Talking bollocks is something that many people do. Idle chitchat, telling stories and passing on gossip is what keeps many people's lives going along. It is funny then, that such talk is now an industry, one that is worth many millions of pounds.

Name of concept: Commodification.

Where did it come from: Marxist politics.

What it is about: The massive growth of the gossip industry has been one of the key transformations in modern Western culture over the last decade. In our newspapers, magazines and televisions, we find out the innermost secrets of people far from us, often living on different continents, people that we will never meet nor have any tangible effect upon our lives, except through the media.

I do not wish to make a po-faced examination of the terrible effects that celebrity has upon our culture; we have all read too many of those articles. Instead, I find it more interesting to note how something that was previously largely worthless, in monetary terms, has suddenly become a huge industry.

Admittedly, making money from gossip is nothing new. In the US, the original gossip columnist, Walter Winchell, became one of the most highly paid people in the newspaper business in the 1930s. Until recently, however, gossip was not an industry: it was only a small, and often derided, part of the media.

Today, on the other hand, we have a phalanx of magazines dedicated to the distribution of celebrities' stories, personal lives and poor taste in interior decoration. Collectively, these magazines sell millions every week. Someone is making a lot of a money.

Academics call this process of turning something previously without monetary value into a commodity, ie something that can be sold, "commodification". It is an inherent part of capitalism, and it is a process that some believe to be good, others bad.

Why we should know about it: Unsurprisingly, Karl Marx did not like commodification at all. Though he did not use the word, the concept was the key to his dislike of capitalism, for it "resolved personal worth into exchange value" and "reduced the family relation into a mere money relation".

From behind his beard, Marx believed that capitalism's focus on the primacy of money would invade all spheres of life, tearing away from the family its "sentimental veil" and lead to the alienation of the worker from his day-to-day tasks.

People on the other side of the argument, whose voices dominate the debate today, believe that commodification can be a worthy process. One of their arguments is that unless something is commodified, then it does not have a value in modern-day economies, and, if that is the case, 'public goods' – such as the environment – are easily trashed. The answer, they say, is to commodify public goods so that companies can value them too.

A good example of this is the carbon tax trading scheme. Since the beginning of this year, all energy-intensive companies in the EU have been issued carbon credits, which grant them permission to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If they emit more than their allocated amount they must buy more credits, and if they emit less than they can sell what they have left over.

The idea behind commodifying carbon dioxide emissions is to provide companies with a tangible financial incentive to cut their emissions. Other countries, including some areas of the US, have pilot carbon trading schemes in place, and supporters believe that such markets will lead to steady reductions in carbon emissions across the globe.

So, are the Marxists wrong? Is commodification actually a good thing? As ever, the answer seems to be: it depends. As the carbon trading idea shows, commodification can be used to protect public goods, by putting a financial value on things of things worth protecting that were previously considered 'externalities' by companies, and so were duly wrecked.

However, and as the emergence of the gossip industry reveals, capitalism does not limit itself to monetising areas that would benefit from the protection offered by commodification. Instead, it spreads into any area where there is money to made.

Bit dodgy because: Today, information is an industry. Many people – myself included – earn a living through discovering and distributing information. But information is not just an industry, it is also a crucial part of a democratic society. A corporate takeover of information, particularly the internet, has the potential to strip citizens of their power to hold governments and companies to account.

Why not also take a look at . . . other areas where people have concerns about commodication – water, tourism and culture. And then there are commodification's supporters, which include those that say commodification can save thousands of lives.