Commodity Circulations

Question 1

How do political economy economists move away from common conceptualization of commodities?

Answer 1

From things to bundle of social relations

(Watts, 1999)

Question 2

What is the three part understanding of commodity value by classical political economists?

Answer 2

• Use value –> ‘usefulness’ (qualitative)
• Exchange value –> established in markets (quantitative)
• Value –> defined in relation to individual labour hours required for production

Question 3

How does Marx elaborate the understanding of commodity value?

Answer 3

• By adding a value of commodity is the socially necessary labour time to produce it
• Proportion of society’s labour time –> productivity of society
• Varies between places –> economic competiveness

Question 4

What is commodity fetishism?

Answer 4

• Hiding of capitalist social relations of production
• External appearance goods hides who made them and exploitation of labour necessary to create its value
• Consumers forgot value comes from labour power, treats bodies as object of commodification (Parry, 2012)

Question 5

What is de-fetishizing of commodities?

Answer 5

• Creates consciousness for working class
  
  • Harvey’s “fingerprints of exploitation” not only about monetary element but also working conditions, human rights etc
• Building a picture of process of value transformation that occurs with a commodity’s economic and geographical circulation
• Peeling of layers of value off (as money) by different economic agents at different stages of the process
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Question 6

What is commodity circulation?

Answer 6

Process by which a commodity is exchanged for money, which in turns permits purchase of another commodity

Watts (1999)

Question 7

What is the follow the thing approach?

Answer 7

• Relational and conditional socio-spatial features of commodity production
• Narrating place through commodities
• Cook and Harrison (2007) trace relations between London family and group of farmers in rural Jamaica using a bottle of West Indian Hot Pepper Sauce
• Show an array of complex connectivites and mobilities at different scales

Question 8

What are fictitious commodities?

Answer 8

• Not produced for sale
• Necessary fictions for market functioning –> subject them to market imperatives destroys them

Question 9

What is the idea of the market economy?

Answer 9

• All inputs of product subjected to self-regulating markets
• Market economy exists in a market society
• Polyani challenges this as to treat the fictitious commodities of ordinary objects of market exchange attacks the ‘substance’ of society

Fraser (2014)

Question 10

How is land conceptualized?

Answer 10

• Land is not like a mat: you cannot roll it up and take it away
• Spatially fixed –> excludable and can be partitioned but not removed

Li (2014)

Question 11

What does land’s usefulness depend on?

Answer 11

Regimes of exclusion

Li (2014)

Question 12

What are inscription devices and how are they related to land?

Answer 12

• Integral to assembling land as a resource for different actors
• Vary spatially and scalar - manipulation from a distance, others on the ground
• Land cannot be removed from place where it is located but with these devices can be assembled in new forms and differently disposed

Li (2014)

Question 13

What surveying as an inscription device enable?

Answer 13

Vast expanse to be sized in mind before it was seized on the ground and put to use

Li (2014)

Question 14

What are the consquences of inscription devices?

Answer 14

In intended and unintended ways these actors, grids and devices are assembling land as a resource available for global with the wider discourse of capitalism

Li (2014)