Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Theorising ‘the Commodity’:
Chains, Networks and Relations
What is a Commodity?
• Oxford English Dictionary (2018)

1
...
A thing which is beneficial to or advantageous for a person

3
...
Comfort or ease

5
...
A natural resource, material etc
...
A thing produced for use or sale; a piece of merchandise, an article of
commerce, a raw material, primary product, a basic good that is traded in bulk

8
...


9
...
e
...
117-199)

• Commodities are everywhere – their ubiquity and everyday nature make them
seem trivial

• Yet it’s because of their mundane nature – that they’re everywhere- that makes
them really important

• Very little (if anything) escapes commodification

• They are important tools through which to explore the way we understand,
experience, live and enjoy the world we live in

They are artefacts of the societies we live in: Relationality
• Our relationship with commodities tells a specific story of how, as a society, we
meet our needs

• By a ‘thing’ becoming a commodity, it becomes something of use

• In contrast, ‘Black’ market commodities show us how the state intervenes to define
what is allowed, and what is illicit

• In doing so, it defines what ‘needs’ should not be met; and creates with it
underground markets (eg
...
) (see
Hastings, 2014 for example)

• As such…

1
...
Commodities typify these value judgements; they materialise the values we
have and need servicing

3
...
We, the barterer, relies upon someone wanting what we have

2
...
It also involves us both judging if what we have to offer, is of the same value,
and thus fairly swapped

In a Market Economy
• Most of our needs are no longer met through barter - they are met through the
marketplace

• Within this we serve a dual role of producers and consumers of the commodities we
need to satisfy our needs

• This a defining and important role in the way in which we structure our lives: it is a
model of capital facilitated ‘social inter-dependence’ (Watts, 2009, p
...
1)
• A commodity is the building block of the economic system - foundational

• ‘We are surrounded by them at every turn, we spend time shopping for them,
looking at them, wanting them and spurning them
...
Marx has chosen the
common denominator as something familiar and common to us all’ (Harvey 2010)

• Commodities behold two forms of value;

• Use value: The uses we have for a particular thing (Qualitative)

• Exchange value: the market price (Quantitative)

• So, if the thing is useless (no use value at all), the labour contained within it/used to
make it does not create a value that can be exchanged, because no one wants it -

•
•
•
•
•

•

the value cannot be materialised within the marketplace - simply put, you have to be
able to sell it

Use value and exchange value are in opposition to each other (there is dualism
between them) - you can only have one, cannot have them simultaneously

One commodity, a singular ‘thing’ has two aspects - there is unity of value through
the commodity, but there are dual aspects of it (Harvey, 2010b)

Theoretically, if use value leads to exchange value, there should only be one
exchange value for a commodity, but this is not the case

In most instances, variations in exchanges values underpin different social relations
(e
...
a primary t-shirt markets for less than a Patagonia t-shirt)

Two aspects of exchange values: Labour and Time:

• If I were to make a white t-shirt and it took me 1 hour on a wage of £6 per hour
- the cost of my t-shirt would be £6 at cost

• If I were to make a white t-shirt and it took me 3 minutes, at £6 per hour - the
cost of my t-shirt would be 30p at cost

• It’s this product of a relationship between labour and time that materialises
value to meet social uses

‘Value’ = socially necessary (beholding use value) labour time (Harvey, 2010)


What does this all mean for ‘the commodity’?
• Why does all of this matter? As consumers, do we really care about all of this? When
we go into shops, how do we value the product?

• We, as consumers, rarely think about the complex and specific social
interrelationships that underpin the production of the commodity- we rarely
think about the value in terms of the labour and time of its production

• As consumers, we’re aware that some relationships between labour and time
are extremely exploitative, whilst others are comparatively less exploitative yet these qualitative values, represented quantitatively, fail to provide nuance to
the qualitative differences that are at play

• Instead, they appear with ‘phantom objectivity’ (Watts, 2009, p100) - the social
character is presented in a ‘perverted form’

• Expressing the commodity’s value as simply price has important impacts on
consumer perception of the commodity:

1
...
Commodities appear independent and apart from the people and social
relations the underpin them

3
...
e
...
e
...
Global Commodity Chains

2
...
Commodity Networks

Global Commodity Chains (GCC)
• This is a theory that directly emerges in response to globalisation

• Economic geographers were realising that understanding commodity provisioning
was increasingly failed by a nation state-centred political economy (of understanding
the economy of singular nations)

• ‘Decentring’ conceptual frame (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1977)

• Builds on an idea called ‘Fillere’:

• Economic sociology

• Refers to a set of firms that are vertically linked though contract, in the
production of a singular product

• It seeks to nuance these inter-relations to understand how capital works on the
ground

• As the economy tells the story of commodity production and consumption, this
work understands the economy as a collection of filleres or commodity chains

• What the GCC metaphor tries to capture is a relationality between the ‘core’ and
‘periphery’ – ideas that had critical agency when it emerged

• The core is considered the ‘old’ sites of production (MEDCs) and the ‘new’ sites of
production are in the periphery

• Under this GCC model, the core largely consumes, and the periphery largely
produces (Leslie and Reimer, 1999)

• In order to gain competitive advantage within the marketplace, the downward
pressures of price, labour and time, are transferred to the periphery

• A broad transfer in commodity chain governance - Whereas previously a tailor or
manufacturer would make a product and bring it to sale, we now see the emergence
of a ‘buyer-driven’ supply chain

• In this, the buyer (i
...
the business from the ‘core’) sets specifications of product The competitive tender process then gets manufacturers to ‘bid’ prices
...
periphery, production vs
...
the
value of exchange value minus production costs)

• It pays attention to the function of each part of the value chain, and the way each
part of the chain is governed (its politics)

• From that it makes the case that greater chances of capital fixity can be realised the
higher up the value- added processes that are undertaken (Kaplinsky, 2004)

• Provides the theoretical justification for ‘upgrading’ production

• By way of example:

• Machinist - division of labour = repetitive task - relatively low skill - replaceable

• Pattern Designer - impacts whole production - input contributes more value to
the production process

• requires high levels of specific skills (education etc)
...


• They emerge as a conceptual frame that responds to the inadequacies of the Global
Commodity Chain discourse:

• Specifically the criticism of its linearity and conceptualisation of the ‘economic’,
‘production’ and ‘consumption’ as being coherent things to be entered and
displayed into the ‘chain’

• Comes from the ‘commodity cultures’ literatures (see Cook and Crang 1996)

• This more culturally inflected discourse sees the movement of a commodity enter
into context specific cultures of production, distribution consumption

• The representation is non-linear (ie
...
there are many lived experiences of it

• How can you ‘lift the veil of production’ as encouraged by Harvey (1990), if there is
no stable reality to ‘reveal’?

• Instead, this approach ‘reveals’ that there are many multi-layered meanings and
explanations that underpin commodity production

• The project seeks to identify these complexities, and undertake a political project of
examine the tensions and contradictions that arise within the network

• From this we can reveal particular foundational aspects of CCs:

1
...
As such, commodities are differentiated in many different ways

3
...
)

• In this project, we are interested in the capacity of many different things (human and
non-human) in interacting/having relations

• Globalisation would be described simply as a physical ‘extension’ of these
networks/ lengthening

• Politically, the CN approach is interesting, because:

• It expands our understandings of ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ to include
non-human and human actors and things

• By breaking down ideas connected to ‘commodities’ into multi-stranded
relationships within a network, it moves away from being a monolithic ideas
(too big to change)

• CNs depict the commodity as very delicate - as completely dependent on
all these networked pieces coming together just right

• It is composed of multiple flows of interest, which are constantly in
flux and unstable

Politics of the Commodity: Debates/Questions
• Well, why should we [geographers] care?

• Goes to the very heart of geographical inquiry (at least for economic
geographers)

• Has a lot of currency; we see in the News, especially in the wake of industrial
disasters, consumers are encouraged to understand the ‘realities’ of their
products

• The way we ‘connect’ to production and consumption of a commodity is
foundational (indeed by saying that we can ‘connect’ is a political stance!)

• For Marxist-inspired critical geographers, ‘revealing’ and ‘connecting’ is the
heart of the project of exploring and critiquing capitalism

• Hartwick (2000) – ‘consumer politics’ is a activist project of connection

• Harvey (1990) – ‘Get behind the veil of production’

• Jackson (2002), however, questions this importance of ‘connection’ – and
argues that GCC frameworks actually privilege the academic’s position to be
the only actor ‘who speaks the truth’- who can truly understand the ‘realities’
they reveal

• In imagining that the academic beholds the only capacity to make
informed connections (to ‘reveal’) - this has a really damaging impact on
consumer and producer knowledges

• Relegated to the realms of ‘uninformed’ and ‘inconsequential’

• Equally, if there is a political necessity to understand more about the geographical
lives of our commodities (which there is), how do we identify and highlight labour
abuse, poverty wages, deathly working conditions, if in a quest for nuance, these

labour and production relations appear as if with parity in a network of other
relations? - how do we account for power relations?

• Circuits for example, make it difficult to pinpoint the beginning and end of an
exploitative practice

• How do we hold those to account within a network, in which hierarchy and power is
difficultly articulated/flattened?

• Ultimately, are we to demonstrate commodities beholding complexity as a
worthwhile end in of itself, or is there a political project(s) that we are morally
obligated to attend to?

Conclusions
• The marketplace (and thus economy) is the product of social relations, judgements
and decisions based upon the provisioning of needs, born out of society

• The commodity is foundational in understanding how the market operates - it
materialises very specific needs or wants, born out of the context bound up in time
and space

• Despite their mundane and everyday character, commodities are vital in
understanding, and bringing together, ideals of value, production, consumption – it
is the basic economic cell of capitalism/understanding capitalism in an age of
‘globalisation’

• The value of a commodity has a dual character; use (qualitative) and exchange value
(quantitative) - the exchange value seeks to represent and materialise the use values
in a dialectical/dualised fashion
...
e

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