Fictitious Commodity

A fictitious commodity is something the market prices and trades as if it were produced for sale, when in fact it is an element of human life or nature that exists for other reasons. Polanyi identified three originals: labor (which is human activity inseparable from the person), land (which is nature existing independently of markets), and money (which is a social convention). Each is governed by the market mechanism as if supply and demand were the appropriate regulator, when the actual effect is to subject human life, ecology, and monetary stability to a logic that cannot sustain them. The fiction is not that these things are bought and sold — they are — but that the market is the appropriate institution for their governance. The attempt to govern them by market logic produces characteristic destruction that provokes protective counter-movements.