The Relationship Between Two Commutators

We clarify the relationship between the linear commutator and the ordinary commutator by showing that in any variety satisfying a nontrivial idempotent Mal’cev condition the linear commutator is definable in terms of the centralizer relation. We derive from this that abelian algebras are quasi–affine in such varieties. We refine this by showing that if A is an abelian algebra and V(A) satisfies an idempotent Mal’cev condition which fails to hold in the variety of semilattices, then A is affine.