‘Commodification of everything’ arguments in the social sciences: Variants,specification,evaluation,critique

Abstract

Claims about ‘the commodification of everything’ are a staple of 21st century left (and some liberal) analysis and critique. These claims, however, are asserted much more often than they are backed up, and little attention has been devoted to thinking through how they might be substantiated or to what ‘the commodification of everything’ actually means. This paper contributes to contemporary debates over capitalism, commodification and politics by suggesting ways that commodification-of-everything arguments can be better specified and evaluated. It identifies four variants of commodification-of-everything claims; reviews and critiques the literature's uses of the terms ‘commodity’, ‘everything’ and ‘thing’; and articulates three possible definitions of ‘the commodification of everything’ that raise additional questions about defining ‘sale’ and ‘market’ and the implications of thinking of things as commodities. The conclusion suggests reframings of the relationship between capitalism and commodification that seek to preserve the force of commodification-of-everything claims while avoiding their pitfalls.

Introduction

Commodification is a central dynamic of our time. In recent decades there has been a spectacular expansion in the availability for sale of a vast range of things, with many becoming so available (indeed, being conjured into being) for the first time. Huge numbers of people from the South and the formerly socialist world have entered labour markets. State assets and functions have been privatized. Cultural expression and leisure activities are increasingly commodified, and new markets have been created for financial claims (including, notoriously, subprime mortgages) and rights to pollute, hunt and fish. Epochal processes such as these give a dramatic sense of what is at stake in contemporary commodification. That sense is only deepened when one considers the more obscure commodifications that feature in reports on, say, boyfriends for rent in China or payments for space in overhead bins on airplanes (Waldmeir, 2014; White, 2013).

Efforts to understand the scale and scope of these commodifications and the forces behind them have been integral to early 21st-century critical social science. Many academics and activists engaged in this project have made claims about ‘the commodification of everything’. This phrase evokes a world in which everything is for sale: all goods, services, relationships, rights, nature, ‘mind, body and soul’ (Harrison, 2006: 111). The concept is a popular one. A 3 May 2022 Google Scholar search for ‘commodification of everything’ returned 2290 hits, and commodification-of-everything claims (or closely related arguments using different language) have been made by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Massimo De Angelis, Jeremy Gilbert, David Graeber, Stuart Hall, David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Branko Milanovic, Jason Moore, Margaret Jane Radin, Jeremy Rifkin, Michael Sandel, Wolfgang Streeck, Yanis Varoufakis, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Watts, Cornel West, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, and Ellen Meiksins Wood. ¹ Opposition to the commodification of everything, too, is frequently put forward as a core principle of contemporary left politics (Klein, 2001: 81–82; Soron and Laxer, 2006; Varoufakis, 2018: 180; West, 2020).

If the popularity of what Brett Christophers (2016: 141) calls the ‘burgeoning critique’ of the commodification or marketization ‘of everything’ is easy to demonstrate, it is less clear how such claims should be evaluated or, in some cases, how seriously they should be taken. The specific arguments made about the commodification of everything vary greatly, with some referring to commodification's empirical extent, some to capitalism's drives and imperatives, some to political projects, and some to ways of thought. Some insist on universality; others apply to ‘virtually’ or ‘almost’ everything, though qualified claims rarely explain what is excluded or why. Commodification-of-everything arguments are also commonly made en passant (Boeckler and Berndt, 2013: 425), and authors assert them far more often than they try to substantiate, provide evidence for (Williams, 2005: 23), or cite earlier literature on them. It may be that some authors assume that their claims will be understood as hyperbole not to be taken literally; that, as Michael Mann (2012: 10) puts it, ‘[t]he commodification of everything is only an exaggeration of a real historical process that is still ongoing in capitalism.’

I argue in this paper that the study of contemporary capitalism, commodification, and politics has much to gain from a careful analysis of commodification-of-everything arguments as social-scientific propositions. This is so for several reasons. First, even if some commodification of (virtually) everything claims are meant as hyperbole, the sheer number of such arguments, their often-emphatic phrasing, and the key roles they play in influential texts make it implausible that they all are. The more likely explanation for their popularity is that there is a widespread (though, as I show, far from unchallenged) assumption that they are basically correct (Williams, 2005). Second, because ‘the commodification of everything’ is an ambiguous phrase that could be interpreted in many ways, the lack of definitional clarity in almost all sources means most claims about it are hard to evaluate. It may be that given a broad enough understandings of ‘commodification’ and ‘everything’, some claims can be taken not just seriously but literally. Dismissing the arguments as hyperbole before they are specified more precisely would thus be premature, and the project of sharpening them can provide insights into issues central to the larger literature on commodification: what a ‘thing’ is and what ‘things’ there are in the world, what it means to commodify a ‘thing’, how extensive commodification is and what forces push for and against more of it (and where), and what kinds of evidence are relevant to different types of commodification arguments. Third (and relatedly), commodification-of-everything claims are often extreme versions of widely-made arguments about commodification's extent and causes. Grappling with the extremes (even if, again, some are not meant literally) encourages a focus on exceptions and counter-examples, and thus helps the commodification literature avoid a problem identified in Colin Williams’ assessment of ‘the commodification thesis’ (see below): a tendency to focus overwhelmingly on ‘things’ undergoing commodification and to fail to search for those that are not (2005: 25). Such efforts can identify new ‘things’ rarely if ever discussed in the commodification literature (perhaps because it is taken for granted that they are not for sale, or because it has not occurred to anyone that they are ‘things’ at all) and propose explanations for limits to commodification and the forces that push for it.

This paper undertakes the first critical review of the commodification-of-everything literature as a whole. Fully evaluating the many distinct commodification-of-everything claims would be a project for a book rather than a paper, and my goal here is thus not to perform those evaluations but to ask how they could be carried out. My approach to clarifying, better specifying, and asking new questions about the claims has three steps. In the first section I divide the arguments into four key variants which take the commodification of (virtually) everything to be a description of the world we live in (V1), a structural tendency inherent in capitalist social relations (V2), a goal of neoliberal ideology (V3), and a condition in which people think of everything as a commodity even if some things are not (yet) actually for sale (V4). I introduce existing critiques of each variant and make initial suggestions about the ways in which each might be evaluated. The second section backs out to examine the literature's uses of ‘commodity’ and ‘everything’ and highlights ways these terms can be used more precisely, including by asking whether ‘commodification’ applies to kinds of things, individual things, or both. The third develops three possible definitions of ‘the commodification of everything’ (as distinct from the four arguments made using the phrase) and demonstrates the implications for commodification-of-everything claims of picking one over the others. The conclusion suggests that future research aimed at more precise arguments about the relationship between capitalism and commodification should recognize that ‘the commodification of everything’ may not mean the same thing as either ‘endless commodification’ or ‘the subordination of all social relations to capitalism/the market.’

Commodification-of-everything arguments: Variants, critiques and evaluative challenges

While ‘the commodification of everything’ and closely related phrases have been deployed in many ways, I have identified four especially prominent claims. These arguments are not incompatible, and some authors move between them without acknowledging (or perhaps realizing) it. In this section I present the four variant arguments, note some further variations within them, highlight existing critiques of each claim, and make initial points about how the arguments could and should be evaluated. I assume here that because claims about the ‘marketization’ of everything and everything being for sale are not clearly distinguished in the literature from those about the commodification of everything, they can be treated as commodification-of-everything arguments. I argue later in the paper, however, that there are benefits to treating sales and markets separately.

V1: The world as it is or is becoming

V1 commodification-of-everything arguments refer to the actual extent of commodification. As Colin Williams (2005: 15) points out, few authors argue that literally everything is already a commodity. Percy Bysshe Shelley did make an unforgettable statement of that extreme position in a section of Queen Mab (1813) that begins ‘All things are sold’, and McKenzie Wark (2019: 48) echoes the claim in writing that ‘we have run out of world to commodify.’ David McNally, too, proposes that

It is only with capitalism that all goods and services become market commodities and, most significantly, that land and labour are commodified. […] Only thorough-going commodification of all aspects of life – most notably human labour – could produce a capitalist society in which literally everything has a price. How that immense revolution in human affairs came about is crucial to understanding the world in which we live today. (2006a: 88)

McNally, however, also notes later in the same piece that ‘large parts of the natural, human and social environments have so far escaped being commodified’ (2006a: 95).

Much more common than claims about already-accomplished total commodification are arguments stating that almost everything is a commodity, and/or that everything is being commodified but that the process is still ongoing. Wallerstein wrote 40 years ago (1983: 90) that ‘we are now close to the commodification of everything’. Wood claims that ‘Virtually everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market’ (2002a: 96–7), and Watts that ‘Virtually everything in modern society is a commodity’. Watts further characterizes ‘mature industrial capitalism’ as ‘a world in which […] the market and the commodity [have] come to dominate virtually all aspects of social life’, and argues that low-income countries ‘are “less developed” precisely because they are not mature commodity-producing economies […] – they are not fully commoditized’ (2004: 52, 2009: 99, his emphases; see also Williams, 2005: 3). Harvey finds that we may be close to the point at which ‘everything – but everything – is commodified and monetised’, and that ‘in many parts of the world there is not much left to enclose and privatise’ (2014: 235; see similarly Robinson, 2019: 848). Sandel states that ‘There are some things money can’t buy, but these days, not many. Today, almost everything is up for sale’ (2012: 3; see also 5, 8–9), and that ‘we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale’ (p.8). Rifkin writes that ‘the totality of our existence is being commodified’ (2000: 145, see also 97, 112), Milanovic (2021) of ‘increasing commodification of everything’, and Varoufakis that ‘Little by little this commodification reaches everywhere’ (2018: 35).

While most V1 arguments about commodification's current extent refer to ‘virtually’ or ‘almost’ everything, these restrictions often do not meaningfully distinguish them from claims about the literal commodification of everything. When arguments provide no examples of ‘things’ exempt from commodification and do not explain commodification's limits, the qualifications seem perfunctory. The first step towards better specifying V1 arguments would thus be for the people making them to be clearer about what ‘things’ these claims exclude and why. More detailed accounts provide some guidance. Sandel states that ‘we’ (meaning the United States) do not allow markets in slaves, children, jury duty obligations or votes, referring to these as among ‘the few limitations on markets we still observe’ (2012: 9–10, 14–15). Harvey, too, notes that all societies impose restrictions on commodification, and that there are technical limits to the commodifiability of things like the atmosphere and oceans (2014: 59–60, 2005: 165–166).

Claims that (virtually) everything is already commodified or on its way to commodification face powerful critiques. One set of responses draws on Karl Polanyi's well-known (though not unambiguous) argument that efforts to treat land, labour and money as commodities, while necessary for the creation of a self-regulating market system, are utopian and bound to fail. If they were ever accomplished, they would result in the ‘demolition of society’ (Polanyi, 2001: 76); before that happened, however, counter-movements would rise up to protect the ‘fictitious commodities’ from the market. Nancy Fraser's critique and reconceptualization of Polanyi preserves the claim that ‘attempts fully to commodify labour, land and money are conceptually incoherent and inherently self-undermining […] society cannot be commodities all the way down’ (2014: 548; see also Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 22–23). Bob Jessop also turns Polanyian arguments directly against commodification-of-everything claims, writing of ‘the inherent incapacity of capitalism to achieve self-closure […] through the value form in a self-expanding logic of commodification’ and arguing that this ‘excludes the eventual commodification of everything and, a fortiori, rules out a pure capitalist economy’ (2002: 19). Such arguments may leave open, however, the V1 possibility that ‘everything’ is becoming increasingly commodified.

Other authors make a more empirical critique by exploring the actual extent and trajectory of contemporary commodity relations and their importance relative to non-commodified ones. Some find not just that the world is not (almost) fully commodified but that commodification-of-everything arguments wildly overstate commodification's extent. J.K. Gibson-Graham differentiate commodity production from capitalism and find that even the resultant broad conception of commodity fails to capture enormous amounts of economic activity (2006: xiii). Colin Williams’ review of statements of what he calls the ‘commodification thesis’ finds that ‘hardly any evidence is ever brought to the fore by its adherents either to show that a process of commodification is taking place or even to display the extent, pace or unevenness of its penetration’; for Williams, ‘it is perhaps those who assume the ubiquity of commodification who are living in a dream world rather than facing the stark reality of economic life today’ (2005: 23, 5).

Williams’ demonstrations of the extent of unambiguously non-commodified work are valuable for assessments of certain V1 arguments. His critique, however, is undermined by his definition of the commodification thesis as ‘the belief that goods and services are increasingly produced and delivered by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange’ (p. 29). This definition differs significantly from almost all the formulations of the ‘commodification thesis’ Williams quotes and from the V1 statements quoted above. ² Williams’ assumption that the thesis concerns the use of commodified labour to produce goods and services rather than the extent to which different ‘things’ are for sale leads him to focus almost exclusively on work. He does not discuss, or touch only briefly on (pp. 190–4), markets in rights, financial claims, body parts, or elements of nature (including land) that are fundamental to the commodification-of-everything literature. Williams also limits commodified work to that performed for profit-oriented capitalist firms, removing from the commodified sphere common labour relationships (like work for public and non-profit bodies) organized through markets. He thus either ignores or mislabels vast areas of contemporary life that most analysts would see as commodified. While Williams provides the most detailed extant critique of certain aspects of V1 arguments and I draw on his insights, a full empirical evaluation of V1 claims would need to grapple with the questions I raise below.

V2: A structural tendency of capitalism

Not all V1 statements mention capitalism, but those that do seek to describe the world capitalism creates. V2 statements, which are deployed primarily by (neo-) Marxists, focus on causality rather than empirics by arguing that capitalism systematically pushes towards the commodification of everything. Wallerstein developed this position in Historical Capitalism, and in doing so coined (as far as I can tell) the phrase ‘the commodification of everything’ (1983: 15–16):

Historical capitalism involved therefore the widespread commodification of processes – not merely exchange processes, but production processes, distribution processes, and investment processes – that had previously been conducted other than via a ‘market’. And, in the course of seeking to accumulate more and more capital, capitalists have sought to commodify more and more of these social processes in all spheres of economic life. Since capitalism is a self-regarding process, it follows that no social transaction has been intrinsically exempt from possible inclusion. That is why we may say that the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.

Dozens of emphatic and unqualified V2 arguments could be quoted. De Angelis theorizes capital as a ‘force with totalizing drives’, one of which is to enclose (by commodifying) the life-world and remake it in its own image. Capital's enclosures and enclosure strategies ‘share a common character: the forcible separation of people from whatever access to social wealth they have which is not mediated by competitive markets and money as capital.’ Capital, too, ‘will not stop in its attempt to colonise until either some other social force will make it stop […] or until it has colonised all of life’ (De Angelis, 2004: 60, 75 (his emphasis), 67). Stefano Longo et al. (2015) also repeatedly foreground capitalism's drive to commodify everything in their book-length analysis of ‘the tragedy of the commodity’ in fisheries.

Rather than pile up V2 statements, I focus on Streeck's unusually precise and detailed take (2016: 24–25, 61–65). Streeck begins with (his interpretation of – see below) Polanyi, writing that for Polanyi ‘it is in the logic of capitalist development and its “utopia” of a “self-regulating market” that in order to continue its advance it must strive ultimately to commodify everything.’ Labour, land and money, however, would be ruined if commodified ‘completely’, and society and thus capitalism would be ruined along with them. Streeck argues that some capitalists may recognize this problem, but their competitive market relations with one another mean they ‘typically face a fundamental collective action problem that prevents them from acting on’ their enlightened, long-term interests (p. 224; see also p. 25). Capitalism's survival thus requires that ‘society’ limit the commodification of the fictitious commodities, and imposing these limits is the task of the state. ³ Globalization, however, has undermined the state's ability to do this, and the contemporary crises of work, environment, and finance helping drive capitalism towards its end result from capitalism having ‘overrun its opponents and […] become more capitalist than is good for it’ (p. 35).

Some scholars reject the idea that the commodification of everything is a baked-in tendency of capitalist social relations. Jessop goes beyond the critique of V1 quoted above to argue against ‘any final destination towards which the logics of capital accumulation and/or class struggle ineluctably draw it […] viewed substantively, capitalism has no pregiven trajectory’ (2002: 19; see also p.30). Making such arguments, however, is tricky. V2 claims operate primarily at the level of theory. Claims about capitalism as a ‘self-regarding process’ (Wallerstein), capital's ‘totalising drives’ (De Angelis), and capitalism's ‘logic of development’ (Streeck) are ultimately abstractions; ones developed through reflection on history, but abstractions nonetheless. They cannot effectively be critiqued by identifying actually-existing non- or decommodified spheres of life. Such spheres may show not that capital(ism) does not drive to commodify everything, but only that this drive has been limited somehow (see Leys and Harriss-White, 2012) and/or that capital(ism) has simply not yet reached the (unreachable?) end of its expansion. Streeck (2016: 206, my emphasis) explicitly rules out the use of empirical evidence to evaluate his arguments about ‘commercialization, commodification or liberalization’:

I maintain that studying contemporary capitalism requires that processes of this sort are recognized as fundamental rather than contingent, and as principal driving forces of institutional change and historical development. This implies that where they happen not to be in evidence or ineffectual in a capitalist political economy, this can only be because they have temporarily been suspended by identifiable countervailing forces.

V2 arguments are thus armoured against critiques that might seem to apply to them (and might work against other variants). Umar Salam, for instance, objects to the idea of ‘commodification as an inevitable and unidirectional process steadily taking over the whole of the uncommodified realm’ and argues that ‘the logical end-point of commodification may not be the commodification of everything.’ His basis for this claim is that ‘commodified and uncommodified structures typically coexist, locked into complex, often exploitative relationships which may well be stable and resistant, at least to some extent, to further commodification’ (2015: 160). While this is a strong response to V1 claims that commodification will actually become universal, it does not directly address the argument that capital(ism) pushes unidirectionally towards that outcome (see also Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 22–23, 48–49). Similarly, Jim Glassman's argument (2006: 617) that ‘there is little reason to suppose that capitalists would wish’ to ‘directly commodify everything […] since to do so would require capitalists to pay all the costs of reproducing capitalist social relations’ is no doubt correct, but it challenges only the idea that universal commodification is something capitalists want to achieve, not the claim that capital(ism) presses relentlessly (and, as Streeck says, against some capitalists’ wishes) towards it. Empirical documentation of enormous contemporary spheres of non-commodification (à la Gibson-Graham and Williams) might suggest problems with specific applications of V2 arguments like Wallerstein's 1983 claim that ‘we are now close to the commodification of everything’ and Streeck's position that commodification run amok has brought capitalism to the brink of collapse. But this may simply mean that these descriptions and predictions were premature (hardly a first for Marxist theory) while the theoretical arguments stand.

This does not mean, of course, that V2 statements cannot be evaluated; it just means that evaluation must be primarily theoretical (while still, of course, referring to empirics). One approach would inquire into the extent to which authors clearly explain what ‘the commodification of everything’ means. It is important to note here that while most V1 arguments about commodification's current extent require the commodification of (almost) everything to be logically coherent and realizable (since they claim we already live in a (virtually) fully-commodified world, such a world must be possible), most Marxists and Polanyians who make V2 arguments state that the actual commodification of everything is impossible. The point, then, is not to ask them what the commodification of everything might ‘look like’ in practice, but to request clarity about the phrase's meaning so that we can better understand what capitalism supposedly pushes towards and why.

A second approach would assess V2 statements’ argumentation and coherence, and especially the V2 habit of converting clear and convincing arguments that capital(ism) pushes for constantly expanding commodification, or for the commodification of specific things, into claims that it pushes to commodify everything. Wallerstein jumps from capitalism's commodification of exchange, production, distribution and investment processes to its ‘thrust towards the commodification of everything.’ Is that jump warranted? Streeck outsources his commodification-of-everything argument to Polanyi; does Polanyi deliver? What are the mechanisms in V2 arguments that drive commodification, to what would those mechanisms apply, might there be ‘things’ to which they would not, and how might those counter-examples be found? Does capitalism, for instance, inexorably push for the commodification of the right to have children, and if so, how and why? These questions may be answerable, but I am not aware of a V2 formulation that asks or answers them.

V3: A neoliberal goal

Many commodification-of-everything arguments make claims about neoliberalism. Some are quite vague, and some, in referring primarily to actually-existing commodification or capitalism's tendencies, are effectively V1 or V2. Here I take up the distinct position that commodifying everything is a goal of neoliberal thought, ideology or doctrine, something for which neoliberals more or less explicitly call. James McCarthy and Scott Prudham state that neoliberal worship of the ‘self-regulating market […] of course requires the deeply problematic commodification of everything’ (2004: 276). Neil Smith refers to neoliberalism's ‘insistence that anything of social worth must be tradable in the global market’ (2006: 20–21). For Harvey, too, the neoliberal presumption ‘that markets and market signals can best determine all allocative decisions’ assumes ‘that everything can in principle be treated as a commodity’; neoliberalism ‘seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market’ (2005: 165, see also p.3; see also Choat, 2018: 4). Further arguments along these lines are cited in (Hall, 2022).

There are several existing (if sometimes implicit) critiques of this argument. First, Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski make a liberal case that ‘[e]veryone seems to agree’ that there are some ‘things’ that should not be commodified because they should not exist at all: ‘Even die-hard libertarians say markets in stolen goods or slaves are wrong because they violate some people's rights’ (2015: 1054). While Brennan and Jaworski do not discuss ‘neoliberalism’, their assessment should apply to neoliberals qua liberals. Second, some authors argue that neoliberalism considered as doctrine or ideology is too diverse to have any unified content (Collier, 2011: 248; Biebricher, 2018: 26), and thus a fortiori that commodifying everything cannot be a shared neoliberal goal. Third, Foucault-inspired analyses claim that while there is a unity to neoliberalism understood as rationality, it involves not the creation of actual markets in everything but the universal dissemination of competitive market models and market-like behaviour (Foucault, 2008: 129–131, 242; Brown, 2015: 31, 61; Dardot and Laval, 2017: 11, 311–12; see also Davies, 2014: 19, 37).

V3 arguments are claims about what neoliberals and neoliberalism actually propose, and as such should be judged against textual evidence. Are there examples of neoliberals calling for the commodification of everything, and do neoliberals sometimes call (or does the logic of their arguments call) for some things to be kept off the market? While the answers to these questions will depend partly on what ‘the commodification of everything’ actually means, I argue elsewhere (Hall, 2022) that V3 authors provide no instances of the former type of statement and that neoliberals do want some eminently-commodifiable things not to be for sale. Extensive markets in what I call ‘market-wrecking commodities’, including judicial decisions, state offices, certain types of violence and monopoly, and outcomes of evaluation against standards, would short-circuit the competitive market order, and neoliberals oppose the commodification (and in some cases the existence) of these ‘things’.

V4: Thinking of everything as a commodity

The fourth variant claims that (some) people think of everything as commodified even if there are not actual markets for everything. It has two sub-variants. V4a refers to the analytical treatment of all human interactions as though they were market exchanges and of all human values as expressible in monetary terms. The earliest V4a statement I have found was made in the unlikely context of Tokugawa Japan. Kaiho Seiryō (1755–1817)'s claim that ‘Between heaven and earth there is nothing but merchandise’ (Oyoso tenchi no aidi ni aru mono ha mina shiromono nari) sounds like V1, but Olivier Ansart's analysis suggests that Seiryō understood all social relations as market-like even in the absence of sales (2006: 79). Margaret Jane Radin's conception of ‘universal commodification’ as an analytical and normative stance includes the ideas ‘that everything people need or desire, either individually or in groups, is conceived of as a commodity’ and that ‘all things of value to the person – including personal attributes, relationships, and philosophical commitments – are described in monetary terms and are in principle alienable’ (1987: 1860; see also 1996: Chapter 1). Universal commodification is thus ‘characterized by universal market rhetoric and universal market methodology’, and for it ‘all human interactions are sales’ (p. 1861). While Radin presents universal commodification as an archetype that does not fully represent any actual thinker's ideas, she sees Gary Becker and Richard Posner as exemplars (1987: 1857–1858, 1862). V4b, meanwhile, is the claim that people in general have come to think, or are taught to think, that everything is a commodity. Rifkin (2000: 4) writes that ‘[f]rom an early age, we learn that virtually everything has a price and everything is for sale’, and Streeck (2016: 34) refers to ‘a populace nursed on materialistic-utilitarian self-descriptions of a society in which everything is and ought to be for sale.’

The first evaluative question about V4 statements is whether they should be treated as commodification-of-everything claims at all. Williams argues that they should not be: ‘The advent of a commodified way of viewing each and every aspect of life does not signify the deeper and wider penetration of commodification itself’ (2005: 26–27). While I have some sympathy for this position, the difficulty of drawing a boundary between seeing things as commodities and their actual commodification (see below) means these arguments should be kept in play. Evaluating V4a arguments, then, would involve comparing conceptions like Radin's ‘universal commodification’ to the writings of thinkers said to employ the approach to see if they fit, combined perhaps with empirical inquiry into how widespread market rhetoric and market methodology are. V4b evaluation would be a mostly empirical process of asking whether ‘we’ are really taught to view, and do view, everything as commodified and all interactions as markets, and could employ methods like opinion surveys and ethnographic fieldwork.

Questions

The preceding section made the case that different arguments about the commodification of everything should be evaluated differently. Those evaluations, however, will not get far until ambiguities regarding what ‘the commodification of everything’ means are resolved. I begin this process by inquiring into the literature's uses of ‘commodity’, ‘everything’ and ‘thing’ and asking whether commodification-of-everything statements should be taken as referring to individual things or kinds of things.

What is a commodity?

The questions of what commodities are and what commodification entails have received much careful scholarly analysis (see Castree, 2003; Hahn et al., 2015; Smessaert et al., 2020). Such analyses are not, however, drawn on much in commodification-of-everything writing, which is mostly imprecise on these essential points (for an exception see Radin, 1996: Chapter 8). The terms ‘commodity’ and ‘commodification’ frequently go undefined; works that do define them do so in varied, often vague, and sometimes incompatible ways; and within individual texts definitions are often used inconsistently. The diversity of definitions and usages means that I cannot provide a comprehensive overview, but I present two core approaches that seem distinct but end up in the same place. The first defines a commodity as something that is or can be for sale (on the market). Richard Walker defines commodities as ‘marketable goods and services’ (2004: 14), and Martha Ertman and Joan Williams define them as ‘goods or services that are, or could be, bought and sold at some point’ (2005: 3). Correspondingly, ‘commodification’ is the process through which something is turned into (or, perhaps, comes to be seen as) a commodity. McNally describes ‘global commodification’ as ‘the idea that every single conceivable good and service under the sun should be turned into a marketable item’ (2006b: 39), and Radin defines ‘commodification’ as ‘the social process by which something comes to be apprehended as a commodity, [and] the state of affairs once the process has taken place’ (1996: xi). Commodification-of-everything arguments that use this definition, then, should refer to all things becoming (understood to be) marketable (or saleable), or to the creation of markets for all things. This approach requires further definitions of terms like ‘thing’, ‘market’, ‘marketable’ and ‘(available for) sale’ that I return to below.

The literature's other prominent definition of ‘commodity’ derives from Polanyi, who ‘empirically defined’ commodities as ‘objects produced for sale on the market’ (2001: 75). Many authors in the commodification-of-everything literature adopt versions of this definition (Harvey, 2014: 25, 39; Leys, 2001: 87; Leys and Harriss-White, 2012; Soron and Laxer, 2006: 17), though they do not always do so consistently. The Polanyian approach provides, however, a shaky foundation for commodification-of-everything claims. The first reason is that pace Streeck and many others (Longo et al., 2015; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004: 276), Polanyi does not make a commodification-of-everything argument in The Great Transformation. He consistently claims, rather, that a market economy requires markets in ‘every element of industry’, in ‘all factors involved’ in machine production, or in ‘the factors of production’ (Polanyi, 2001: 75, 43, 187). Nothing in Polanyi states that market society requires markets in sex, votes, blood, citizenship, admission to top universities, or many other ‘commodities’ highlighted in contemporary debates.

A second reason is that since many ‘things’ (the electromagnetic spectrum, say, or human brains) cannot be produced by humans at all, turning ‘everything’ into ‘objects produced for sale on the market’ is impossible. The Polanyian response is, of course, that there are also ‘fictitious commodities’: things like land (nature), labour and money that were not produced for sale but that, in a market society, are ‘regarded’ as though they had been. This means that there are in fact markets for ‘every element of industry’, and ‘that each element has a price which interacts with demand and supply’ (p.75). Within this framework, then, ‘the commodification of everything’ presumably means that everything is either really or fictitiously commodified; that markets exist for all things whether they are ‘real’ commodities or not. This move, however, takes us back to the commodification-of-everything arguments associated with the first definition given above. While the distinction between things that can be/are produced (for sale) and those that cannot be/are not is important for many purposes, I argue that because there are no significant differences between the following statements for the purposes of evaluating commodification-of-everything arguments, it is easier to adopt the second:

Two kinds of objects are for sale on markets: commodities, which were produced to be sold, and fictitious commodities, which were not.

A commodity is something that is or can be for sale on the market. There are two kinds of commodities: those produced for sale and those that are not.

What is everything? what are ‘things’?

Defining ‘everything’ is essential to evaluating commodification-of-everything arguments. While ‘everything’ may appear straightforward, the literature's uses of the term are ambiguous and varied, and I know of no analysis that asks explicitly what ‘everything’ means. Gilbert provides more specificity than most in writing of capitalism and neoliberalism as being ‘driven by the aim of reducing all material phenomena (however apparently intangible, including information, genetic codes, concepts, chemical formulae, brands, etc.) to commodities and abolishing all relations other than those of the contractual seller/buyer transaction’ (2008: 563). Many authors, too, use more limited phrasings that imply that commodification's range, while enormous, may not extend to ‘everything’. These include the commodification of ‘every possible social relation’, ‘every activity and value’, ‘every conceivable good and service under the sun’, all ‘social wealth’, ‘all economic relations’, and ‘all corners of social and political life’ (Gilbert, 2008: 562; Klein, 2001: 82; McNally, 2006b: 40; De Angelis, 2004: 75; Wood, 2002b: 63; Leys and Harriss-White, 2012). It is not clear, however, whether these formulations actually distinguish commodification's sphere from ‘everything’ or are just rhetorical flourishes. Here again, it is worth recalling Polanyi's consistent argument that market society requires the commodification of all factors of production – a big set of ‘things’, but clearly not ‘everything’.

If commodification-of-everything arguments and their evaluation require clarity about ‘everything’, so do they need to specify what a ‘thing’ is. This question, too, is trickier than it might look. Distinctions between ‘things’ are not given in nature and can shift. ‘Things’, too, need to be brought into being and stabilized to be commodified. That is obviously so for clearly constructed commodities like financial securities or rights to emit carbon dioxide, but also applies to seemingly simpler ‘things’ like land (Li, 2014). ‘Commodifying everything’ should thus be understood as not just the commodification of all existing ‘things’ but the creation of new kinds of commodifiable ‘thing’. Another critical issue is how fine-grained an understanding of ‘thing’ to use. Should, for instance, human labour in general be understood as a commodifiable ‘thing’, or are all conceivable kinds of services qua types of labour separate things? Should we think of the market for art, for 17th century Dutch art, for Vermeers, or for View of Delft? Once ‘thing’ is nailed down, finally, there is still the problem of coming up with a list of ‘every thing’ against which commodification-of everything-claims can be tested. Williams’ critique of the tendency to study only ‘things’ undergoing commodification is crucial here, and the guiding principle should be to look for ‘things’ that are not (seen as) commodities, that capitalism might not push to commodify, or that neoliberals want to keep off the market.

Commodification of all kinds of things or of all individual things?

Another closely related question is whether the commodification of everything involves the commodification of all kinds of things or all individual things. There is a huge difference (though one I complicate below) between asking whether some particular ‘thing’ – an individual matsutake mushroom, say (Tsing, 2015), or the labour of a specific child – is a commodity and asking whether there is a market in matsutake mushrooms or child labour. Here again the literature is usually ambiguous, and some texts move back and forth between these meanings. Watts begins a dictionary entry by paraphrasing an Oxford English Dictionary definition of ‘commodity’ as ‘something useful that can be turned to commercial advantage […] an article of TRADE or commerce, a thing that is expedient or convenient’ (2009: 99). A commodity here is clearly an individual thing. Watts then, however, writes that ‘Virtually everything in modern society is a commodity: books, babies […], debt, sperm, ideas (intellectual property), pollution, a visit to a national park and human organs are all commodities’. Watts presumably does not mean that all ideas (etc.) are articles of trade that can be turned to commercial advantage; rather, the analysis has shifted from discussing commodities as individual things to discussing the kinds of things that are bought and sold. Later in the same piece commodities again become individual things.

The same ambiguities run through the early pages of What Money Can’t Buy. The statement that ‘Today, almost everything is up for sale’ implies that Sandel is talking about individual things. The examples Sandel uses to support this claim, however, are mostly limited to particular places, and some are limited to specific buyers and sellers. They include prison cell upgrades in Santa Ana, California, ‘Access to the car pool lane while driving solo’ in ‘Minneapolis and other cities’, and payments for reading books made to second-graders in Dallas (2012: 3–5). While these examples illustrate the kinds of things that can be for sale nowadays, they highlight their own limits by implying that cell upgrades are not available in most prisons, most reading is not done for payment, and so on.

Three possible definitions of ‘the commodification of everything’

Confusion over whether commodification-of-everything arguments refer to kinds of things or individual things (or both) thus presents an evaluative challenge. Achieving more precision, however, requires proponents to do more than pick one position or the other. Digging into this issue further reveals ambiguities around the terms ‘market’ and ‘for sale’, and requires grappling with the relationship between thinking of something as a commodity and the existence of actual markets for such things. Things (as it were) can be clarified through consideration of three possible definitions of ‘the commodification of everything’. These definitions are distinct from the four variant commodification-of-everything arguments covered above, and each definition could be used in V1, V2, or V3 arguments.

(1) Some individual instances of all kinds of things are for sale

‘The commodification of everything’ might mean, first, that however the world is divided up into kinds of ‘thing’, at least some instances of each are for sale. Even if it is highly unusual for prison cell upgrades and sperm to be bought and sold, the fact that some instances are means that these kinds of things are commodified. A ‘thing’ would count as ‘what money can’t buy’ only if no individual instance of it were for sale.

This definition sets a low standard for commodification-of-everything arguments to meet; surely there cannot be many ‘things’ that are not for sale anywhere under any conditions. It can also, however, be expanded and sharpened in ways that make it more interesting and that introduce questions that also apply to the evaluation of arguments that use other definitions. A first expansion inquires into sales’ legality. Some theorists include state-backed property rights in their understanding of commodification (Harvey, 2005: 165; Nevins and Peluso, 2008: 14). Requiring that sales be legal to count as commodified dramatically raises the evaluative bar; it would make all V1 and V3 claims untenable, and require further elaboration of V2 to explain why capitalism pushes not just for everything to be for sale but to make all conceivable transactions legal. Other approaches, however, recognize illegal or illicit commodities (Watts, 2009: 99), and Ertman and Williams include illegal sales in defining ‘market’ (2005: 2; see also Radin, 1987: 1859). Compared to conceptions that require legality, such approaches greatly extend commodification's empirical terrain and make commodification-of-everything arguments more plausible. A broader point, however, is that the legal status of commodities is rarely mentioned in the literature. I have seen no focused discussion of the implications for any version of the commodification-of-everything claim of the fact that capitalist states are formally committed to stamping out many kinds of commodity, or the attendant fact that participants in many sales risk imprisonment or even execution.

A second expansion receives similarly limited attention: commodification's geography. Commodification-of-everything arguments usually seem to assume a global, or indeed abstract/non-spatial, market for ‘things’; when they deal with where things are for sale, the main large-scale claim is, again, that commodification has gone further in the North than the South. While concrete examples (like those in Sandel) can have a geographical component, the implications have not been pursued. It is important, however, to ask how availability for sale can vary geographically, and whether certain kinds of thing may be more commodified in (parts of) the South and the post-Socialist world than in (much of) the North. While evaluating the latter idea would require much (perhaps unobtainable) empirical data, I suggest as a subject for further research the possibility that ‘market-wrecking markets’ may fit this argument (Hall, 2022). Marina Zaloznaya provides an example involving sales of evaluative decisions meant to measure merit against a standard. Her research on Ukrainian higher education finds extensive sales of specific grades on exams and assignments to students who have not met the relevant standards (2017, Chapter 2). After 20 years as a professor in Canada, however, I have yet to sell a grade, have a student even hint to me that they would be willing to buy one, or hear of any of my colleagues engaging in such sales.

(2) There are markets in all kinds of things

A second possible definition would take ‘the commodification of everything’ to mean that there are not just sales of but markets in all kinds of ‘things’. While I have never seen ‘sales’ and ‘markets’ explicitly distinguished in the commodification-of-everything literature, claims about the ‘marketization of everything’ should be seen as going further than those about some instances of all kinds of things being for sale. I argue that in markets sales are reasonably regularized and institutionalized, prices are determined substantially by supply and demand (see Ertman and Williams, 2005: 2), and participants who can pay the going price can usually expect to be able to purchase what they need without too much difficulty. This conception is grounded in Polanyi. Polanyi argued that when ‘elaborate machines and plant’ become widely used in a commercial society, it becomes necessary for ‘all factors involved’ in machine production to be available for sale. This means more than that it is possible for them to be purchased in some quantity under some conditions some of the time. Rather, ‘they must be available in the needed quantities to anybody who is prepared to pay for them’ (2001: 43). For Polanyi, this required not just that prices be governed by supply and demand but that they only be governed by them; markets needed to be self-regulating and free of any interference (72). This latter condition is too restrictive to use in evaluating especially V1 arguments (self-regulating markets are rare as hen's teeth if they exist at all). Polanyi also takes it for granted that such markets would be legal, but I do not; illicit markets frequently meet the definition given above.

The contrast between Zaloznaya's findings and my own experiences is again instructive. In Ukraine grade sales are sometimes routinized and institutionalized; some departments provide price lists (2017: 36–40). They can thus be treated not just as sales but as markets. I, however, would face major challenges and risks in trying to find students willing to pay for an A, and such efforts would be more likely to cost me my job than to result in a concluded transaction. Prices in any deals I could make, too, might bear little relationship to notional supply and demand for grades. I would, that is, be engaging in a sale but not in a market. This comparison emphasizes again the need for commodification-of-everything arguments to be clear about whether they mean that there are markets for everything somewhere or everywhere. Distinguishing in practice between sales and markets will, however, often involve judgment calls in the absence of adequate information.

(3) All individual things are commodities

A third definition would state that ‘the commodification of everything’ means that all individual ‘things’ – all physical stuff and actual activities, ideas and rights – are commodities (V1), or that capitalism (V2) and/or neoliberals (V3) seek to commodify them. Many statements quoted above can be interpreted as relying on such a definition, but the ambiguities of ‘everything’ make it hard to be sure. A few are difficult to read any other way – Smith's assertion that neoliberals insist ‘that anything of social worth must be tradable in the global market’, for instance, and statements by Wallerstein, Harvey, Wark and others about there being (almost) nothing left to commodify. Polanyi's ideas, again, can be used to illuminate the difference between this and other definitions of ‘the commodification of everything’. Even if one accepts that a market society requires that all elements of industry are available for sale in the quantities industry requires, it does not follow that every hectare of land, hour of human labour, or actual instance of any other element must be for sale. Polanyi's position might be interpreted as sitting between the ‘kind of thing’ and ‘individual thing’ takes on commodification. It states that there must be markets in relevant kinds of things, and that enough instances of each kind must be available; what counts as ‘enough’, too, will increase as the economy grows. All this could be true, however, while a great many individual ‘things’ stayed off the market.

The evaluation of arguments that take the commodification of everything to mean that of ‘all individual things’ also depends heavily on the definition of a commodity. My analysis so far has assumed that a thing's commodity status derives from the objective relationships in which it exists – that a commodity is something that is or can be for sale (on the market). For V4, however, commodification is also a question of how people think about, or ‘see’, the thing in question. Radin, Sandel and others argue that when a market emerges for a new kind of thing, the possibility of sale can infuse and, in cases in which sales are morally inappropriate, corrupt our relationship to such things. The existence of an adoption market, for instance, may make us see all humans and human attributes in commodified terms (Radin, 1996: Chapter 10). These arguments suggest that my ‘kinds of things – specific things’ distinction may be unsustainable. If the existence of some sales of a kind of thing leads all individual instances of that thing to be treated as commodities, then the commodification of everything qua commodification of all individual things is already implied by the first definition and is not a distinct position.

That argument, however, is too extreme (and Radin provides a number of challenges to it). One issue is what it means to say in defining ‘commodity’ that a thing ‘can be turned to commercial advantage’ (Watts), or is ‘marketable’ (Walker), or that commodities are things ‘that are, or could be, bought and sold at some point’ (Ertman and Williams). These conceptualizations invoke the ability to do something, but none provides criteria for determining when that ability exists. I have the right (and responsibility), as a professor, to assign grades to my students’ work. If I were teaching in some places, I might be able to turn that right to commercial advantage. Under the conditions at my university, however, I effectively cannot do this. While it would presumably not be impossible for me to sell grades, the difficulties and risks I would face in doing so are so severe that it would make no sense for me to try. The fact that grades are for sale somewhere thus need not ‘corrupt’ my relationship to my own grading. Even if one accepts that the way people think of things is an aspect of commodification, taking the commodification of everything to mean the commodification of all individual things is a distinct formulation that needs to be evaluated on its own terms.

A final point that requires clarification is whether this third definition of ‘the commodification of everything’ would rule out the existence of any non-market relations. Would it still be possible in a world in which all individual things are commodities for parents to buy things and give them to their children, for governments to buy them and make them available to citizens for free, for people who sell some labour (qua individual ‘thing’) also to devote some to volunteering, for professors to give students as grade because they had earned (rather than bought) them, and so on? Some commodification-of-everything claims suggest that it would not be. Marx and Engels provide a limited V1 statement: ‘The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand […] has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”’ (1848: 30). De Angelis’ argument about capital's enclosures is a V2 version, and Gilbert's about ‘abolishing all relations other than those of the contractual seller/buyer transaction’ a V2 and V3 one (see above for both).

Conclusions

I have argued above that most commodification-of-everything claims are underspecified and ambiguous and thus difficult if not impossible to evaluate, and I have covered issues that fully-articulated statements would need to tackle. I do not want to push this call for clarification, precision, and consistency too far. The key terms in the debate are complex and multifaceted, and authors may not be able to frame definitions of, say, ‘commodity’ that include everything they want to include while excluding everything they do not. Much more, however, could be done, and I have provided some direction by first identifying four variants of the commodification-of-everything argument and showing that they need to be evaluated against different kinds of evidence, then calling for clearer definitions of ‘commodity’, ‘everything’ and ‘thing’, and then articulating three possible definitions of ‘the commodification of everything’ that raise additional questions about defining ‘sale’ and ‘market’ and the implications of thinking of things as commodities.

I do not want this paper to be read as denying that commodification has expanded massively in recent decades, that capitalism pushes powerfully to expand commodification, that neoliberals want to commodify a great many ‘things’, or that we have come to conceive of more of our relationships and actions in market terms. Commodification-of-everything arguments, however, discourage us from careful inquiry into the possible limits to those dynamics and the reasons for and implications of those limits. In concluding, I would like to suggest two alternative arguments that may preserve the core points some commodification-of-everything theorists wish to make while also being more convincing and open-ended. The first begins from Moore's use, in a 2011 paper, of the terms ‘relentless commodification’, ‘endless commodification’, and ‘the commodification of everything’ (the latter in scare quotes) (2011: 126, 107, 125). While nothing in Moore's paper suggests that these terms mean different things, it may be that they do. Commodification under capitalism can be relentless, endless, or even infinite without applying to everything. To use a mathematical analogy: the set of nonzero even numbers (i.e., 2, 4, 6, 8…) goes on endlessly, but it is not the set of all numbers. Polanyi effectively makes this kind of argument when he writes that taking land, labour and money out of the market is not incompatible with the continued functioning of ‘competitive markets’ for ‘an infinite variety of products’ (2001: 260).

The second argument begins with Gibson-Graham's critique of the treatment of ‘commodification’ and ‘capitalist expansion’ as identical (2006: 6) but takes it in a different direction than they do. The commodification component of the increasing subordination of society to the market/capitalism (see the quotation from Watts above), or of the increasing generalization of capitalist social relations, should not be assumed to push in only one direction. Rather, keeping some things off the market, or even decommodifying already-commodified things, may be essential to these processes. Polanyi argued that ‘the running of society as an adjunct to the market’ (2001: 60) required the existence of a liberal economy and a liberal state, and found that when the liberal project of constructing a self-regulating market came into conflict with the laissez-faire principle that people should be left free to form labour unions and trusts, it was the former that prevailed (2001: 154–156). Similarly, a laissez-faire approach to markets in judicial decisions, government-created monopolies, state offices and hired violence between capitalists would rapidly mean the end of ‘the institutional separation of society into an economic and political sphere’ (2001: 74), and thus of capitalism (Hall, 2022). The argument that capitalism depends existentially on, or can receive crucial support from, decommodification is not new; statements of it from Streeck and others are cited above (and see Dale, 2016: 9; Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 22–23; Goodwin, 2018: 20). I suggest, however, that we have more to learn about this crucial dynamic (and how it varies by time and place), and that distinguishing capitalism's expansion from ‘the commodification of everything’ will help us learn it.