A potato is not just a potato.
A coat is not just warmth.
A coin is not just metal.
Once they enter the sphere of exchange, they become something else — something more abstract, more mobile, more dangerous.
They become commodities.
And around them spins a world — the market — where value is not fixed by use, but floated by price, desire, scarcity, power. Where things are not merely owned, but traded. Where the act of giving something up is inseparable from the act of receiving something back. And in this swirling exchange, a deep question waits, often unanswered:
When does a thing stop being just a thing?
This question — about commodities and markets — sits at the very heart of economic life. Not as a problem to be solved, but as a mirror to be held up. Because how we treat things, and how we trade them, says everything about how we see ourselves.
What Is a Commodity?
A commodity, in its barest sense, is something made for exchange. Not something made for the sake of use — not bread for the table, not a handmade gift — but a good or service whose value is defined not by its function, but by its tradability.
A thing becomes a commodity when it enters a system of comparison.
– This apple is worth that coin.
– This hour of labor is worth that wage.
– This barrel of oil is worth that future.
It is an act of abstraction. We strip the thing of its context, its story, its place in the world, and assign it a number. We make it legible to the market — measurable, movable, exchangeable.
But in doing so, something is often lost.
The commodity, once priced, no longer carries its full meaning. A tomato grown in your grandmother’s garden is not the same as a tomato in a plastic crate at the supermarket. But in the logic of the market, they are made equivalent — through price.
This equivalence is powerful. It allows scale, trade, coordination. But it also flattens difference, silences memory, obscures cost.
The Market: Mirror and Machine
The market is the mechanism through which commodities move. But it is not just a place — not only stalls, shops, and screens. It is a structure of expectations, a rhythm of exchange, a choreography of wants and fears.
It is where supply meets demand, yes — but also where dreams meet limits, and lives are shaped.
Markets coordinate, signal, allocate. They are brilliant in their efficiency. But they are not neutral. They do not only reflect value — they create it. They tell us what matters, how much it matters, and to whom.
In a market economy, to be priced is to be seen.
What cannot be sold often cannot survive.
And this is the paradox: markets bring abundance, but they also bring invisibility.
What about care, silence, tradition, nature, trust?
What is the price of a coral reef? Of a childhood? Of dignity?
When these things cannot be commodified, they often fall outside the map of economic logic.
The market is a mirror. But a mirror reflects only what it is shown.
Classical and Marxian Shadows
Classical economists like Smith and Ricardo saw commodities as bearers of value — especially labor. Their models were grounded in the material: things had value because effort had gone into them. The market, in this view, was a natural outcome of specialization, a way to link self-interest with collective benefit.
Marx, however, stared deeper into the commodity and saw something darker: fetishism. Not in the modern sense, but in a way only he could name — a spell, a disguise.
For Marx, the commodity was a mystification. It hid the labor behind it. It turned social relations between people into economic relations between things. A worker sells labor as a commodity, but the market erases the story, the pain, the inequality. All that remains is price.
To buy a shirt is not only to wear it. It is to participate in a chain of production, power, and exploitation — mostly unseen. The commodity becomes a veil.
And the market, far from neutral, becomes a site of forgetting.
Today: A World of Commodities, a Crisis of Meaning
In the 21st century, commodification has extended far beyond goods. Ideas are commodities. Emotions are marketed. Even attention — once the most private of acts — is now monetized.
We scroll, we click, we trade ourselves in fragments.
We are not just consumers. We are also the consumed.
And still, the market expands.
Carbon credits. Intellectual property. Personal data. Rentable friendships. Surrogate wombs.
What is left that cannot be bought or sold?
Perhaps the more urgent question is: What should never be?
Because when everything becomes a commodity, nothing is sacred. And without the sacred — without spaces of refusal, of care, of non-exchange — the system cannot hold.
Reclaiming the Thing, Reimagining the Market
To critique the commodity and the market is not to reject them. It is to see them clearly — to hold them to account. We need exchange. We need trade. But we also need boundaries. Not everything that can be priced should be sold.
We need markets that serve life, not consume it.
Commodities that carry their stories, not bury them.
Economic systems that recognize value beyond what is profitable.
And we need to remember that the market is a human creation, not a natural law. We can reshape it. Redirect it. Even refuse it where necessary.
The thing must not be lost in the transaction.
The person must not be reduced to the price.
And the world must not be sacrificed for the sake of liquidity.
Because beneath every commodity, there is a hand.
And behind every market, a set of choices —
about what we see, what we ignore, and what we are willing to trade.
It is time to choose again.
Not just what we buy —
but what we believe.