (most users of electric power are only concerned with energy consumption; only a minority of users are concerned with the quality and technical details of voltage and frequency deviations, phase imbalance, etc.), music (an intellectual property) can be bought and sold through many formats especially digitally, wheat, bulk chemicals such as sulfuric acid, base and other metals, and even pork-bellies and orange juice. More modern commodities include bandwidth, RAM chips and (experimentally) computer processor cycles, and negative commodity units like emissions credits.
In the original and simplified sense, commodities were things of value, of uniform quality, that were produced in large quantities by many different producers; the items from each different producer are considered equivalent. It is the contract and this underlying standard that define the commodity, not any quality inherent in the product. One can reasonably say that food commodities, for example, are defined by the fact that they substitute for each other in recipes, and that one can use the food without having to look at it too closely.
Commodities exchanges include:
- Chicago Board of Trade
- Euronext.liffe
- London Metal Exchange
- New York Mercantile Exchange
Microeconomists also include labor, and currency as commodities that can be bought and sold.
Examples
Wheat is an example of a soft commodity. Wheat from many different farms is pooled. Generally, it is all traded at the same price; wheat from farm A is not differentiated from wheat from farm B. Some uniform standard of quality must necessarily be assumed. There may be various standards leading to different pools: one say for genetically modified wheat, and one for unmodified wheat. Failures to match the consumer's assessment of risk and usefulness for some purpose, can lead to lower prices or the necessity of dividing the market into different pools - a very major issue in agricultural policy.
Markets for trading commodities can be very efficient, particularly if the division into pools matches demand segments. These markets will quickly respond to changes in supply and demand to find an equilibrium price and quantity.
Commodities and Marxism
In classical political economy and especially Karl Marx's critique of political economy, a commodity is simply any good or service offered as a product for sale on the market. Some items are also seen as being treated as if they were commodities, e.g. human labour or labor power, works of art and natural resources, even though they may not be produced specifically for the market, or be non-reproducible goods.
Marx's analysis of the commodity is intended to help solve the problem of what establishes the economic value of goods, using the labor theory of value. This problem was extensively debated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Rodbertus-Jagetzow among others. Value and price are not equivalent terms in economics, and theorising the specific relationship of value to market price has been a challenge for both liberal and Marxist economists.
Characteristics of commodity
In Marx's theory, a commodity has value, which represents a quantity of human labor. The fact that it has value implies straightaway that people try to economise its use. A commodity also has a use value, an exchange value and a price.
- It has a use value because, by its intrinsic characteristics, it can satisfy some human need or want, physical or ideal. By nature this is a social use value, i.e. the object is useful not just to the producer but has a use for others generally.
- It has an exchange value, meaning that a commodity can be traded for other commodities, and thus give its owner the benefit of others' labor (the labor done to produce the purchased commodity).
- Price is then the monetary expression of exchange-value (but exchange value could also be expressed as a direct trading ratio between two commodities without using money).
According to the labor theory of value, product-values in an open market are regulated by the average socially necessary labour time required to produce them, and price relativities are ultimately governed by the law of value.
Illustration
To understand the concept of a commodity, consider a chair. It is a commodity if the chair is a tradeable product of human work possessing a social use-value. By contrast, a fallen log of deadwood sat upon in the forest is not a commodity, as it was not produced by human work for the purpose of trade. A chair created by a hobbyist as a gift to someone is not a commodity. Nor is a chair a commodity (as a chair) if its only use would be as scrap firewood (unless one purchases a chair specifically to chop it up for fire wood). A chair that nobody could sit on has no use-value, and cannot be a commodity (unless it has an ornamental value, e.g. in a doll's house).
See also
- List of traded commodities
- Commodity price index
- Commodity markets
- Commodity money
- Commodity form theory
- Commodity computer
- Property
- Trade
- Law of value
- Simple commodity production
- Use value
- Exchange value
- Real prices and ideal prices
- Gold as an investment
- Trading Places - comedic film about playing the commodity markets
External links
Categories: Commodities used as an investment | Business | Marxist theory