Endomorphism monoids in varieties of commutative semigroups

A concrete category is almost universal if its class of non-constant morphisms contains an isomorphic copy of every category of algebras as a full subcategory. This paper characterizes almost universal varieties of commutative semigroups. As a consequence we obtain that for every infinite cardinal κ there exists a commutative semigroup of cardinality κ such that it has exactly two endomorphisms, the identity endomorphism and a single constant endomorphism.