Human society has evolved in our epoch to an unprecedented level of economic integration. The central feature of this development is a division of labour which embraces ever-widening circles of humanity in a single nexus of commodity production and exchange. Almost all modern social theory is an attempt to grasp the implications of this fact. At the heart of the issue lies the definition of a process identified variously as the growth of capitalism, market economy, industrialism, etc. The elementary concept in this process is the commodity. The limited objective of what follows is to clarify the meaning of this term and to define the evolutionary tendency which, for want of a better expression, I will call commoditization.

It is usually not difficult to find a word for something distinctive. But, once we have found it, certain logical consequences normally ensue. The most important of these is that phenomena excluded by the term form a single category opposed to it in a dualistic negation. Moreover, language has the effect of reducing the infinite variations of matter in time and space to ideal abstractions (i.e. words) whose principal virtue as vehicles of communication is that the meanings they convey are presumably static. It is thus not an idiosyncratic quirk of modern social science that it be obsessed with polarized dualities. It is very hard for us to think in any other way. If we label something V, our discourse depends on supposing that its meaning will stay the same long enough for a linguistic community to come to share it.