Concept
Commodification
Overview
Commodification is the process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people) into commodities, or objects for sale. It has a connotation of losing an inherent quality or social relationship when something is integrated by a capitalist marketplace. Concepts that have been argued as being commodified include broad items such as the body, intimacy, public goods, animals and holidays.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
So far we have considered C―M as sale, as the conversion of commodity into money. But if we look at it from the other end, the same process will assume the form M―C, or purchase, i. e., the conversion of money into commodity. Sale is necessarily its opposite at the same time; it is the former if we look at the process from one end, and the latter if we regard the process from the other end.
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
The author is tied to Commodification in the knowledge graph.
When, therefore, it is maintained, rightly or wrongly, that some change or modification in the powers exercised over things by the persons legally recognised as their proprietors would be beneficial to the public and conducive to the general improvement, it is no good answer to this merely to say that the proposed change conflicts with the idea of property. The idea of property is not some one thing, identical…
John Stuart Mill, Socialism
Close in meaning to Commodification; the term itself is not named.
Marx further examines the process by which money is transformed into capital and discovers that the form in which money circulates as capital is the inversion of the form in which it circulates as the universal equivalent. The individual owner of commodities sells to buy, he sells what he does not need, and buys with the money thus obtained what he does need.
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
Close in meaning to Commodification; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Commodification
Related ideas
- Globe Pequot Publishing Group
- Industrial Revolution
- Karl Marx
- Netflix
- Marx's theory of alienation
- Bell hooks
- Slavery
- Semiotics
- Capitalism
- Other (philosophy)
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.