Heating Commodities Back in the middle of October, the price of natural-gas had risen because a gas company was forced to shut down a pipeline due to the need for repairs. This impending shortage led to the decrease in prices for other heating commodities, as well as larger profits. The demand for energy was becoming greater and greater because it was that time of year when consumers began storing energy in their homes to prepare for the cold winter months ahead. The four commodities mentioned
Life As A Commodity Last night, George W. Bush, the President of the United States, announced a compromise policy on Federal support for stem cell research. His announcement made few people happy because it cut a path straight down the middle of the issue and carefully avoided making any significant ethical decisions about it. At the ethical heart of the matter is a question about using a human fetus for scientific (read "medical") research. For significant research to happen, the fetus must
Commodity Prices The financial term commodity is defined as a physical substance, such as food, grains, a and metals, which is interchangeable with other product of the same type, and which investors buy or sell, usually through future contracts. Or more generally, a product which trades on a commodity exchange; this would also include foreign currencies and financial instruments and indexes. When one speaks of a commodity, they can be referring to two types of this aspect of finance. A cash commodity
There are many definitions of a commodity, some more elaborate than others. Examples are: (i) A product which trades on a commodity exchange; this would also include foreign currencies and financial instruments and indexes. (ii) A physical substance, which is interchangeable with another product of the same type, which investors buy or sell, usually through futures contracts. The price of the commodity is subject to supply and demand. Risk is actually the reason exchange trading of the basic agricultural
The idea behind commodity fetishism is that the relationships that were once between people have been transferred over to the products of said people’s creation. The abstractness of the item’s economic value has somehow taken a tangible form that gives the item value through exchange rather than the labor required to produce it. The line between an item’s falsified intrinsic value and the labor that was required to make it has been obscured to the point that we exaggerate the value of the item. Eventually
Commodities simple put are goods that are available for exchange or sale, but what truly gives these commodities values are the social relations that revolve around it. In the consumerist society that we live in today, a society that circles around capitalistic economical relations, commodities end up being more than just a thing to exchange. While it retains its physical assets, which grants it its value in our market, theorists such as Karl Marx, speculate that there is more to commodities than
Commodity fetishism refers to the Marxian concept of the decontextualization and mystification of the social relations of production in the process of commodification. In consumer culture this concept often highlights the characteristics of advertising brand discourse which tend to overlook the production of commodities especially in large scale productions. They ignore the social and environmental cost and instead focus on creating additional meanings and symbolic agency around brands. In this
Purchasing Power Parity and International Commodity Arbitrage Foreign Exchange Foreign exchange refers to two different things. The first is currency claims expressed in the equivalent value in foreign money. The second is actual transactions involving the conversion of money of one country into that of another. Foreign exchange is necessary because different countries have different monetary units. One country’s currency typically cannot be used in another country. The determination of the
advertisements, non-environmentally friendly production techniques and privacy issues, ethical consumption has proven to be impossible. Karl Marx defines commodity fetishism as “the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade” (CITE). This concept is especially present in today’s society and can range from being minute to very extreme and perhaps even harmful
Commodity Fetishism in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence Commodity fetishism is a term first coined by Karl Marx in his 1867 economic treatise, Das Kapital. It takes two words, one with a historically economic bent and another with a historically religious bent, and combines them to form a critical term describing post-industrial revolution, capitalist economies. Specifically, this term was used to describe the application of special powers or ideas to products that carried no such inherent
INTRODUCTION A commodity can be broadly defined as “a physical product, natural resource, or chemical that an individual can touch, taste, smell, mine, grow, consume, or deliver” (Lind Waldock, 2011). Commodities are fungible, meaning they are considered equivalent even though they may come from different producers. Because there is little product differentiation, commodity prices are fundamentally driven by global supply and demand (S&P, 2011). A. MAJOR CATEGORIES OF COMMODITIES Commodities are tangible
In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Michael Taussig describes how commodity fetishism plays a large role in both peasant and industrial societies. The concept of commodity fetishism is rooted in capitalism, but the effects of it are not the same for each type of society. The differences are made clear by first understanding that the South American peasant societies Taussig describes are precapitalist, that is, when “ there is no market and no commodity definition of the value and
Commodity or Woman? Zohra Nouri A commodity is defined as a product or service that is in demand, in relation to a product that the public wants, is mass-produced and subsequently purchased. This definition does not raise an eyebrow until we further analyze that the definition broadly includes women, this being a result of the pervasiveness of popular cultures portrayal of sexually explicit women, especially in mainstream films. One may question not only the definition, but the fundamental role
Initial response of anthropologists: Gift exchange vs. commodity exchange The differences that were initially identified by early anthropologists, between commodity exchange and gift-exchange are exponentially unalike one another. However, throughout the recent years the outdated gift-commodity dichotomy has evolved (Rus). Commodities and gifts represent two different realities as first proposed by Macel Mauss and later elaborated by Chriss Gregory and other anthropologists. According to Gregory;
have. For example, how do you get shoes if the shoemaker doesn't like fish? The series of trades required to obtain shoes could be complicated and time consuming. Early societies faced these problems. The solution was money. Money is an item, or commodity, that is agreed to be accepted in trade. Over the years, people have used a wide variety of items for money, such as seashells, beads, tea, fish hooks, fur, cattle and even tobacco. There are numerous myths about the origins of money. The concept
world they are living, we can also say, is the transformation of people own labour into power which rules them as if by a kind of natural or supra- human law. The origin of Alienation is FETISHISM-, which means the belief that inanimate things (COMMODITIES) have human powers that will be able to govern the activity of human beings. [Estrangement &Alienation]. Marx points out, that Alienation is the human labour, which created culture and history. The formation of an exchange economic is the
it themselves. The human travel needed to conduct trade, while beneficial to people, poses a negative consequence to the environment. Trade routes started for the exchange of a particular good such as the spice trade. The existence of other commodities later led to the types of traded items to expand and include items ranging from copper to porcelain (Cipolla, 1996). While this increase in scope of goods traded improved the economic well being of the parties involved, it increased resource utilization
we be working so hard for if we made the same amount of money as a trash man? He had many other views that were just as important. Adam Smith believed that a nation's wealth was not derived by how much they had in resources, or in an exchangeable commodity, but rather by the labor that its residents produce. "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniences which it annually consumes." (Wealth of Nations, p. 1) He stated that a nation
the means of production. He will be paid a wage. Marx makes it very clear that the wage is paid not for the labour, but for the labour-power, that is, the use of the worker for whatever set amount of time. Marx writes: "Labour-power, then, is a commodity, no more, no less so than is the sugar. The first is measured by the clock, the other by the scales." (1847. Wage-Labour and Capital. pg 3. All subsequent references will be marked by page number only.) The wage that the worker is paid will be
the wives, and the other is the marriage of Anne Page. Both of these plots subversively yield a disheartening attitude towards the view of women within the scope of the play. Wives in The Merry Wives of Windsor are not acknowledged as much beyond commodities, not to be entrusted to their own wills, and are considered anonymous, degraded figures by men. By examining the use of the word "wife", the characters who use it most frequently, how it is used, and by examining the surrounding text and context