Commodification is the transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other entities that normally may not be considered goods, into a commodity (in the Marxist sense of the word).
The Marxist understanding of commodity is distinct from the meaning of commodity in mainstream business theory. One way to summarize the difference is that commoditization is about proprietary things becoming generic, whereas commodification is about unsalable things becoming salable.
Commodity played a key role throughout Marx’s work, he considered it a cell-form of capitalism and a key starting point for an analysis of this politico-economic system.
The earliest use of the word “commodification” in English attested in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1975.commodification, n. Second edition, 1989; online version November 2010. ; accessed 6 January 2011. Use of the concept of commodification became common with the rise of critical discourse analysis in semiotics.
