The Commodification of Everything

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-11-21-commodification-of-everything-polanyi/



In the hyper-capitalism that characterizes today’s economy, more and more of human life is becoming commodified, used primarily as arenas for corporate profit. In the face of these deeper trends, government efforts to moderate the effects by using transfers to reduce income extremes, or increasing social investment, can be futile sandcastles. Sometimes government policy working through private players, such as Obamacare or Biden’s industrial subsidies to private industry, serves to reinforce this deeper trend. My intellectual hero, Karl Polanyi, wrote about the relentless tendency of capitalism to turn everything into a commodity. Writing in 1930s and 1940s, almost a century after Karl Marx, Polanyi’s explanation of how this dynamic worked was informed by more history and was more persuasive than Marx’s cruder version.

But when I was young, we enjoyed something of a pause, which some optimists assumed was permanent. Mobilized citizens, democratic governments, and workers organized into trade unions insisted that the preconditions of a good life—health, decent employment, education, housing—must not be treated as mere commodities for maximum profit. The Danish social scientist, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, writing in the spirit of Polanyi, looked at Scandinavian social democracy as an ongoing process of “de-commodification.” Unfortunately, that was then. In the past half-century, the tendency of capitalism to commodify everything has returned with a vengeance. And commodification, it turns out, goes hand in hand with concentration. As formerly social goods get turned back into commodities, corporations use hyper-concentration to further increase profits.

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