COMMODIFICATION of services is one of the major avenues of expanding the realm of capital in the neoliberal age. Commodity for Marx has no reference to corporeal reality. Something which is produced for sale whether it is goods or services does not make a conceptual difference in Marx’s notion of commodity. For Marx, commodity is a social relationship independent of its physical nature. The expansion of services in the count of GDP is partly because of commodification of services which were earlier supplied from a community or collectively owned pool.

USE values are created by labour and nature. But capital relations attach value to products that are being produced for the purpose of creating surplus. Production in capitalism is production of surplus value and this involves a process of appropriating labour and nature.

THE recent decade has attracted concerns about two potential trends of relocation of production and labour. One relates to increasing wages in the developing countries triggering a new wave of use of robots in production and the other is more geopolitical in nature referring to possibilities of relocating manufacturing activities outside China.Large reserve of cheap labour in the global south led to relocation of production in the developing countries and might have postponed large scale robotisation of production in advanced economies.

ACCORDING to official sources, India’s unemployment rate in the past five years turned out to be one of the highest in the post-independence period. For decades before the current regime the average open unemployment rate used to be within the range of 2-3 per cent. In developing countries where labour resources are mostly unused, people can hardly afford to wait and remain unemployed in absence of unemployment supports and tend to accept low wages and poor working conditions as they have no alternative source of earnings.

IT is election eve and the prime minister while speaking in the parliament on the interim budget session ended with forecasts of election results for the ruling combine. It was not an expression of encouragement for his colleagues for the ensuing election but a prediction of number of seats that the BJP and the NDA would be winning.