C:OMMODI'TY. In its most general sense, a commodity is anything thatmay be bought, sold, or bartered. In Marxist analyses of culture, the con-cept of the commodity takes on particular Importance, for it is the formthat products assume when the productlon and reproductlon of thematerial conditions of a society are organized through exchange. As aproduct within a system of exchange, any commodity has two distinctproperties. The first, identified by the eighteenth-century political econ-omist Adam Smlth, is use value. Thls refers to the commodity's ability to ,satisfy some human want or desire. The second of these propertes is dis-cussed by Marx and Is labeled simply value, though It is sometim~sreferred to as BXCHANGE VALUE, to distlnguish it from USE VALOB. Tbisproperty is a commodity's capacity to command other commodities inexchange. I

From these two properties of the commodlty Marx is able to movetoward a labor theory of value. AlI comm,odities may be dseussed interms of value: as use values, each commodity ls unque and thus quall-tativeIy different. Whereas a Ioar of bread and a palr of socks mlghtrequlre the same amount of labor to be produced, they do not meet thesame human needs, and 80 cannot be compared. On the other hand,because they both require labor to produce, they can be compared interms of exchange value. According to Marx, when commoditles con-front each other in exchange, the!r value (the amount of labor requlredto produce each) becomes apparent as exchange value. ,

Marx refers to the labor that is expended n commodity production as"soclallabor." The entity produced is not consumed by the laborer, butby another who obtains it through exchange. In a soclety based uponcommodity producton, subsistence and the means of production areprovlded by others. Nevertheless, in such a society I?roduction appearsprivnte: the producer perceives the product of bis labor to exist inde~en-'dentof soclety as a whole. Thus the cabinet maker percelves bis cabmets

":' ij~h,riown products, even though he depended on a number of other .i/j;r(idili!tiito provide him Wi~~~~~4..~iidtools, and wiU ;~ha,~ge hls :

i(~;l'~1~~~~ri)~~:;ii~~~:j~m~i~;l;A~t:,~::;1~hwm;~1;~..W';- Marx, the complex interrelations that humans have to one ano er are';