A natural problem that arises in the study of derivations on a Banach algebra is to classify the commutators in the algebra. The problem as stated is too broad and we will only consider the algebra of operators acting on a given Banach space X. In particular, we will focus our attention to the spaces $lambda I and $linf$. The main results are that the commutators on $ell_1$ are the operators not of the form $lambda I + K$ with $lambda eq 0$ and $K$ compact and the operators on $linf$ which are commutators are those not of the form $lambda I + S$ with $lambda eq 0$ and $S$ strictly singular. We generalize Apostol's technique (1972, Rev. Roum. Math. Appl. 17, 1513 - 1534) to obtain these results and use this generalization to obtain partial results about the commutators on spaces $mathcal{X}$ which can be represented as $displaystyle mathcal{X}simeq left ( igoplus_{i=0}^{infty} mathcal{X} ight)_{p}$ for some $1leq pleqinfty$ or $p=0$. In particular, it is shown that every non - $E$ operator on $L_1$ is a commutator. A characterization of the commutators on $ell_{p_1}oplusell_{p_2}opluscdotsoplusell_{p_n}$ is also given.
