A commodity is any good or resource produced for the purpose of exchange.[1] The commodity has two aspects, its use value, its qualitative physical and useful properties, and its exchange value, which is its quantitative properties, the proportion in relation to the exchange of other commodities.[2]
References
- ↑ “Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)”
Karl Marx (1867). Capital, vol. I: 'Commodities and money; Commodities'. - ↑ “A commodity is, in the first place, a thing that satisfies a human want; in the second place, it is a thing that can be exchanged for another thing. The utility of a thing makes is use-value. Exchange-value (or, simply, value), is first of all the ratio, the proportion, in which a certain number of use-values of one kind can be exchanged for a certain number of use-values of another kind.”
Vladimir Lenin (1915). Karl Marx: a brief biographical sketch with an exposition of Marxism: 'Marx’s economic doctrine'.