The Thing and the Exchange: On the Nature of the Commodity and the Meaning of the Market

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.

Before the Model, the Vision: On the Stages of Economic Theorising

Before the first equation is drawn, before the diagram takes shape or the dataset is loaded, something quieter — and more profound — happens in the mind of the economist.

A vision forms.

It is not yet a theory, not even a framework. It is a way of seeing — a lens through which reality is filtered, simplified, organized. It determines which facts matter and which are discarded. It hints at causes, at consequences. It whispers what kind of world we believe we live in.

This is the beginning of economic theorising. And it is here, in what Joseph Schumpeter called the pre-analytic cognitive act, that the most important choices are made — often unconsciously.

In The Wealth of Ideas, Alessandro Roncaglia lifts this hidden process into view. He reminds us that economics is not just a machine of models, but a chain of stages — beginning with conceptualisation and only later arriving at model-building. To confuse one for the other is not only an intellectual error. It is a philosophical blindness.

Stage One: The Quiet Birth of a Worldview

To theorise is to abstract. But to abstract is to select. And to select, one must already hold a vision of what is essential and what is noise.

In the first stage of theorising, the economist does not write — they see. They sift through the chaos of life and choose: this is the agent; this is the environment; this is the mechanism that matters.

Smith saw a moral universe of sympathy and trade. Ricardo saw classes and surplus. Keynes saw uncertainty and animal spirits. Each began not with a formula, but with a question: What kind of economy are we living in?

This stage is conceptual. Philosophical. Even poetic.

It is also dangerous.

Because it happens in the background, many economists do not recognize it as theory at all. They inherit the vision embedded in the textbooks, unexamined. They speak in the language of models without asking who wrote the grammar.

Roncaglia warns: The meaning of a concept, even if it carries the same name, can change entirely between theories. Price. Value. Rationality. Equilibrium. These are not universal constants. They are expressions of deeper commitments — to the individual or the collective, to scarcity or production, to harmony or conflict.

To understand an economic theory, one must first understand its conceptual soul.

Stage Two: From Vision to Mechanism

Only once the vision has taken shape does model-building begin.

This is where mathematics enters — not as a tyrant, but as a tool. The economist formalizes assumptions, defines variables, and traces outcomes. The model becomes a microcosm — a purified space where the logic of the vision can play out without interruption.

Done well, models are beautiful. They clarify, discipline, and illuminate.

But they are only as honest as the concepts they encode.

This is why Roncaglia insists that model-building cannot be divorced from conceptualisation. The two stages are not separable tasks assigned to different minds. They are a spiral — each shaping and reshaping the other.

When the model fails to describe the world, it is tempting to adjust the math. But often, the problem lies deeper — in the initial vision that was never made explicit, never questioned.

The risk is subtle but serious: we become technicians of systems we do not understand.

The Hidden Curriculum

Modern economics, especially in its mainstream forms, tends to treat model-building as the core of the discipline. The more advanced the math, the closer we are to the frontier.

But this prioritization comes at a cost: the first stage of theorising is neglected, even erased.

Students are trained to solve, not to see. They learn to manipulate symbols, but not to ask where those symbols came from — or whether they should be there at all. The deeper questions are outsourced to the history of thought, if they are asked at all.

This is a profound narrowing of the economist’s craft.

For when conceptualisation is abandoned, so too is creativity. Without it, we cannot adapt to new realities, cannot build new paradigms. We are left polishing models that no longer speak to the world they were meant to explain.

Returning to First Questions

To recover conceptualisation is not to reject models, but to deepen them. It is to reintroduce into economics the awareness that every theory is a story about the world — and every story has an author.

It is also to reclaim agency.

If we acknowledge that our models are rooted in visions, then we can choose to change them. We can build theories that reflect different values, different possibilities. We can bring in ethics, institutions, psychology, history — not as appendices, but as constitutive elements of the economic.

We can once again see the economist not just as a technician, but as a thinker — someone who crafts worlds, who makes the invisible visible.

A Slow Art

Theorising, at its best, is not an assembly line. It is an art of slowness — of seeing, selecting, building, revising.

It asks not only, What does the model predict? but also, What does it assume? What does it ignore? What world does it describe — and is it the world we live in?

In a time of rapid change — ecological, technological, political — we need more than models. We need vision.

We need economists willing to return to the first stage. To question their concepts. To trace the genealogy of their assumptions. To imagine economies that have not yet been drawn.

Because before every model is a metaphor. Before every equation, a choice.

And to make better models, we must begin again — by learning how to see.