ON COMMODIFICATION — Chris Dillow

Commodification is of the essence of capital. It can be a force for good, as proponents of the price mechanism as the solution to all problems claim, or not, as Marx & Engels objected based on alienation. Chris Dillow comments.

Stumbling and Mumbling
ON COMMODIFICATION
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Branko Milanovic — Commodification again—a response to Diane Coyle

In a very nice post published today Diane Coyle, commenting on my blog on Commodification(published yesterday) takes me to task for the following sentence:

“The most obvious case is commodification of activities that used to be conducted within extended families and then, as we became richer and more individualistic within nuclear families. Cooking has now become out-sourced and families often do not eat meals together. Cleaning and child-rearing have become more commercialized than before or ever.”

I should have added a number of other activities: fixing the roof, doing kids’ homework, car repairs, gardening, and this quintessential US activity of raking the leaves.

It would have been, perhaps clearer, that I did not have in mind only activities predominantly done by women but also by men.
Now two points remain to be explain.…

Essential to economic liberalism and private property is first the enclosure of the commons, secondly the commodification (capitalization) of all activity, and thirdly, the the substitution of rent extraction for profit from competition, which under perfect competition is the money return on capital ("the interest rate").

Global Inequality
Commodification again—a response to Diane Coyle

Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

BTW, a major aspect of commodification is the fraying of the social fabric. So far this has not been mentioned specifically in the discussion on commodification. Nor has alienation. Bot of these effects are well known to sociologists and social psychologists but not so much to economists, apparently since it is not in their portfolio under the overarching paradigm of economic liberalism that isolates economics from psychology and the social sciences, as well as social and political philosophy, ethics, action theory, and value theory.

Diane Coyle — Markets and humans

Diane Coyle comments on Branko Milanovic's post on Commodification from a feminist point of view.

From an economic point of view there are trade-offs. From a sociological point of view there are winner and losers, not only individually but with respect to a society as a cultural and institutional system.

BTW, Marx introduced "commodification" relative to alienation, and Brako's piece speaks to this without mentioning Marx. As Marx pointed out, commodification results in depersonalizing relationships by replacing personal relationships with money transactions.

Moreover, commodification adversely affects traditionalism and it is therefore opposed by traditional who see liberal policies undermining "traditional values." This includes most of the non-Western emerging world, including Russia, which is a bridge between the Western world (Petrinism, liberalism) and Eurasia (Orthodox and Muslim traditionalism).

This is important in the transition to a new world order than now occurring as Western 500 year global dominance winds down as the emerging world catches up.

The Enlightened Economist
Markets and humans
Diane Coyle | freelance economist and a former advisor to the UK Treasury. She is a member of the UK Competition Commission and is acting Chairman of the BBC Trust, the governing body of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Branko Milanovic — Commodification

Commodification = depersonalization.

Global Inequality
Commodification
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior schoment for International Peacelar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endow

Billier on the commons v. enclosure

It’s an encouraging sign that the language of the commons and enclosure is gaining momentum internationally.  This should not be a surprise.  Enclosure is one of the great, unacknowledged scandals of our time.

One of the worst sets of enclosures is the international land grab that is now underway in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  Investors, national governments and speculators are buying up millions of acres of farmlands.  Saudi Arabia is spending $1 billion for huge tracts in Africa for rice cultivation.  India and China are assembling investment pools to buy up farmlands.  Much of this land is customary land  managed as commons.  Hundreds of millions of rural poor use have used these lands for generations for subsistence.   But because they don't have formal property rights -- the government or corporations do – they are powerless.

And to justify the appropriations, the commons are called “wastelands” or “unowned” lands.  This harks back to John Locke’s definitions of property and value.  Because commoners use their lands in ecologically sustainable ways, without the exploitation and extraction that markets typically use, the lands are considered without value.  Investors who bring the land into a system of market control – say, for monoculture farming or biofuels production – are supposedly “developing” the land.  This is how language misleads us about the real meaning of value.

One of the most infamous enclosures occurred in Bolivia.  We just heard earlier about the infamous attempt to privatize water in Cochabamba.  Even though the people prevailed, enclosures of water are still a worldwide phenomenal.

Read it at David Bollier — new and perspectives on the commons

Surveying Commons Activism on the International Stage

by David Bollier

h/t Energy Bulletin)

I bring this to attention because it is relevant to a developing trend destined to shape the future, which might be termed "global awakening."

The commons is a great sleeping giant – an unacknowledged superpower – if we consider the many transnational tribes of commoners.  Because they are not conventional institutions or nonprofits, their impact can be easy to overlook.  But consider these diverse movements and networks of people who may not be explicitly using commons language, but certainly share the core values and goals of commoners:  

• The Solidarity Economy movement, which is particularly strong in Brazil, Venezuela, Canada and Europe.

• The Transition Town movement

• Water activism

• The Landless Workers Movement / Via Campesino

• Free software/open source software, a well-established international network

• Creative Commons / free culture, which is active in more than 70 countries

• Wikipedians, who number in the tens of thousands in dozens of countries

• Open access publishing, which has more than 7,000 open access journals

• Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, which features open courseware in more than 150 colleges and universities worldwide

• The Pirate Parties in more than two dozen countries

• The Occupy movementA great convergence of movements is going on, or at least robust cross-fertilization.  

Each movement has serious questions about conventional governance and politics, or is building its own alternatives to convention markets and government.  Each has different focal points and different tactics.  But there is a rough agreement on basic human values, political goals and a respect for the open, participatory ethic of the Internet.