Culture and Commodities

The term ‘commodity’ is very little understood. It is generally taken to mean a product that is exchanged against another product (as in barter) or against money. Commodity production correspondingly is taken to mean production for the market or, more generally, production for exchange, in which case production for barter, the jajmani system prevailing within the Indian village for millennia, the small shops in the local market of a mofussil town which have carried on for generations passing from father to son, and modern capitalist production undertaken by large multinational corporations, are all subsumed under the term commodity production.