Decommodification and egalitarian political economy

Politics and Society

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 310-346

  Vail, John ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Commodification; Commons; Decommodification; Fair trade; Social movements

Indexed keywords

EID: 77956022027     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329210373069     Document Type: Article

References (124)

1. Laura T. Raynolds, Douglas L. Murray, and John Wilkinson, Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization (London: Routledge, 2007); on community struggles against water privatization in South Africa
2. Ashwin Desai, We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002); for microcredit
3. Daniel Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004); on the social economy
4. Carlo Borzaga and Jacques Defourney, The Emergence of Social Enterprise (London: Routledge, 2001).
5. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); for open-source unionism
6. Richard Freeman and Joel Rogers, "A Proposal to American Labor," The Nation (June 24, 2002).
7. In a survey of the diverse universe of what he calls "anti-systemic" movements, Immanuel Wallerstein emphasized the benefits of such a framework: "The third component has to be the establishment of interim, middle range goals that seem to move in the right direction. I would suggest that one of the most useful-substantively, politically, psychologically-is the attempt to move towards selective, but ever widening decommodification." Immanuel Wallerstein, "New Revolts Against the System," New Left Review 18 (November-December 2002): 29-39, 38.
8. Gavin Fridell highlights fair trade's "decommodifying effects";
9. Gavin Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
10. Patrick Bond also uses the term when exploring anti-privatization campaigns in South Africa: see Patrick Bond, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neo-liberalism in South Africa (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
11. Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1990).
12. One notable exception to this is Claus Offe, who even if his insights were not flushed out into an alternative framework, certainly envisioned decommodification in the wider way that I am proposing herein: "areas of social life that have been decommodified by welfare state interventions can be developed, through political struggle, into relatively autonomous sub-systems of life oriented to the production and distribution of use values." Claus Offe, Modernity and the State (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1996), 265.
13. David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: the False Coin of Our Own Dreams, (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2002), 79.
14. By contrast, Colin Williams defines the decommodified realm as any form of economic activity that is non-exchanged, non-monetized, or without a profit motive. Colin Williams, A Commodified World: Mapping the Limits of Capitalism (London: Zed Books, 2005).
15. Among those I drew inspiration from are the volumes in the Real Utopias series edited by Erik Olin Wright, the work of Diane Elson on socializing markets, Andre Gorz on a redistribution of labor, and Yochai Benkler on the promise of the new information technology (see citations below).
16. There are notable exceptions to this overall tendency. Graham Room stressed the link between labor commodification and self-development and argued that decommodification proponents did not sufficiently address how greater autonomy and creativity could be ensured in the sphere of paid work. Graham Room, "Commodification and Decommodification: A Developmental Critique," Policy and Politics 28, no. 3 (2000): 331-51.
17. In an influential critique, Ann Shola Orloff argued for the positive effects of commodification on women's lives and proposed an alternative category, defamilialization, which explored the extent to which women could secure an independent livelihood without recourse to the household.
18. Ann Shola Orloff, "Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States," American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 303-28.
19. Terry Eagleton, "Utopia and Its Opposites," in Socialist Register 2000, ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (London: Merlin Press, 1999), 31-40, 34.
20. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 2.
21. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for Equity and Accountability in Markets, Communities, and States, ed. Erik Olin Wright (London: Verso, 1998);
22. Andre Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999);
23. Jane Wheelock and John Vail, eds., Work and Idleness: The Political Economy of Full Employment (Boston: Kluwer, 1999).
24. Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).
25. For the official report, see http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr.
26. There are any number of moral, philosophical, and political inspirations that underpin this indictment of capitalism, ranging from Marx and Gramsci through to Polanyi and Gorz. For a concise discussion of the ills of the market, see Erik Olin Wright, "Compass Points: Towards a Socialist Alternative," New Left Review 41 (September-October 2006): 93-124.
27. Erik Olin Wright, "Introduction," in Bowles and Gintis, Recasting Egalitarianism, xi. This belief has a long antecedent within the progressive tradition: as Karl Polanyi wrote, "the end of market society means in no way the absence of markets."
28. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1957), 252.
29. For the literature on embeddedness, see Greta Krippner and Anthony Alvarez, "Embeddedness and the Intellectual Projects of Economic Sociology," Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007): 219-40;
30. for the importance of the non-market sector, see J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It) (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996);
31. Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York: New Press, 2001);
32. Williams, Commodified World.
33. Martha Ertman and Joan Williams, eds., Rethinking Commodification (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4.
34. Joan Williams and Viviana Zelizer, "To Commodify or Not to Commodify: That Is Not the Question," in Ertman and Williams, Rethinking Commodification, 362-82, 368.
35. Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 297.
36. The quote is from Franklin Roosevelt. For an enlightening discussion of "democratic experimentalism," see Roberto Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative (London: Verso, 2001).
37. Fred Block, "Confronting Market Fundamentalism: Doing 'Public Economic Sociology,'" Socio-Economic Review 5, no. 2 (2007): 326-34, 330.
38. Roberto Unger makes a similar claim: "Ideas exercise the decisive power upon the demarcation of the frontier between the actual and the possible when they begin to animate the available forms of social action." Unger, Democracy Realized, 92.
39. But nor should we underestimate the positive spillover effects that some decommodification initiatives may precipitate. The Grameen Bank estimates that more than 50 percent of its microcredit borrowers (95 percent of whom are women) who have been in the program for more than five years have risen out of a state of poverty, which they define as having a house with a tin roof, clean drinking water and sanitation, proper clothes, mosquito nets, and children's education. At the same time, researchers found that women in the program experienced higher use of birth control, levels of education, and labor-force participation than other Bangladesh women, all of which substantially enhanced their capacity to resist the persistent gender oppression they faced.
40. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, "Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination," in Panitch and Leys, Socialist Register, 1-29.
41. Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
42. The idea of a way station for social transformation is highlighted in Erik Olin Wright, "Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias," Soundings 36 (Summer 2007);
43. non-reformist reforms are found in Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor (Boston: Beacon, 1967).
44. The term second enclosure comes from James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
45. On the biosphere, see Vandana Shiva, Protect or Plunder: Understanding Intellectual Property Rights (London: Zed Books, 2001);
46. on the public domain see David Marquand, Decline of the Public (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). For an attempt to theorize this process
47. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005)
48. Massimo De Angelis, "Separating the Doing and the Deed: Capital and the Continuous Character of Enclosures," Historical Materialism 12, no. 2 (2004): 57-87.
49. I attribute the term fencing-off to Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (London: Flamingo, 2002).
50. Among the first to stress this factor was Polanyi, Great Transformation, 33.
51. Claus Offe envisions this as a cornerstone of a new progressive project of "guaranteeing minimums instead of realizing maximums, and of using appropriate procedures and institutions to brake and shackle the destructive effects of the dynamics of technological, military, economic, bureaucratic and ecological modernization by applying principles of responsible self-limitation." Offe, Modernity, 181.
52. In this regard, one is drawn inevitably into definitional questions. Andrew Sayer uses decommodification to refer to what he calls the "recontextualizing moment" of consumption (the move from functional qualities of things [exchange value] to the symbolic aspects of status, identity, and personal liberation intentionally attached to products [use value]). "The continued success of commodity production therefore," he writes, "depends on successful decommodification by the consumer, usually with a cultural steer by the producer."
53. Andrew Sayer, "(De-)Commodification, consumer culture and moral economy," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 3 (2003): 341-57, 346. On the other hand
54. J. K. Gibson-Graham includes as part of the non-commodified world independent commodity production of small businesses as well as for-profit partnerships where the surplus is jointly appropriated and decisions about its distribution are jointly made (a definition that would have the effect of including Goldman Sachs as a non-market actor!);
55. Gibson-Graham, End of Capitalism. Neither of these would be included under my framework.
56. The work of Viviana Zelizer has been at the forefront of this development: see Viviana Zelizer, The Social Meaning of Money (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
57. Zelizer, Purchase of Intimacy.
58. This thesis of market corrosion has a long lineage in the social sciences as Albert Hirschman eloquently traces;
59. Albert O. Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). For contemporary accounts
60. Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
61. Margaret Radin, Contested Commodities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
62. Folbre, Invisible Heart, xii.
63. On the commodification of gay identities, see Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2000);
64. on the dependencies of bonded labor, see Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
65. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).
66. Indeed, this "commodifying effect" is likely to be a feature of decommodification initiatives that are at present only speculative. Philippe van Parijs, one of the leading proponents of a basic income, highlights this dynamic: "Consequently, BI [Basic Income] can be said to increase the commodification of people, in the sense that it fosters participation in the labor market for a greater proportion of people and a longer portion of their lives, while at the same time decreasing the commodification of people by making them less dependent on the labor market for their subsistence. This is a paradox not a contradiction. Indeed, the fundamental reason why I find BI such a good proposal is precisely that it contributes to commodification in the former sense while contributing to decommodification in the latter." Philippe van Parijs, "Basic Income versus Stakeholder Grants,"
67. Bruce Ackerman, Ann Alstott, and Philippe van Parijs, Redesigning Distribution: Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants as Cornerstones of a More Egalitarian Capitalism, ed. Erik Olin Wright (London: Verso, 2006), 206-7.
68. Donald Mackenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
69. Of course, there may be differing degrees of non-rivalness. My consumption of a book from the library may well mean that someone else is unable to read that same book until I am finished with it. Similarly, my enjoyment of the beautiful vistas of a national park wilderness or a beach, not to mention the quality of the good in question, may be severely impaired if too many other people pursue their right at the same time. In those instances, restrictions on usage may be necessary, and these may be accomplished by both bureaucratic procedures (registration requirements, waiting lists, etc.) and monetary fees (user charges to defray expenses of park management), which need not imply commodification in every instance.
70. Benkler, Wealth of Networks.
71. Nancy Folbre, in this regard, has suggested that raising children should be deemed a public good. Individuals who devote relatively little time, emotional labor, or resources to child rearing are essentially free riding on parental labor given that they will likely enjoy the benefits of this social reproduction via pensions and health care paid for by the grown-up, tax-paying children. She insists therefore that there should be greater public support (child care subsidies and tax relief, after-school services, and the like) and public acknowledge- ment of this activity. Folbre, Invisible Heart.
72. David Miller insists that there is still a "first order question" to decide, namely which goods society deems is necessary to make public. Given that certain groups may benefit more from certain public goods than others, public goods are subject to the same kind of social justice considerations as any other forms of social wealth. Indeed in an era of widespread fiscal constraints, the debate about which public goods might be sacrosanct from the inevitable public sector cuts rages on both side of the Atlantic. David Miller, Market, State and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1989).
73. This does not preclude that the enactment of public goods may very well enrich private beneficiaries. This may be the result of intentional action-a means of ensuring legislative passage by arranging side deals with potential opponents-but more likely it is a natural indirect consequence of creating such goods within a capitalist economy. When a government decides to commit funds for public libraries, public health clinics, or high-speed rail, it does so with the full knowledge that it is likely that the construction of these entities will be undertaken by private firms, which will derive substantial profits from their participation. Yet private enrichment should not obscure the wider societal benefits from enacting such goods in the first place nor should it invalidate the underlying belief that providing more public goods would have strong egalitarian effects. This dilemma can be observed in the heated debates among progressives about the strengths and weaknesses of the Obama health care reform.
74. Aidan Hollis and Thomas Pogge, The Health Impact Fund: Making New Medicines Accessible for All (New York: Incentives for Global Health, 2008).
75. Dean Baker, The Artistic Freedom Voucher: An Internet Age Alternative to Copyrights (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2003).
76. Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (Salt Lake City: Tanner Lectures in Human Values, 2000);
77. Marquand, Decline of the Public.
78. This may include direct taxation that supports general goods such as public parks, streetlights, public education, health care, and the like. Other goods, such as public broadcasting, may be funded through specific earmarked fees such as the license fee that supports the BBC.
79. On open source, see Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Soft- ware (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008);
80. on collective efficacy Robert J. Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy," Science 277 (August 15, 1997): 918-24.
81. Inge Kaul, Pedro Conceicao, Katell Le Goulven, and Ronald U. Mendoz, eds., Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003).
82. The extension of democratic regulation into areas of the market may achieve similar effects on market actors as noted in this section-extending time horizons, altering incentives and priorities, instantiating a concern for social ends-yet I think it is useful to differentiate this alternative strategy from the initiatives described herein.
83. On local exchange trading systems (LETS), see Claus Offe and Rolf Heinze, Beyond Employment: Time, Work and the Informal Economy (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1992);
84. on open source, see Benkler, Wealth of Networks
85. Kelty, Two Bits;
86. on fair trade, see Raynolds, Murray, and Wilkinson, Fair Trade;
87. on pensions, see Robin Blackburn, "Plans for a Global Pension," New Left Review 47 (September-October 2007): 71-92.
88. Diane Elson, "Socializing Markets, Not Market Socialism," in Panitch and Leys, Socialist Register, 67-85, 69;
89. Andre Gorz, Strategy for Labor, 7;
90. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 290.
91. Roberto Unger, What the Left Should Propose (London: Verso, 2006), 21.
92. One could reasonably inquire whether this definition strays very far from the familiar argument within economic sociology that emphasizes the "embedding" of markets (see Krippner and Alvarez, "Embeddedness"). When we argue that a market is embedded (in social, political/institutional, cultural, cognitive forms), it could mean various things: that financial markets are influenced by symbolic relations and by theories of financial markets themselves; that commodity prices are formed not only by market interactions but by branding, status, and taste; that global trade is regulated by a dense web of rules, standards, and political agreements. However, not all instances of embedding directly impact on the func- tioning of core market imperatives in the manner I am suggesting. More importantly, many forms of embedding are designed to improve the functioning of markets (by improving information flows, reducing price volatility, lowering transaction costs, managing uncertainty) in order to aid efficiency and enhance profitability rather than to promote egalitarian and democratic outcomes as I am arguing a decommodifying effect must accomplish.
93. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 18-19, my emphasis.
94. For fair trade coffee, see Raynolds, Murray, and Wilkinson, Fair Trade;
95. Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee;
96. Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability and Survival (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
97. One might argue that much of the discussion about health care reform in the United States concerned this very issue. The furious debate over the "public option" revolved around whether the establishment of a public insurance plan and national clearinghouse that enabled citizens to evaluate and choose between public and private options would be sufficient to pressure private insurers to change their behavior (controlling costs, reducing administrative waste, curbing excessive executive salaries, bargaining more aggressively with pharmaceutical firms). Reformers were also concerned with how the attractive model of low-cost nonprofit health care delivery (exemplified by the Mayo Clinic) could be extended throughout the country to challenge the dominance of the high-cost, for-profit hospitals that view patients as individual profit centers.
98. Atul Gawande, "The Cost Conundrum," The New Yorker (June 1, 2009).
99. Cadburys, one of the leading chocolate firms in the world, announced in early 2009 that its most popular chocolate bar, Dairy Milk, was to become fair trade certified and promised its other brands would follow suit over time. When the new product line went on sale in the fall, it was estimated that it would shift the value of fair trade chocolate sales in the United Kingdom alone nearly fivefold (from £45 million to £225 million) and triple the tonnage of fair traded cocoa beans bought from Ghana. A more skeptical mind might note that for the past three years the fair trade guaranteed price has actually been below the open-market price, which has given firms like Cadbury's a material incentive to embrace their ethical side; however, their chief executive promised the company was committed over the long term to fair trade regardless of price movements (a guarantee that will be severely compromised now that the firm has succumbed to a hostile takeover bid by Kraft, a global food conglomerate). Similarly, Starbucks recently announced that espresso coffee in all 750 of its U.K. stores would be sourced from fair trade coffee from Rwanda, which will have a massive impact on the total acreage of fair trade coffee in that country and opens the door to a similar agreement for its U.S. and worldwide operations.
100. For a discussion of these issues in terms of fair trade coffee, see Jaffee, Brewing Justice, chap. 9.
101. Esping-Andersen, Three Worlds, 37.
102. Gosta Esping-Andersen, Incomplete Revolution: Adapting Welfare States to Women's New Roles (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009).
103. Esping-Andersen, Three Worlds, 35.
104. Panitch and Gindin, "Transcending Pessimism," 6.
105. On commodity fetishism, see Karl Marx, Capital (London: Penguin, 1973).
106. This is also the product of intentional action by market actors (and their political allies) to insulate their decisions from democratic oversight. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, On Democracy (New York: Penguin, 1983).
107. Gibson-Graham, End of Capitalism, 90;
108. Cohen and Rogers, On Democracy.
109. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 156, 157, 135, 98. In the classical economist's explanatory schema, "vision was limited to the market" yet "society as a whole remained invisible";
110. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 258. For a fuller discussion of Polanyi's argument
111. John Vail, Karl Polanyi and the Paradoxes of the Double Movement (New York: Routledge, forthcoming), chap. 3.
112. Roberto Bolano, 2666 (London: Picador, 2009), 348.
113. Peter Jackson makes a similar point: "Yet there is something hollow about the call to 'unveil' the commodity fetish as though the provision of such knowledge would automatically lead to widespread shifts in consumer behavior or to significant changes in working conditions at the point of production. There is little evidence to suggest that commercial culture works in this way." Peter Jackson, "Commercial Cultures: Transcending the Cultural and the Economic," Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002): 3-18, 6-7.
114. The term moral shock comes from James Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
115. cognitive liberation from Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
116. It should be noted that a heightened moral sensibility, even one that has been stimulated by progressive movements and campaigns, may not always be conducive of greater under- standing. Even if one appreciates how one's consumer purchases reinforce exploitative and oppressive workplace conditions, moral certainty and condemnation should be tempered by a pragmatic reckoning of the choices that are actually feasible in these circumstances. Naila Kabeer's research of women textile workers in Bangladesh explicitly addresses this moral ambiguity;
117. Naila Kabeer, The Power to Choose (London: Verso, 1997). Even though the women she studied had been pushed into this employment by lack of opportunities elsewhere and by low wages in the countryside and many endured hazardous working conditions and exploitative wages, most nonetheless regarded factory work in a favorable light. It gave them a regular income at a higher wage than women with an equivalent educa- tion could hope to achieve; it enabled them to earn an independent livelihood; and it gave them an opportunity to postpone marriage or marry someone of their own choosing and to save and send money back to their families. Unlike the familiar picture of exploitation and inequality that a critique of commodity fetishism might uncover, Kabeer instead discovered growing autonomy, self-reliance, and self-confidence, a portrait that demonstrates the complex trade-offs of commodification and decommodification that all egalitarian strategies must contend with.
118. Richard Locke, Matthew Amenguel, and Akshay Mangla, "Virtue out of Necessity: Compliance, Commitment and Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains," Politics & Society 37, no. 3 (2009): 319-51.
119. Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 8.
120. Schor, Born to Buy;
121. Amitai Etizioni, "Spent: America after Consumerism," The New Republic (June 17, 2009).
122. Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1991).
123. Fred Block throws his support to an even older ideological tradition but one that has a some- what more attractive resonance: The "moral economy."
124. Fred Block, "A Moral Economy," The Nation (March 20, 2006).