COMN 2700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Commodity Fetishism, Fungibility, Arjun Appadurai

• School: York University
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMN 2700
• Professor: Mark Hayward

Document Summary

This means studying how culture and capitalism affect each other. This unit will look at the following aspects of the capitalist economic system: Commodity: a good or service that can be bought or sold to satisfy some want or need. Often a commodity is interchangeable with another commodity of the same kind (fungibility) The commodity is a form, fundamentally a relationship between us and objects. Marx doesn"t talk about commodities, but the commodity-form. A particular relationship between social, symbolic and material relations. Use-value: the way that a thing satis es a speci c need or want. Exchange-value: the value, always in relation to other commodities, of a thing in circulation. Value is suppressible (not immediately visible to us) The critique of political economy argues that economic concepts often erase social contributions in their analysis of exchange and circulation. The commodity-form is a way that makes it dif cult to see the contribution of labour and nature to the produced good.