Marxist-Leninists of Holla Forums, you have 15 seconds to define "commodity"

commodity production is when you produce stuff, if the state does it it's socialist and if the market does it it's capitalist

OP is trying to initiate a shitstorm between MLs and leftcoms

Goods produced solely for exchange.

If you want to nitpick, of course you will reach some inconsistencies, since exchange implies some sort of need in case of the end consumer, and the commodity gets exchange before reaching the needy one who consumes it.

The point is, economy based on use-value does not have all the nasty time-dependent non-linear fluctuations and accumulations that exchange-value dominated economies using money seem to have.

With modern computer technology for information storage and processing and transmission, the argument of Friedrich Hayek about the inability to collect all this information is moot. Today we have devices in the pockets capable of sending all this information and servers capable of processing it many times simultaneously.

Reminder that goods are not solely produced for exchange, but for use as well, obviously. For example, the use value of a hot dog is that you can eat it and the exchange value is that you had to pay for it.

I meant what is the difference between bought, sold, and exchanged?

Goods being rationed according to work done isn't commodity exchange though.

(Not an ML.)

A commodity is a useful thing which is produced to be exchanged for another - typically, money. Commodity production is the act of making these things to be exchanged. Commodity production is experienced by us as "work" in capitalist societies.

And when we say it is a thing, it isn't necessarily a physical object - a taxi ride is a commodity which is consumed at the same time that it is produced, for example. An idea can be sold if it is protected by copyright. Anything exchanged for money is a commodity

The usefullness of the thing is only a minimal requirement – as long as there is someone who will buy it, it can be sold. The more important determination to the capitalist is how profitable it will be.

Commodity production is so ubiquitous in capitalist society that life can generally not be sustained or without purchasing them.
Commodity production and commodity consumption do not just reproduce the lives of people, it reproduces capitalist society itself.

So when communists say they want to end commodity production, they want to end the production of things for exchange, and have production oriented towards uniquely and directly meeting human needs, i.e. a socialist society. No money, no measuring of value, no mediation of relationships between people through objects, and no class-subjects (especially ones defined by their prospensity to labour; the proletariat), and ultimately, no State.

Sale and purchase are moments of exchange. The tankie did not read Marx, if you have one of these, you have all three.

If it is rationed it is not exchanged.

what's with people so frequently implying leftcoms whenever the topics of commodity production, value, wage labour, etc. come up? there's nothing specifically leftcom about that, it's basic marx.

that doesnt mean its produced for use, necessarily.

The thing is Bordiga wasn't specifically "leftcom" either; he was basically a Marxist who happened to have a tactical disagreement with Lenin which made him ending up (not that much) mentioned in the Infantile disorder.

What commodities aren't produced for use value(as well as exchange value), or don't have use value?

just because it has a use value doesnt mean it was produced for use

A commodity always has a use-value. It's the prerequisite. The point is that the commodity on top of this has an exchange-value, which must always be sated before anything else.

youtube.com/watch?v=UltE6U4t8Vc

yeah no shit. but it's not produced "for use".

Yes. Although the USSR was not capitalist.

You can sell and buy stuff that isn't produced for exchanged. The salesman functions as middle men between collectivized production and the consumer. Law of value operates in terms of pricing, but doesn't determine production, which functions via use-value.

It's literally the 1:1 definition of commodities from Marx' Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Like, word for word. But whatever moron.

Every capitalist commodity produces for use and exchange simultaneously, as the previous poster explained. You're just making yourself look dumb whining over semantics.

hmm

literally ancap logic

Read Engels

Ancap is logic when you say that commodity production is transhistorical and that it's always existed, when we can see that 190,000+ years of the modern human's history was absent of it. There can not exist in the future an economy which is still mercantile but which isn't capitalism anymore, because capitalism was commodity production's generalization, so what supersedes it as Marx tells us is its total negation, a move towards the same non-commodified communist society we once had, but a scientific communist society, meaning industrialized and agrarian without capital (implying commodities).

But if I sell and buy stuff an exchange does occur, no? No matter what said stuff was produced for in the first place.

lol

This. Good post.

It's the quality or state of being emperor Commodus.

Product of human labor for exchange.
Also USSR was socialist.

Product of human labor for exchange.
Also USSR was socialist.

Because LeftComs have managed to gain a reputation for being the only people who read Marx on account of there being like 2 LeftComs here who have done so and basically no one else.

Really makes me think

You can only pick one.

That which has a social form–that is to say–is exchanged.

learn the difference between partial commodity production, which existed in late feudal society and even less so in the later Soviet Union, and generalised commodity production, which is a trait of the capitalist mode of production

Commodities are use values produced for exchange value.

The USSR during the planning era didn't have commodity production as there wasn't an M-C-M chain. No capital accumulation at all. "profit" was merely an accounting metric and would be ignored often if selling at a loss was for a social good. With Khrushchev, and to a greater degree, Kosygin, this started to change and firms were expected to produce a profit and trade with each other on a market instead of according to the gosplan.

Leftcoms either don't understand Marx or don't understand how the soviet economy operated.

If you think international trade was somehow causing the soviet economy to turn into one giant "capital", that doesn't match up with the data either. international trade was less than 4% of GDP

...

Yes

But if you have sale (C-M) and purchase (M-C), you have exchange (C-M-C).

Gimme a second to link a Jason unruhe video

Nice joke.