What does tea mean to you? The linking of commodities and man

What does tea mean to you? Is it something you sip after a long day to calm the nerves? Is it an early morning energy boost? Whatever its meaning, the value of tea to each person will differ, as will be the case for all commodities.

As stated before, there has been/is a fetishization associated with commodities. They have a target audience, and the goal is to entice this audience, whoever it is, into buying the product for a profit. The differences within these commodities are represented in their commodity chain- how they are made, by whom, under what conditions, how they are marketed and how they are packaged and sold at whatever price.In an odd way, everything natural or man made on the earth can be commodified. There is literally no limit! Even today we may find ourselves wondering, what on earth do i need that product for? And yet still there is someone else who has an mad desire to own said product.

In Capital, Karl Marx outlined the nature of a commodity, where he stated that, 'a commodity appears at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties......There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things... The Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities".

Wallace Shaw in his book The Fever (1991) also took a view that the pricing of an item, its commoditization, lent with it some form of erasure to the historical nature of the item, such that the people involved in its manufacture and sale, and the whole concept of these, are rather ignored or at the very least placed on the back burner so that the item itself gains a value of 'newness' and ownership that was not 'tainted' by a past legacy.

"The notion of the commodity chain traces the entire trajectory of a product from its conception and design, through production, retailing and final consumption. Commodity chains are defined as the network of labour and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity (Leslie and Reimer)