CHAPTER ONE
Marx's Concepts
A world of commodities
The most obvious feature of the economic system in which we live is that it is centred around the buying and selling of goods of all sorts. We have to pay for food, shelter, clothing, energy to light and heat our homes, transport to move around, everything we need to keep ourselves and our families alive. And in order to buy we have to sell, even if all we have to sell is our capacity to work for others. Our very lives depend on the movements of commodities. Hence Marx's starting point in Capital:
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.
Marx was writing at a time when market relations had still not penetrated large parts of the world. There were still societies in which all production was for people's immediate needs, whether in "primitive communist" societies based on hunter-gathering or light agriculture, 1 where people agreed freely among themselves how and what to produce, or in peasant societies where a local lord or ruler dictated to them from above. Even in most of the societies where the market already existed, the majority of the population were still subsistence farmers, producing most of the things they needed to keep their families alive, with only a small proportion bought or sold. Today we can extend Marx's words to say that "the wealth of the whole world, with a few exceptions, presents itself as a mass of commodities". And the exceptionsthe provision, for instance, of free health and education in a number of advanced countries-are increasingly subject to forces seeking to commodify them. This near universality of commodity production marks society today off from anything that has ever happened before. To understand what is happening to the world we have to begin by understanding the workings of commodity production.
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