Commodity

In the ECSA discourse, commodity includes all output produced for and recognized by a Network. This is not Marx’s use of the term, which associates commodities with capitalist production relations. There, commodity production has two dimensions: it is extractive, in the sense that commodities are produced by the workers and owned by the capitalist, and produced to be sold for a profit. This latter emphasis gives rise to the term “commodification”, meaning more and more facets of social life turned into marketable opportunities for extraction. Our use of the term ‘commodity’ is more like Straffa (1960) in his book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. There, commodities are all produced outputs. They are produced for a market, but they are not exchanged for money. This gives space for our proposition that commodities can be produced for the Commons (without a price). Similarly, there can be no suggestion that our use of the term commodity is subject to a ‘fetishism’ of commodities, developed by Marx at the end Chapter 1 of Volume I of Capital, for this term too, is capitalist-specific. In many analyses, the political response to fetishism is to take goods and services out of market relations. Our proposal is to change the nature of markets.