well nice to know, but i'm still confused, for example in the ussr exactly what made their products commodities?, was it because the state enterprises made profit from them?, and also if the enterprises didn't make profit would that make them NOT commodities?
does price have anything to do with things being commodities?, so for example in towards a new socialism things change price acording to demand, but still nobody profits from sells, are those commodities?
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no, it is a thing you produce for exchange. if the exchange actually takes place or not is irrelevant for the individual commodity.
marxists.org
Yes, commodities are things that are produced for their exchange value rather their social use value. A tire factory doesn't produce tires because they know that a certain number of people are in need of tires, they produce them because they know they can exchange them for more value than was expended producing them. If tires ceased to be make a respectable profit, the factory would cease to produce tires and produce something that could produce the profit they desire. In the USSR there was commodity production, especially in agriculture sector. It was commodity production because individuals or groups of individuals produced the crops or what have you and sold their surplus on the market to exchange for money to again exchange for other goods.
It doesn't matter what they were made for, if you make something for yourself but later need the money so you sell it, it is still a commodity. Everything that is exchanged is a commodity. It is the exchange that defines the commodity, not your intent or some other spooky concept.
They were exchanged.
No. You can operate at a loss and still produce commodities. Whether you made a profit or not is completely irrelevant.
If it has a price, it is a commodity. The magnitude of the price doesn't matter.
Since they are exchanged, they are commodities.
no. Marxism specifically deals with the economy at the point of production, not at the point of exchange unlike in reified bourgeois economics. A commodity that sits on the shelf of a shop unsold until spoilage is still a commodity.
also learn what 'spook' means before you use it.
but what does it mean that a thing is "exchanged"?, is it because it is exchanged for money?, so correct me if i'm wrong, if the answer is yes this means that in lower phase communism you produce things, get the value of your labour expend (minus discounts), and whoever buys the things does not give you money, but rather the value of the product gets discounted from his accumulated labour, from the work he did, am i correct?
what do you mean by price tho?, i know for a fact that everything isn't free in lower phase communism, in fact there is a part in the critique of the gotha program, where marx says that in lower phase you only get in product the amount of labour you generated or you did (again minus discounts), corrrect me if i'm wrong for things to be like this you need to give some of your labour to get a thing, the amount of labour being the socially neccesary labour time it took to produce the thing, in what way is this not "a price"
You are not just wrong, you are an idealist. To believe that intent somehow changes the material reality of things is an offence against Marx's materialism. Read the first chapter of Capital carefully and you will have to admit that nowhere in it does Marx mention intent, or the psychology of the producer. Not once. Things become commodities when the partake in the social division of labour, through exchange. Nothing more, nothing less.
Price is the exchange value with the money commodity. You don't have to exchange for money: it is still a commodity if the exchange happened through barter. "Lower stage communism" was a serious error from Marx to satisfy the Blanquists, it does not fit into the framework of Capital. Kropotkin was right about this.
ok i'm getting more confused, then is money what makes a commodity?, so is it only a commodity when a thing is produced to exchange for the money commodity, in order to exchange that money for more commodities?, again lets go back to towards a new socialism to see if i understood this, in that proposal producers don't exchange their products with people, they produce things, they get the representation of their labour as vouchers, and when people want to get something they delete some of their vouchers without giving them to anyone and take the thing, so does the fact that producers don't exchange their product for money mean that their product is not a commodity?
correct that last part:
does the fact that producers don't exchange their product for money mean that their product is not a commodity, even if the value you have to delete from your vouchers changes according to demand?, or does that last part make it a commodity
Isn't the whole idea of a commodity production that you're wasting resources to produce an item to meet demand (engineered or contextual) rather than a need?
the difference between producing something for USE and for EXCHANGE is quite clearly not an idealist distinction.
for one you sell your labour-power, for the other you labour
Try to understand labour-power as a commodity before you make these grand claims.
That very much matters. The reason for that is that it determines certain physical qualities of the commodity. A use-value produced for the purpose of exchange will be optimized for that purpose. Its design will be such that it appeals to a target demographic in ways unrelated to its ptrimary function. It may be designed to break after a certain amount of use so as to encourage the customer to buy a replacement. It may have certain dimensions to make transport easier. It will be packaged and advertised in a manner designed to attract buyers.
On the other hand, if you were to create a use-value for your own use or as a gift to a friend then the item inquestion will be optimized for use. It does not benefit the producer to have the product break or for it to be packaged attractively. That is why there is a physical difference between a commodity and a non-commodity use-value.
Typically that is the case, but it can be exchanged for any other commodity, not just money. A bushel of wheat that was grown and harvested by a farmer to be exchanged, say, for a kilogram of iron that was smelted by a blacksmith is a commodity. The farmer does not himself make the wheat into bread, and he would not have given it to the blacksmith if the blacksmith had not reciprocated with iron.
Money or any other commodity, that is. Money itself serves as a commodity in this case.
The difference lies in the fact that the producer receives the value of his labor before the actual exchange occurs. The producer does not benefit from the actual exchange, just from his own production. His labor benefits him, and the quality of the product that he produces will impact how in demand his particular form of labor will be later. That provides him with the motivation to produce the best product that he can. Their product is optimized for use, not for exchange.
Part of what makes a thing a commodity is its purpose. An unsold loaf of bread that goes stale on the shelf is still a commodity. It was created by human labor for the purpose of an exchange.
Now you are just confusing things. If I own a farm and raise pigs for example, and go to the market to sell a pig, what do I sell? The pig. Not my labour, not my labour power. If I own a tattoo salon where I tattoo people, what do I sell? My labour. If I was hired by somebody else to work 8 hours a day and get a wage for it, what do I sell? Only in this case do I actually sell my labour-power. Only wage workers sell their labour-power, yet all three sell commodities.
Whether something was produced for use or exchange obviously cannot matter, since you can easily sell and thus turn into a commodity anything that was originally produced for use, and you can use something that was intended to be exchanged without exchanging it.
That's completely irrelevant here, it in no way influences whether something is a commodity or not.
if you rent someone else's labour power to produce a good or service, it's a commodity
But in that example you do it alone. Idk how tattoo salons work, imagine something that is owned by and run by exclusively by the owner.
and this is where we get to generalised commodity production. In your farm and tattoo salon examples you'd be a petty-bourg selling commodities with your labour in them - the pigs you've taken care of or the services provided. Focusing on examples that are in the singular and particular obfuscates the big picture.
On a systemic level, which is where marxist economics operate, it doesn't matter if your petty-bourg artisan doesn't strictly sell their labour-power but labour-in-commodities, since they all have to account for market forces for survival. C-M-C' cycle applies to petty-bourgs too.
disclosure: am a market socialist who isn't really sold on the whole labour vouchers thing so some people here are likely going to disagree with me (and yes I have heard of bordiga), but I would see no problem with a single operator performing a service and receiving either another good, service or amount of currency that they felt was worth it, as long as they entity they were engaging with was not itself a capitalist one; for example let's say a group of workers that owns a business hires an accountant to do their numbers, in return for the service, the accountant receives a set payment, and so neither has caused the creation of something for the purpose of selling it for more that they "bought" with their labour
Bear in mind that your labor power produced the pig. You fed it; you penned it; you took care of it. The pig is had in its exchangable form as a result of your labor, so it can be said that the pig, as a commodity, contains your expended labor.
In the farm example he would be a peasant, not petit-bourgeois.
you can't tell from the amount of information given, but I think it is reasonable to expect the example to be of the modern day where farmers who personally sell their livestock are petty-bourgs, not peasants.
Marx says it pretty clearly at the end of the first section of the first chapter of Capital, titled The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value (The Substance of Value and the Magnitude Of Value). Here's the most important sentence:
I think this settles the problem. It is the exchange that determines whether something is a commodity or not. Whether something was produced to be determined or not does not matter.
So absent labour vouchers how do you coordinate the amount of labour time in society needed as an input to provide for all the goods being consumed? Some kind of floating labour time quotum everyone has to meet?