ABSTRACT
This chapter presents commodification and the dynamics of capitalist development are interrelated the dialectics of commodification, the politics of markets and the unity of opposites. It considers how certain key themes that inform Harriss-White's work on the Indian political economy may be used to construct a framework of three interrelated levels through which people might usefully analyse commodification. The chapter explores the multi-dimensional nature of the global capitalist crisis we are currently facing, and by observing that commodification, in a variety of ways, is central to almost every aspect of it. Commodification has always been at the heart of the study of capitalist development. Marx and Polanyi share the key insight that commodification is not only about the ways in which goods are produced, consumed and exchanged but rather about the ways in which both the nature of and relations between those who produce, consume and exchange those goods are transformed.
