Commodity

By Zachary Seburn

The term commodity has become ubiquitous in today’s society, often thought of as anything of value that can be bought or sold. This term originates from the Latin adjective commodus, which translates to modern English adjectives such as opportune and convenient. Commodity more closely emerges from the 5th century Old French noun commodité, translating to benefit or profit. 18th century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who is regarded as “the father of capitalism,”1 provides a more functional definition in his renowned work An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, positioning a commodity as any good produced from labor that is available to purchase.2 Importantly, Smith argues that the market value of a commodity lies within its labor: “Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only.”3

Critiques of how classical capitalism and the free market define commodity raise intentionally withheld considerations that are integral to its actualization in society. 19th century German political theorist and economist Karl Marx provides a quintessential critique not only of capitalism but also of bourgeois economists who proclaim its merits in his work Das Kapital. Marx posits that a commodity has a twofold character: use value and exchange value.4 Use value reflects the utility a specific individual gains from an object, where a commodity must “satisfy human wants of some sort or another.”5 As individuals attempt to exchange commodities between one another, exchange value emerges in order to facilitate the comparison and equivalency of objects. Marx states that exchange value is most prominently expressed through the general equivalent of money. More importantly, Marx makes the essential assertion that exchange value “manifests itself as something totally independent of their use value.”6 Rather than reflecting use value, exchange value internalizes the “socially necessary”7 amount of labor needed in the production of the object.

Marx’s conceptualization of use value and exchange value has several implications that establish the commodity as a powerful analytic. Given the exchange value of an object—or monetary price, which defines value under capitalism—is independent of use value, the cultural, environmental, or communal value of an object is lost as it becomes a commodity. As Marx simply puts, “an [object] can be a use value, without having value.”8 It is important to note that these values may be inalienable to individuals, yet are only lost through the capitalist process in which an entity becomes a commodity.

Another implication centers on Marx’s notion that exchange value is derived from the “socially necessary” amount of labor. This places the commodity—and thus human labor—in a social context, where it “functions to represent what the current society recognizes as beneficial.”9 This complicates the commodity, as the subjective value of individual labor—the “expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles”10—becomes objectively quantifiable at the hands of others. Marx refers to this as the “fetishism of commodities,”11 where the commodity’s value may seem intrinsic, yet is the product of social hierarchies and confined labor. As a result, the individual is alienated from the product of their labor.

The Marxist definition of a commodity and the process by which an entity becomes a commodity strongly manifest within the history of oppression that Indigenous communities have faced. One of the most prominent instances is the commodification of Indigenous lands. An incisive case in point is the establishment of colonial America through violence and the displacement of Native American communities. Transatlantic voyages to the Americas in the 15th and 16th century were motivated by the doctrine of mercantilism, where a country’s political power was thought to be a product of their economic positioning.12 European nations fiercely sought to establish American colonies to increase their trade and thus capture market share from competing nations, where “every penny spent on such commodities paid some profit to a merchant, paid some duty to the nation, enhanced and empowered the nation-state.”13

This strict economic doctrine led to the onslaught of Native American communities in colonial America. The very first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown, illustrates this. Fearful of the growing transatlantic presence of the Spanish, the British crown chartered the Virginia Company of London in 1606 to establish a colony in North America to “​​make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry of our people.”14 Seeking economic opportunity for the Crown, Jamestown settlers encroached on Powhatan land through open violence. In 1622, the Powhatan organized a retaliatory attack against these settlements, which resulted in the death of many English settlers and even more Powhatan. This prompted the establishment of a “policy of extinguishing Indigenous land claims,”15 where vested British interests strived to “inforce the salvages to leave their country, or to bring them in[to] fear and subjection.”16

As settlers arrived to Jamestown, they observed the agrarian practices of the Powhatan, particularly their cultivation of tobacco: “The people in the South parts of Virginia esteem it exceedingly; they say that God in the creation did first make a woman, then a man, thirdly great maize, or Indian wheat, and fourthly, tobacco.”17 Yet settlers viewed Indigenous land practices as inferior and economically inefficient, which justified settler encroachment and the displacement of Native Americans. 17th century English philosopher John Locke believed that the value of land was a product of its ability to cultivate economic gain, and “for want of improving [their fertile land] by Labour, [Natives] have not one hundredth part of the conveniences”18 that settler agrarian practices produce. Locke could not fathom a society in which land was not a clearly defined commodity, and he viewed Indigenous communities as barbaric for their relationship with the land, where their inability to “cultivate [their] lands in the proper fashion”19 meant the land was “open for use by”20 settlers. Indigenous land became a mere factor of production for economic gain, where its social value to Indigenous communities—cultural tradition, communal living and subsistence, shared ownership, ecological knowledge—was erased in its becoming of a commodity, just as Marx theorizes.

In addition to land, the Marxist commodity and the process of commodification manifests within the oppression of Indigenous culture. Anthropologist Robert Shepherd establishes that given how shared traditions and belief systems organize communities, culture does not belong to anyone, rather “held and used in common.”21 Marx encapsulates this communal responsibility under the notion of “primitive communities”22 property. With this, Shepherd states that the selling of culture is a “form of community-wide expropriation”23 that consequently erases meaning, where individuals are estranged from their traditions through the rhetoric of the market. Further, given how the vast majority of those transforming culture into a product are outside of its community, commodification serves to oppress through propagating harmful stereotypes and typecasting individuals within the community. 

The tobacco industry once again serves as an exemplar, as Indigenous culture became a commodity alongside land through its cultivation and sale. Community health researcher Joanne D’Silva performed a textual analysis of over 70 archival tobacco documents from the Truth Tobacco Documents Library to evaluate how the tobacco industry has historically capitalized on Native American culture. In many Native communities, tobacco is integral to spiritual, ceremonial, and cultural practices. For instance, Lakota burn čaŋšášá (traditional tobacco) in a sacred pipe while praying to Ťuŋkaśila (the Great Spirit), where prayers rise with the smoke as one exhales—the smoke is never inhaled into the lungs. Traditional tobacco is a sacral endeavor, and is not for consumption that is detrimental to one’s health. The commercial tobacco industry strategically employs Native culture for this exact reason, as it repositions the addictive, cancerous product as a beneficial and spiritual experience24 that is an “American tradition pre-dating the tobacco industry by centuries.”25

With this, Joanna D’Silva found extensive appropriation and racial stereotyping of Native Americans in her textual analysis. The most prominent appropriation was Native regalia, where over 40 of the documents depicted headdresses in their advertisements.26 In particular, Native imagery was found most often as a tactic to differentiate products as natural. Accompanied by descriptors such as organic and safe, tobacco companies appropriate Native culture to market additive-free products. Despite these products being just as harmful as tobacco products that did contain additives, consumers reported purchasing additive-free products with Native imagery as a health-conscious alternative.27 By stereotyping Natives in regalia and associating long-held sacred practices with commercial products, tobacco companies delegitimize the essential role tobacco plays in Native cultures, all for the purpose of bolstering their sales. In addition to this, tobacco companies position Natives as ancient figures existing only in the past and in the context of their tradition.

In addition to racial typecasting and stereotyping, the construct of authenticity is vital to the discussion of the commodification of culture. Given how cultures are altered and erased in their process of becoming an object for sale, there is a desire for that exact object to be authentic. Shepherd presents this as the paradox of authenticity: As culture becomes more distanced from the corruptions of the market, the more desire there is to consume the culture as authentic, thereby commodifying it.28 According to Shepherd, individuals often define authenticity by “tying a particular culture to a specific people and a particular place,”29 therefore this paradox becomes especially relevant to Indigenous communities.

An illustration of this is the domination of tourism in Hawai’i. Kānaki Maoli scholar Stephanie Nohelani Teves describes the performance of Kānaka Maoli culture, specifically aloha, as a product of commodification through tourism, stating their culture “is actively incorporated into public space throughout Hawai’i in the service of the tourist industry.”30 Aloha, which carries many meanings of community in Native Hawaiian culture, has been simplified into a catch-all term that signals Hawaiianess to tourists, where “Kānaka Maoli are encouraged to perform ‘the aloha spirit’ in order to be recognized as Kānaka Maoli.”31 For instance, Honolulu mayor John Henry Wilson organized hula circuits in the early 20th century to encourage Hawaii tourism, where Wilson recruited Kānaki Maoli women to perform cultural dances across the continental United States as “ambassadors of aloha.”32 This places Native Hawaiians in the paradox of authenticity, where their practice of aloha to “recognize one another”33 are at the same time “deeply intertwined with the legacies of colonialism and the tourism industry.”34

Of the utmost atrocities, the commodification of Indigenous bodies is an integral dimension of the history of oppression that Indigenous communities have faced. For Native Americans, capture and enslavement predated the establishment of formal settlements in the New World, where English adventurers “forcibly removed Indians from coastal settlements to provide labor or for sale abroad.”35 The enslavement of Native Americans became a formal institution through the Pequot War of 1636, which served to demonize Natives and establish a “legal pretext for the enslavement of Indians”36 as prisoners of war. For instance, the Massachusetts General Court ordered that a Native from Block Island “bee kept as a slave for life to worke”37 as a result of their participation in an armed conflict. Coinciding with an acute labor shortage, the enslavement of Native Americans was underpinned by colonists’ desire to exploit their labor:

If Pequot enslavement sparked little moral, legal, or political debate among the English colonists, contemporaries were perfectly clear about its utility. Colonial governments and interested individuals offered a number of material, strategic, and social justifications for enslaving Indians over the course of the seventeenth century. Foremost among these rationales was the need for labor both in New England and in the Atlantic and Caribbean plantations where Puritans established trade and personal ties.38

Even as the institution of slavery declined, Native Americans continued to be exploited for their labor. The assimilation of Natives in the 19th and 20th century was equally motivated by economic exploitation as it was cultural erasure. Sold as the “habit of industry”39 in the hyper-capitalist United States, residential schools capitalized on the labor of Native youth in the name of transforming them into productive members of western society. For instance, at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Natives were subjected to “rigid organization of time and space”40 through labor quotas, where manual labor requirements detracted from the American education they were forced to pursue. More importantly, Natives at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School were forced into the “outing” system, where their labor was cheaply leased to white farming families during the summer.41 This exploitation clearly opposes Adam Smith’s conceptualization of the commodity, where the labor of Natives was removed as the factor of exchange value, rather Native erasure was the price. Their exploitation reflects the Marxist concept of the alienation of labor, as Natives possessed no authority over their labor and its value was intentionally undersold.

Marxist theory of the commodity provides a cogent analytic to examine the many challenges Indigenous communities face in their history of oppression. Yet even with its merits, Marx’s rhetoric falls short in many aspects of the Indigenous experience, evening propagating harmful ideations of Indigenous communities. For instance, Indigenous studies scholar Glen Coulthard points out that Marx’s theory on primitive accumulation possesses temporal rigidity, where the “era of violent, state dispossession”42 simply initiates the process of capital accumulation, which ends in “the silent compulsion of economic relations.”43 Coulthard rightly argues that violent dispossession is a perpetual feature44 of capital accumulation, where Indigenous communities today continue to face an onslaught of violence in the name of capitalism. Moreover, Coulthard points out how Marx suggests that “although vile and barbaric in practice, colonial dispossession would nonetheless have the ‘revolutionary’ effect of bringing the ‘despotic,’ ‘undignified,’ and ‘stagnant’ life of the Indians into the fold of capitalist-modernity.”45 This unequivocally creates harm for Indigenous peoples by stereotyping them as primitive and uncivilized, where Marx goes as far to declare that “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history.”46

We must place everything, including Marx’s theoretical frameworks, in conversation with the “critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples themselves.”47

Notes 

1. Ryan Patrick Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4.

2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: D. Hanna, 1816), 44.

3. Ibid., 47.

4. Angelo Segrillo, Karl Marx’s “Capital” (Vols. 1, 2, 3) Abridged (São Paulo, Brasil: University of São Paulo Press, 2020), 22.

5. Ibid., 20.

6. Ibid., 21.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Jenny Yusin, “Marx and the Idea of the Commodity,” Postcolonial Studies at Emory, Fall 2002, accessed May 27, 2024, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/marx-and-the-idea-of-commodity/.

10. Angelo Segrillo, Karl Marx’s “Capital” (Vols. 1, 2, 3) Abridged (São Paulo, Brazil: University of São Paulo Press, 2020), 22.

11. Ibid., 27.

12. John J. McCusker, “British Mercantilist Policies and the American Colonies,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 337.

13. Ibid., 340.

14. King James I, “The First Charter of Virginia,” in The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and other Organic Laws of the States and Territories now or heretofore forming the United States of America, compiled and edited by Francis Newton Thorpe (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 53.

15. Shane Freeman, The Land Systems of Colonial America: European and Native American Land Tenure Issues in the Colonial Eras of the Americas (West Virginia University, 2004), 47.

16. Ibid.

17. Alexander Brown, The First Republic in America (Boston and New York: Houghton, 1898), 232.

18. Calum Murrary, “John Locke's Theory of Property, and the Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples in the Settler-Colony,” American Indian Law Journal vol. 10, no. 4 (2022): 6.

19. Ibid., 7.

20. Ibid.

21. Robert Shepherd, “Commodification, culture and tourism,” Tourist Studies 2, vol. 2 (2002): 187.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Joanne D’Silva et al., “Tobacco industry misappropriation of American Indian culture and traditional tobacco,” Tobacco Control, vol. 27 (2018): 57.

25. Ibid., 60.

26. Ibid., 58.

27. Ibid., 61.

28. Robert Shepherd, “Commodification, culture and tourism,” Tourist Studies 2, vol. 2 (2002): 191.

29. Ibid., 190.

30. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, “Cocoa Chandelier’s Confessional: Kanaka Maoli Performance and Aloha in Drag,” in Critical Ethnic Studies (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2016), 287.

31. Ibid., 282.

32. Ibid., 286.

33. Ibid., 282.

34. Ibid., 283.

35. Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by nature: New England Indians, colonists, and the origins of American slavery (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 17.

36. Ibid., 18.

37. Ibid., 26.

38. Ibid., 43.

39. Elizabeth Brown, “Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” American Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2023): 708.

40. Ibid., 709.

41. Ibid.

42. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Mineeapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), 9.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 10.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., 8.