The Commodification of Everything

Spring Colloquium 2003

One of the most striking transformations of our times has been the elevation of the market as the ideal paradigm of social organization. Indeed, many have understood the political revolutions of the last decade to offer a complete vindication of American-style free and self-regulating markets. For the market promises the most efficient allocation of resources, unmatched production of wealth, and greater liberty. Unfettered markets encourage success, punish failure, and offer the most reliable path to prosperity and the advancement of human freedom.

What is most remarkable, however, isn't merely the way that the market has triumphed as the dominant form of economic organization, but rather the way that commodification—the process of transforming things into objects for sale—has also become a dominant and totalizing cultural force. We live not only in a market economy, but in a market society, where the market and its categories of thought have come to dominate ever more areas of our lives. Many universities now think of the education that they offer as a “product” that they need to pitch to their student “consumers.” Increasingly, new advances in biotechnology make possible the commodification of our offspring or our very bodies. While commodification is certainly not a recent innovation, what is new is its size, dimension, scope, and power. It has become intensified and institutionalized in new and far-reaching ways, carrying meanings that reconfigure our understanding of the world and our place within it. Everything can become a commodity now, and almost nothing is unaffected by the appropriation of the market paradigm.

The cultural changes brought about by commodification are as sweeping and complex as they are controversial. Many welcome these changes, trusting in the market's potential to unleash more fully the potential of human creativity. Others are less sanguine and worry about the market’s potential to reduce our highest values and our most sacred social ideals—its capacity to corrupt various goods and social practices, expose the disenfranchised to greater exploitation and manipulation, and encourage patterns of consumption that put pressure on scarce and vulnerable natural resources.

This debate leaves us with a whole range of pressing moral, political, and social questions. What forces, pressures, and cultural changes drive this tendency to commodify? Is anything resistant to commodification? What happens to democracy and political order, marriage and the family, religion and morality, identity and our understanding of the human person when they are conceptualized under market categories? What sorts of psychological and anthropological changes occur when we begin seeing our basic relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world as commodities? Are there any realistic alternatives to a consumer society dominated by commodification?

FEATURING:

Juliet Schor, Professor of Sociology at Boston College.

George Ritzer, Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland.

David Lyon, Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

Graham Ward, Professor of Contextual Theology and Ethics and the director of the Centre for Religion, Culture and Gender at the University of Manchester.

Kiku Adatto, Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University.

Michael Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Papers from this colloquium were published in the Summer 2003 issue of The Hedgehog Review.