Commodity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
"In a certain respect it is a shame that Marx, in his famous commodity analysis, did not proceed from prostitution and its particular form of exchange. Such an approach would certainly have offered theoretical advantages. As head of the olet Party, he would have to be interested in every opportunity to demonstrate the cynicism of money. The woman as commodity would have been a truly irrefutable argument. But a book that intends to become the Bible of the worker's movement cannot begin with a theory of prostitution." --Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) by Peter Sloterdijk |
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In economics, a commodity is an economic good or service that has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
The price of a commodity good is typically determined as a function of its market as a whole: well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. The wide availability of commodities typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (such as brand name) other than price.
Most commodities are raw materials, basic resources, agricultural, or mining products, such as iron ore, sugar, or grains like rice and wheat. Commodities can also be mass-produced unspecialized products such as chemicals and computer memory.
See also
- 2000s commodities boom
- Commercial off-the-shelf or "commercially available off-the-shelf" (COTS)
- Commodification
- Commodity (Marxism)
- Commodity currency
- Commodity fetishism
- Commodity market risk and values
- Commodity money
- Commodity price shocks
- Commodity price index
- List of traded commodities
- Sample grade
- Standardization
- Trade