Does capitalism drive towards the commodification of everything?

Abstract

The claim that capitalism drives to commodify everything is widely made in late-20th century and early-21st century critical political economy and plays a central role in prominent theoretical frameworks and texts. The argument is, however, rarely articulated in any detail, and proponents do not explain why capitalism would drive to commodify not just very many things but everything. In this paper I carry out the first systematic review and critique of works making the claim. I show that the literature fails to define ‘everything’ and ‘the commodification of everything’ and identify significant weaknesses in the six implicit argumentative strategies these works employ. I also show that positions that might appear to reject the claim do not get traction on it. In the second section I reconstruct the argument by defining terms, positing six commodifying mechanisms that should emerge from capitalism’s core features, and searching for ‘things’ the literature has ignored. The search draws especially on historical research into surprising examples of commodified violence, governance, authority and monopoly. My analysis both greatly expands the literature’s theoretical and empirical scope and argues that capitalism generates decommodifying drives with respect to certain key ‘things’. Capitalism does not drive towards ‘the commodification of everything’ under any non-trivial definition of the latter term.

Introduction

The relationship between capitalism and the expansion of commodity relations has been central to critical political economy since Marx’s early writings. This focus strengthened in the neoliberal era as commodification’s scale and scope dramatically deepened. Huge growth in product and input markets, intensifying commodification of land, labour and knowledge, and the constant emergence of new and sometimes alarming commodities – from organs to organic food, from credit default swaps to carbon emissions – sparked thousands of academic studies (for instance Ertman and Williams, 2005; Laxer and Soron, 2006; Smessaert et al., 2020).

Against this background it has come to be widely argued that capitalism drives to commodify everything. Dozens of late-20th century and early-21st century political economists have made the claim, including such prominent figures as Immanuel Wallerstein (whose germinal statement appeared in 1983’s Historical Capitalism), Stuart Hall, David Harvey, Jason Moore, Jeremy Rifkin and Wolfgang Streeck. The argument is not that everything has become, will become or even could become commodified; it is that capitalism generates a constant pressure or tendency towards universal commodification. The claim is usually stated with confidence and without qualifications, and for some authors it expresses one of capitalism’s fundamental features. It is almost never articulated in detail, however, and the attention given to substantiating it is not proportionate to its role in key texts and theoretical frameworks. It has also received little focused critical attention.

This paper presents the first systematic assessment of the position. I review and critique works that claim capitalism drives to commodify everything, construct a new statement of the position that seeks to remedy weaknesses in existing versions, and develop an original argument that capitalism’s core relations generate drives to keep some fundamental but overlooked ‘things’ off the market. In the first section, I find that the literature defines neither ‘everything’ nor ‘the commodification of everything’, and that it is therefore impossible to know what the argument refers to or what ‘things’ proponents might be missing. I identify six implicit strategies used to support the claim and demonstrate that all have substantial problems. I then review texts that might be taken as critiquing the argument and show that while they make essential points about the capitalism-commodification-decommodification nexus they do not directly challenge the ‘drive’ position.

The second section tackles this impasse between unconvincing arguments and critiques that do not get traction on them. I define ‘everything’ by listing the categories of ‘things’ that make it up, and suggest ways of defining ‘the commodification of everything’ that allow arguments to be stated more precisely. I make the best case I can for the ‘drive’ position by positing six commodifying mechanisms (some familiar, some original) that should characterize capitalist societies. I highlight the sixth, which expands the literature’s empirical scope (its sense of ‘everything’) by exploring potential and historical commodifications of violence, governance, authority, monopoly and knowledge. I argue that while capitalism may drive to commodify these highly significant ‘things’ (and, in doing so, to create what I call ‘market-wrecking markets’), it also generates what can be a more powerful drive to decommodify them. Opposition to these commodifications comes not just from forces ‘external’ to capital but from capitalism’s defining dynamics.

This paper breaks new ground in our theoretical and empirical understanding of relationships between capitalism, commodification and decommodification that structure modern life (see Fraser, 2014; Gibson-Graham, 2006; Goodwin, 2018; Lacher, 1999; Williams, 2005). I identified the texts reviewed by searching academic databases and Google Scholar, following citation trails, receiving tips from colleagues and serendipity. I show elsewhere that ‘commodification of everything’ arguments have four main varieties (Hall, 2023). The first, V1, refers to commodification’s empirical extent, stating that (virtually) everything is (becoming) a commodity. V2 is the causal claim that capitalism pushes systematically for universal commodification. For V3 the commodification of everything is a neoliberal project, while V4 states that (some) people think of everything as commodified even if there are not actual markets for everything. This paper assesses only the second claim. Individual sources/authors often, however, mix arguments, and I draw where appropriate on analysis not directly focused on V2.

Existing statements, absent definitions, argumentative strategies and critiques

Capitalism’s putative push to commodify (almost) everything has been characterized in many ways. It has been called a tendency (Lavelle, 2014; Moore and Keefer, 2017; Prodnik, 2012: 297–298), a drive (Longo et al., 2015: 32; Soron and Laxer, 2006: 17), a pressure (Gibson, 1992: 95), a thrust (Wallerstein, 1983: 16), a propensity (Harvey, 2006: 84), a need (Strange, 2000: 69), a requirement (Longo et al., 2015: 33), an inherent potential (Boeckler and Berndt, 2013: 425), a logic (Hall, 1997: 180; Streeck, 2016: 24), an attempt (Brook et al., 2013: 281), a ‘singleminded determination’ (Rifkin, 2000: 8), a ‘steady, ceaseless’ and an ‘unbridled’ process (Mavelli, 2020: 63; Wallerstein, 1983: 91), a ‘headlong rush’ (Moore, 2000: 123), an ‘insatiable demand’ (Glendinning, 2011: 16) and an ‘all-devouring desire’ (Barnett, 2006: 34). The position does not imply that total commodification will or could happen. Some authors specifically deny this (Brook et al., 2013: 281; Moore, 2003: 453), and the argument that full commodification of land, labour and money (and a fortiori everything) is impossible goes back to Polanyi (2001; see Fraser, 2014). The V2 argument rather is that capitalism drives to commodify everything.

Evaluating these claims requires knowing how they define ‘commodification’, ‘everything’ and ‘the commodification of everything’ and how they try to demonstrate that capitalism drives towards the latter. Absent a definition of ‘everything’, we cannot be sure authors are not missing ‘things’ to which commodifying drives might not apply; absent one of ‘the commodification of everything’, we cannot know what condition capitalism supposedly drives towards and cannot assess V2 logic and evidence. I have discussed definitions elsewhere (Hall, 2023), so concentrate here on argumentative strategies. These are usually implicit; few authors see V2 arguments as requiring substantiation, so the methodological question of how to substantiate them is rarely raised.

Definitions I

While most works in the commodification of everything literature do not define ‘commodity’ or ‘commodification’, two main takes on ‘commodity’ can be identified. The first sees a commodity as something that is or can be for sale (on the market), the second as something produced for sale on the market. Conceptions of ‘commodification’ in the commodification of everything debate in practice rely on the first definition. There are good reasons for this. Since some things (like the electromagnetic spectrum and the basic constituents of matter) cannot be produced by humans, it is difficult to see how ‘everything’ could become a commodity in the second definition’s terms (Hall, 2023: 553), and I am not aware of any V2 argument that claims consistently that capitalism drives to do this. I thus largely assume that V2 arguments see ‘commodification’ as the process through which something (or some kind of thing) becomes available for sale, though I return to this point below in discussing Marx.

I have found no source that explicitly defines ‘the commodification of everything’ ¹ or reflects directly on what ‘everything’ means. Some V2 authors flesh ‘everything’ out by mentioning large-scale components; Luke (1999) lists ‘the raw resources of the Earth, the manufactured things of social production, and the social services of human interaction’ alongside ‘words, codes, memories, sounds, images, and symbols’ and ‘life itself, whether in the form of designer genes, engineered tomatoes, bionic joints, synthetic skin or patented mice’ (p. 33; compare Prodnik, 2012: 297–298; Mavelli, 2020: 63). Almost all V2 texts, however, take ‘everything’ for granted. The questions begged (Hall, 2023) include: is ‘everything’ composed of kinds of things or individual things? how fine-grained are distinctions between kinds of things? might any (kinds of) things be missing from the author’s sense of ‘everything’, and how would we know?

Further challenges appear in defining ‘the commodification of everything’. The literature’s framings suggest the phrase might mean that (1) at least some instances of every kind of thing are for sale somewhere under some conditions, (2) there are markets in all kinds of things or (3) all individual ‘things’ are commodified and, perhaps, accessible only through markets (Hall, 2023). Jeremy Gilbert (2008) takes the third approach, and provides the closest thing to a definition I have found, in arguing that capitalism and neoliberalism are ‘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’ (p. 563). Most authors, however, do no more than gesture towards a definition.

Argumentative strategies

The first strategy used in implicit support of V2 arguments is plain assertion. Some authors present the claim en passant (Boeckler and Berndt, 2013: 425), as though it were obviously correct and requires no back-up (see Burton and Sommerville, 2019: 97; Lavelle, 2014: 90; Wallace et al., 2020: 11). There is thus nothing in them to evaluate.

The second strategy is qualification. Prodnik (2012: 286) distinguishes between arguments about the commodification of everything and of almost everything. V2 statements have referred to ‘the capitalist drive to commodify nearly all aspects of existence’ (Soron and Laxer, 2006: 17) and ‘the gradual commodification of practically everything’ (Azhar, 2021: 432). Such qualifications appear to lessen claims’ scope and starkness and lower the burden of proof. They also imply the question of what ‘aspects of existence’ capitalism does not drive to commodify, but most authors do not ask it. For some the limitation is possibility; Harvey (2014) writes that ‘Capital cannot help but privatize, commodify, monetize and commercialise all those aspects of nature that it possibly can’ (p. 262). This move requires an explanation of what (kinds of) things are uncommodifiable and why; Harvey (2014) briefly considers this point (p. 59), but others do not. What stands out most about this strategy, however, is that even content-free qualifications are unusual. Most V2 arguments are not qualified; they are about everything, not almost, virtually, practically or nearly everything.

The third strategy, implicit equivalence, involves using ‘the commodification of everything’ interchangeably with other phrases and concepts in describing capitalism’s core tendencies. Moore (2003: 453; 2011a: 114) implicitly treats ‘endless commodification’ and ‘generalizing and globalizing commodity production’ as equivalent to ‘the commodification of everything’. Such moves can make V2 claims seem more plausible by conflating them with arguments that may be better specified, better substantiated and less extreme. They can also muddy the analytical waters by equating potentially distinct (or even antagonistic) processes.

Implicit equivalence features repeatedly in Longo et al.’s (2015) The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture. Longo et al. (2015) argue that the intense environmental degradation and destruction of sustainable relationships between humans and marine life associated with modern fisheries result not from Garret Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ but from the ‘tragedy of the commodity.’ They focus on the commodification of fish, nature and labour in showing compellingly how social relations and the ‘universal metabolism of nature’ are subordinated to instrumental profit orientation and capitalism’s demand for constant growth. They also posit that those commodifications are aspects of a deeper drive, writing that ‘what might appear to the casual observer as a system governed by base greed and human instinct is in fact fundamentally directed by the drive for capital accumulation and deliberate progressive commodification of everything’ (p. 32; see also 146, 150, 173, 175, 187, 200, 203).

Longo et al. (2015) also describe capitalism’s basic drives in other ways. They again use ‘directed by’ language in characterizing capitalism as ‘A social system directed by generalized commodity production’ (p. 147, see also 35, 152). Under capitalism, too, exchange value is ‘the rationality that is superimposed on all social relationships and forms of exchange’ (p. 35), markets are ‘the dominant social institution that fundamentally reorganizes human relationships and nature’ (p. 147), ‘[a]ll aspects of the social and natural world [. . .] are subordinated to the “laws of the market”’ (p. 147, quoting Polanyi), and there is an ‘all-encompassing competitive market system’ (p. 201). These formulations are not obviously incompatible with V2, and some may be synonymous with it. At least ‘generalized commodity production’, however, prima facie means something distinct from ‘the commodification of everything’. Implicit equivalence discourages inquiry into whether, for instance, a universal commodifying drive might work against subordination of the entire social and natural world to market laws, a possibility I explore below.

A fourth strategy is citation. It is perfectly appropriate in principle; if someone has already shown that capitalism drives to commodify everything, their work need not be repeated. Practice is trickier. V2 texts generally do not cite earlier literature ostensibly making the claim. Those that do most often attribute the argument to Marx, Polanyi and/or Wallerstein (see Longo et al., 2015). The question, then, is whether those authors made convincing-enough commodification-of-everything arguments that citing them sufficiently grounds a V2 claim. I discuss Marx and Polanyi here, and cover Wallerstein (as a contemporary author) under ‘theorization’ below.

Polanyi is often said to have argued that capitalism or market society requires or drives towards the commodification of everything (Levien, 2018: 1125; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004: 276; Streeck, 2016: 24, 61). Polanyi, however, was not a V2 theorist (Hall, 2023: 552–553). The Great Transformation argues that a market economy requires markets in ‘every element of industry’, ‘all factors involved’ in machine production or ‘the factors of production’, and Polanyi (2001) also envisions ‘competitive markets’ for ‘an infinite variety of products’ (p. 74, 43, 187, 260). Those ‘things’ do not add up to ‘everything’. The closest statements to V2 in The Great Transformation posit that in market society ‘All transactions are turned into money transactions’ (p. 43; Longo et al. quote this line) and that ‘Machine production in a commercial society involves, in effect, no less a transformation than that of the natural and human substance of society into commodities’ (p. 44). In context, however, ‘all transactions’ should be read as all economic transactions rather than all human relations, and The Great Transformation’s logic and evidence give no reason to think the second statement applies to ‘everything’.

Marx’s case is more complicated, and I assess it in several steps. The first is to note that several extended discussions of the (increasing) commodification of (almost) everything written within a largely Marxist framework or by people well-acquainted with Marx do not state that Marx wrote about the topic (Harvey, 2005, 2014; Milanović, 2019; Streeck, 2016; Wallerstein, 1983). (I discuss one ambiguous exception, a Harvey Grundrisse reference, below.) Seasoned Marxologists have thus looked to resources other than Marx’s work in directly making V2 claims.

Some authors do, however, cite Marx in support of V2. Ferguson (1999) writes that ‘as Marx explains, the logic of the capitalist mandate is to commodify everything in sight – including, or especially, labor power’ (p. 5; see also Gibson, 1992: 95), and Moore (2011a) that ‘Marx’s theory of value, grounded in socially-necessary labor time, offers a non-arbitrary means of grounding the ‘commodification of everything’ in an active relation between humans and the rest of nature’ (p. 125). Azhar (2021) states that ‘The history of capitalism, as Marx [. . .] aptly demonstrated in his pioneering critique of political economy, can be seen as the gradual commodification of practically everything: land, labor power, and the Earth’s natural resources’ (p. 432). All three have more to say, but for Azhar and Ferguson the expansion involves glossing (and, for Ferguson, adding more) ‘things’ Marx saw as being commodified and discussing consequences; they do not ask what ‘(practically) everything’ means or show how Marx points to (practically) universal commodification.

Only two reviewed post-1983 sources quote Marx in direct support of a V2 argument (Longo et al., 2015: 34; Murdock, 2006: 3). This is surprising. Marx’s oeuvre contains some humdinger passages about everything being for sale. The text Graham Murdock quotes from The Poverty of Philosophy reads in full:

Finally, there came a time when everything that men had considered as inalienable became an object of exchange, of traffic and could be alienated. This is the time when the very things which till then had been communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. – when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of general corruption, of universal venality, or, to speak in terms of political economy, the time when everything, moral or physical, having become a marketable value, is brought to the market to be assessed at its truest value. (Marx, 1847: Chapter 1.1)

Earlier, in the Economic and Political Manuscripts, Marx (1992a) had written that ‘Money, inasmuch as it possesses the property of being able to buy everything and appropriate all objects, is the object most worth possessing’ (p. 375; see also 358, 366, 377, 379). Istvan Mészáros drew on the Manuscripts and On the Jewish Question (Marx, 1992b: 239–241) to argue that in Marx (and in reality) ‘Alienation is therefore characterized by the universal extension of ‘saleability’ (i.e. the transformation of everything into a commodity)’ (Mészáros, 1972: 35). ² Nor are such lines limited to the young Marx, as Capital Volume I shows:

With the extension of commodity circulation there is an increase in the power of money, that absolutely social form of wealth which is always ready to be used. [. . .] Since money does not reveal what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. (Marx, 1976: 229)

Marx of course explained why capitalism drives to expand commodity production in many crucial areas, and also claimed across decades that everything had become saleable. Does this mean Marx adequately grounds V2? The issues are how Marx’s claims should be interpreted and how convincing they are. One interpretive challenge is that the two key ‘everything for sale’ passages early in Capital Volume 1 state that many saleable things are not commodities. In the second, ‘Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price’ (p. 197). While the precise meaning of ‘commodity’ in Capital’s early chapters is difficult to pin down, Marx clearly says that commodities are ‘products of labour’, and presents them as external objects or physical things (including human labour) rather than rights, relations, qualities or ideas (pp. 125–128). Speaking of the latter’s ‘commodification’ may thus not fit the conceptual framework, and requires engagement with the ‘commodity form’ concept. ³ These passages distinguishing ‘commodities’ from things that are ‘saleable and purchaseable’ suggest that efforts from Meszaros’ work on to ground arguments about ‘the transformation of everything into a commodity’ in Marx are likely working with a conception of ‘commodity’ that is not Marx’s. ⁴

Another interpretive challenge is Marx’s presentation of universal saleability as most immediately a consequence of extensive monetary relations. Does this mean ‘universal alienability’ could arise in monetized non-capitalist societies? There may be tensions in Marx on this point. In The Poverty of Philosophy the ‘time [. . .] when everything is brought to the market’ comes after a time ‘when all products, all industrial existence, had passed into commerce’, and thus presumably after ubiquitous capitalist commodity production. Capital, too, says money acquires universal power after sufficient ‘extension of commodity circulation’. Marx’s (1976) citation of Columbus and Shakespeare on money’s leveling power and ability to buy anything (p. 229), however, suggests those features were already visible when that ‘extension’ was still limited. The Grundrisse may also point in both directions (Marx, 1973: 221–227), and Harvey (2010: 72–73; 2014: 55) draws on it to argue that pre-capitalist communities already had to resist money’s tendencies towards ‘the commodification and monetisation of everything’.

Marx’s V2 status is further complicated, ironically, by his presentation of universal saleability as an accomplished condition. If everything was already for sale in Marx’s 19th century (or before), and if commodification is (as most contemporary authors assume) the process of making things saleable, then it is unclear how there could still be an unfinished tendency to commodify everything in the early 21st century. Marx’s position also seems to contradict the widely-made argument (see below) that the commodification of everything is impossible.

The other big question is whether Marx’s claims are convincing. While Marx’s abstract arguments explain why money under conditions of extensive commodity circulation would make everything ‘purchaseable’, he neither inquires into the actual extent of sales of ‘things’ like conscience and honour nor considers what ‘everything’ means or how to identify its components. Walzer (1983) saw Marx’s writing about money as the ‘universal pander’ as representing ‘the naïve view’ of money’s capabilities, and listed ‘blocked exchanges in the United States’ to oppose it (p. 95, 100). That Marx, like Percy Bysshe Shelley (1813) before him, said everything was purchaseable does not make it true; his comments should be evaluated for specification, logic and evidence like anyone else’s. To be clear, I am not saying Marx cannot ground V2, but that such grounding does not emerge straightforwardly from Marx (compare Joseph, 2005: 392) and needs to be demonstrated.

The fifth strategy, enumeration, sees authors augment V2 claims by listing things subject to commodification pressures or already commodified. The implicit logic highlights important, surprising and/or alarming commodifications as testimony to capitalism’s ubiquitous commodifying drive. Wallace et al. (2020) write that ‘Capitalism commodifies everything – Mars exploration here, sleep there, lithium lagoons, ventilator repair, even sustainability itself, and on and on’ (p. 11). Brook et al. (2013) reach the claim that capitalism ‘attempts to commodify everything’ (p. 281) after surveying commodifications explored by Arlie Hochschild and those covered in a special issue celebrating Hochschild’s The Managed Heart. The breadth and significance of these commodifications is striking; it includes love, care, intimacy, relationships, language, digital space and ‘our everyday lives’. While Brook et al. do not explicitly state that this range substantiates the V2 claim, it works to lend it credibility.

Enumeration has two basic problems. One is that no list of things, however long, adds up to ‘everything’. Williams (2005) points out the other. Because these efforts focus overwhelmingly on what is (being) commodified, ‘they find, and even create, what they seek’: relentless commodification (p. 25). Searching for what is not being commodified might turn up equally surprising and important ‘things’.

The final strategy, theorization, involves constructing an explicit explanation of why capitalism drives to commodify everything. Few authors do this, and some do it so quickly that their points are closer to assertions than explanations (i.e. Loy, 2008: 46, 51). Wallerstein (1983) likely still provides the most sustained causal account (pp. 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.

This argument makes two unwarranted jumps. The first two sentences make a plausible case for capitalism’s tendency to commodify more and more exchange, production, distribution and investment processes. The third leaps to all ‘social transaction[s]’ without considering that much life is outside these processes – there are also reproduction processes, governance processes, linguistic processes and so on. The fourth leaps again from a negative claim (no social transaction intrinsically off limits) to the positive one that capitalism actually drives to commodify everything. Wallerstein’s logic does not support his conclusion.

Critiques?

The V2 literature fails to define ‘everything’ and ‘the commodification of everything’, and its argumentative strategies all have significant deficiencies. This situation suggests that it should have faced sharp critiques (as have V1 and V3 arguments – Hall, 2023). Identifying such critiques, however, is complicated. Few scholars have responded directly to the core V2 claim, and it is not obvious what kinds of arguments would actually challenge it. How might one show that capitalism does not drive to commodify everything?

Wolfgang Streeck’s version of V2 helps illuminate the difficulties. Streeck’s case that capitalism drives to commodify everything does not go beyond Polanyi citations, but his analysis of the drive suggests that some arguments that might seem to challenge it do not. A first potential critique is that the commodification of everything is impossible and that, if it could be accomplished, capitalism would collapse. Streeck (2016) emphatically agrees with both points, but shows that neither means that the drive does not exist. He argues rather that capitalism relies existentially on having limits to its commodifying tendencies (especially regarding land, labour and money) imposed by state and society. If those restraints falter (as Streeck says they are doing after decades of globalization and neoliberalism), capitalism will collapse through ‘having overrun its opponents and in the process become more capitalist than is good for it’ (p. 35, see also 24-25, 61-64). Second, critics of V2 could point to the existence of large decommodified areas in capitalist societies as evidence against the drive’s existence. Streeck, again, agrees that these areas exist, but posits that they show only that countervailing forces are ‘temporarily’ keeping the ‘fundamental’ commodifying drive in check (p. 206). Third, it has been convincingly argued that capitalists should not want everything to be commodified, since that ‘would require capitalists to pay all the costs of reproducing capitalist social relations’ (Glassman, 2006: 617). Streeck, however, draws on Marx’s analysis of the working day to argue that while more thoughtful capitalists might recognize the dangers of excessive commodification and want to oppose it, capitalist competition creates collective action problems that prevent them from doing so effectively; they are pushed to keep driving commodification against their own preferences (pp. 24–25).

To get traction on V2, critiques must confront it on its own terrain. They must develop theorizations of capitalism’s structures and imperatives that show capitalism does not drive to commodify everything. Bob Jessop and Nancy Fraser come closest to doing this. ⁵ Jessop (2002) argues that ‘Even at the most abstract level of analysis, let alone in its actually existing forms’, the balance of ‘market-mediated’ and ‘extra-economic’ supports required for capitalism’s reproduction ‘excludes the eventual commodification of everything’, that ‘This incompleteness is a constitutive, or defining, feature of capitalism’, and that the ‘open-ended dynamic’ involved in this shifting, unstable balance ‘excludes any final destination towards which the logics of capital accumulation and/or class struggle draw’ capitalism; ‘viewed substantively, capitalism has no pregiven trajectory’ (p. 19). Fraser, similarly, argues that society ‘cannot be commodities all the way down’ (Fraser, 2014: 545). For her, ‘the commodity form, while causally consequential, is not at all ubiquitous in capitalist society,’ views that see it as such or ascribe single logics to capitalism are ‘far too totalizing,’ and the coexistence of marketized and non-marketized zones in capitalist societies ‘is no fluke or empirical contingency [. . .] but a feature built into capitalism’s DNA’ (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 21–25, 48–52).

Neither author, however, directly engages the argument that capitalism contains a drive to commodify everything (Fraser comes close – Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 50, 52). My reading of their differences with Streeck is that their rejection of a single, commodifying logic to capitalism derives from an overall assessment of the interaction between the varied elements that necessarily exist in a capitalist society (the outcome of which will never be unidirectional). Streeck agrees about the necessary existence but thinks that a sub-set of those elements – capitalism’s ‘economic social relations’ (p. 203) – creates a V2 drive that cannot be achieved but is nevertheless always active. Jessop and Fraser do not posit the existence of such a drive, but neither do they show that it does not exist.

Capitalism and the commodification of everything: Definitions and (counter-) mechanisms

Debating whether capitalism drives to commodify everything thus feels like debating the existence of God: the positive arguments don’t work, but proving a negative is tricky too. Rather than counselling agnosticism, I suggest that the question can be grappled with more effectively if researchers clearly define ‘everything’ and ‘the commodification of everything’; carefully specify mechanisms that should emerge from capitalism’s basic relations and that together would drive to commodify everything; and ask (as the literature never has) whether those basic relations might generate drives against commodifying certain things. In tackling these tasks I prioritize the search for commodifiable ‘things’ the literature has missed that promise to reveal new aspects of the capitalism-(de)commodification relationship.

Definitions II: Everything, the commodification of everything and capitalism

What kinds of thing together make up everything? I propose that V2 arguments’ scope can be measured against the following (overlapping) categories. First, material phenomena – the physical elements and processes of nature, organic and inorganic, some of which have been extensively transformed by humans. Second, human labour (productive and reproductive) and leisure activity. Third, states of mind such as emotions, memories, attention, desires and aversions. Fourth, products of culture and intellect like knowledge, information and ideas. Fifth, governance: the rules and institutions, state and non-state, that govern social life (including socially-recognized and legal rights and obligations), and judgements, decisions and votes regarding applying rules and running institutions. And sixth, relationships between people, including membership of and positions in groups and institutions (citizenship, jobs in companies and state agencies) and informal relationships like love, friendship and acquaintance. These categories reflect my secular and (social-)scientific ontology; I see gods and spirits as cultural productions rather than a separate category of thing, but others would disagree. ‘Everything’ is also not static, but expands as new kinds of thing emerge.

Scope restrictions can be applied in moving from ‘everything’ to ‘the commodification of everything’. For some V2 positions, again, commodifying drives apply to everything that can be commodified. One uncommodifiable thing (pace Wallace et al., 2020: 11) is sleep; while sleep aids can be purchased, I cannot sleep for two hours and sell that sleep to you. Experiences can be sold, memories cannot. The law of gravity as an idea can be commodified, but not gravity itself (I think). Technical limitations to commodification can, of course, be overcome (genetic information, now on the market, was once not just uncommodifiable but unknowable), and capitalism generates drives to overcome at least some of them. ‘Everything’ could also mean the entire universe, but I stick to earth and its atmosphere.

V2 arguments need to define ‘the commodification of everything’. I do not, however, adopt a single definition here. The literature’s inchoate conceptions could refer to very different conditions, and since the definition chosen has huge implications for how V2 statements should be evaluated it would be arbitrary to consider only one. I thus keep the three definitions introduced above in play and reflect in the conclusion on what my mechanisms say about them. Their differences can be clarified through consideration of a particular ‘thing’: admission to graduate school (Sandel, 2012: 108–110). Under the first definition, this ‘thing’ would be commodified in a world in which admission is usually based on noncommodified principles of merit and equity applied by faculty following a professional ethos and university regulations, but where entry to some programs can be bought under the table. Even if sales were highly irregular and risky for buyers (would-be students) and sellers (admissions committee members), and even if they did not occur at most universities, admission would be commodified in that it could be bought somewhere and somehow. Under the second definition, this ‘thing’ would be commodified if there were a well-established market in admissions. Sales would be more common and regularized than under the first definition (but perhaps still illicit), supply and demand would strongly influence prices, and aspiring students with enough cash on hand would feel confident about finding a spot. Many people, however, would still be admitted in non-commodified ways. The third definition imagines that all positions in graduate programs are for sale. Universities would sell admissions directly and openly, and buyers would have the right to sell spots on to others. In an extreme version, admission would happen only through the market. Merit and equity considerations would disappear; graduate programs would have no interest in transcripts, application statements, reference letters, or anything other than a credit card.

This example highlights the significance for the first two definitions of how fine-grained one’s conception of ‘kind of thing’ is. If ‘admission to educational institutions’ is a kind of thing, it would be commodified if preschool but not graduate school admissions were sold. If the ‘thing’ is ‘admission to graduate school’, commodification would have occurred even if no admissions were for sale in certain disciplines. If it is ‘admission to graduate programs in political economy’, Master’s but not PhD admissions could be for sale. And so on. The evaluative bar for commodification-of-everything arguments raises as one moves from the first to the second to the third definition, and as the ‘kind of thing’ conception used for the first and second narrows.

Finally, arguments about capitalism’s commodifying drive cannot begin without a definition of capitalism. Here too the literature’s conceptions are diverse and often vague. I combine Fraser and Streeck’s approaches as clear, compatible statements from key V2 debate authors that are reasonably representative of other understandings. For Fraser, capitalism’s ‘core features’ are ‘private ownership of the means of production and the class division between owners and producers’, a free labour market, a competition-driven, self-expanding dynamic of profit-oriented capital accumulation, and markets in the major production inputs (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018: 13–28). Streeck (2016) defines capitalism as ‘a market society that secures its collective reproduction as an unintended side-effect of individually rational, competitive profit maximization in pursuit of capital accumulation, through a ‘labour process’ combining privately owned capital with commodified labour power’ (pp. 58–59).

Five capitalist commodifying mechanisms. . .

This next two sub-sections make my best case for a set of mechanisms that should emerge from the defining relations of capitalist societies and generate powerful commodifying drives applying to far more ‘things’ than the V2 literature considers. In the conclusion I ask whether these mechanisms add up to a drive to commodify everything.

The first three mechanisms are familiar and can be covered quickly. First, because capitalist concerns in competitive market relations must sell to survive, they try to expand existing markets and find new kinds of things to sell. They will seek to produce more commodities (goods, services, ‘content’) and to enclose existing things (elements of nature, knowledge, human and other bodies) to sell them. Capitalists may not be able to accomplish enclosures on their own, but states can help. This sales imperative also drives commodification of access to consumer attention (Sherman, 2020). The second mechanism overlaps the first: to produce things to sell, capitalists need inputs, including labour (‘free’ or forced), resources, land and knowledge. The quest for new inputs does much to give capitalism its geographically expansionist and imperialist drive.

The first two mechanisms arise from the structural pressures capitalists face. A third emerges from capitalist ideological conditions that present markets as a solution to policy problems and ‘externalities’. This mechanism is especially prominent under neoliberalism. The climate crisis is tackled through new markets in greenhouse gas emissions rights (Stuart et al., 2019); responses to overfishing include markets in fishing rights (Longo et al., 2015) and environmental certification (Foley and Hébert, 2013). While the argument that neoliberal ideology demands markets in (virtually) everything goes too far (Hall, 2023), this mechanism still has wide applicability.

The next three mechanisms receive little or no attention in V2 texts. The fourth derives from the survival needs and desire to maintain a reasonable level of lifestyle and status of ordinary people (non-capitalists). Households without direct access to the means of production must usually sell labour. This well-understood pressure expands the number of people selling labour and the hours they sell; it also presses people to search for new kinds of work, helping commodify a more fine-grained range of kinds of thing. Even proletarianized people can also, however, conceivably sell ‘things’ beyond their labour. These include their organs, passports, children and political support (including, in democracies, votes). They can also try to sell things that are not theirs. For Marx (1992a), selling a friend into slavery exemplified the claim that ‘You must make everything which is yours venal, i.e. useful’ (p. 362). This elastic sense of ‘yours’ can be stretched further. Attending to people’s ability to sell things they do not own but control through employment reveals a key commodifying mechanism. Such sales are less relevant when they involve physical goods, which are usually already commodified; stealing and selling the office printer does not expand commodification’s reach. More interesting are sales of decisions and judgments employees have under their jurisdiction that are meant to be made according to rules, regulations and merit. Bureaucrats might receive payment to ignore a land grab in a national park; inspectors could sell decisions regarding whether restaurants meet food safety standards.

The fifth mechanism deals with demand. In capitalist societies people face pressures to do or buy things restricted or banned by the state or non-state institutions (like universities). These pressures, again, arise from survival imperatives and status anxieties and from the pathologies (like addiction) capitalist life creates. Demand for illicit drugs provides one example, demand for illicit border crossings another. In both cases, the good in question is in fact for sale in many places, and the market in it may be accompanied by other markets in bribes, hired violence and so on. Supply can come from the people discussed under mechanism four or illicit capitalists. This mechanism’s scope should be enormous – potentially as big as governance itself, if every restriction/regulation incentivizes commodifying the means to get around it.

A return to graduate school admissions illuminates the relationship between mechanisms four and five. When these decisions are commodified in the under-the-table way included in my first and second definitions of the commodification of everything, neither buyers nor sellers are capitalists. This commodification is not a moment of primitive accumulation. Both sides, however, have to survive capitalism. Stressed students need a leg up in competitive job markets, crunched professors need to make mortgage payments, and they identify a mutually-beneficial exchange. The ‘capitalist’, the university owning the capital supporting the graduate program, would presumably be upset (for reputational reasons) by this commodification, though it could consider cutting the professors out of the income stream by selling admissions itself.

Commodifications of this type see decisions meant to be made on a non-commodified basis sold to the highest bidder. Once one searches for such decisions, one finds them everywhere – they are fundamental to social life, and all are potential commodities. V2 arguments, which almost always see commodification as driven by capital itself, must be expanded. Commodifying drives also emerge from the constrained agency of ordinary people (see relatedly Milanović, 2019: 187–197).

. . . and a sixth mechanism: The drive for market-wrecking markets

The sixth mechanism gets its own sub-section because of the unfamiliarity of its commodifications, the striking historical examples that help bring it to life, and its role in my subsequent arguments. It returns to the pressures on capitalists. Capitalist inter-firm competition is generally taken to be basically ‘economic’, to take place through the market. Firms are seen to respond to the profit imperative by trying to extract more value from labour, cut costs, develop new products, improve technology, organization and marketing, and so on. Many conceptions of capitalism recognize that firm survival also frequently relies on government support and mechanisms of primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession including imperialism and war (Harvey, 2003). The emphasis on ‘economic’ competition, however, remains (see Mau, 2022: Chapters 8 and 9).

The sixth mechanism emerges counter-intuitively from such competition. The sharper ‘economic’ pressures are, the more capitalists should seek to escape them through ‘extra-economic’ means. Capitalists should face as much pressure to protect themselves and prey on others through violence, authority and political power as they do to sweat their workers and build better mousetraps. These means of survival can be accessed in different ways, one of which is purchase. Sales of and even markets in inter-capitalist violence, state offices, and formal monopolies over trade in goods and services and over knowledge have existed in some places and times. The paradox such sales pose is that while purchasers compete for these ‘things’ through the market, these commodifications reduce markets’ broader role in society by stifling ‘economic’ competition. If pushed too far, they create what can be called market-wrecking markets.

Historical examples draw out the preceding paragraph’s compressed logic. The first ‘thing’ I consider is a kind of service/labour: commission of violent acts like assault, property destruction, kidnapping and murder. Firms could conceivably hire workers to provide these services just as they hire assembly line workers and accountants. Some uses of commodified violence, like firms hiring security guards to protect property or thugs to attack strikers, should not threaten, indeed should support, other markets. Things are different for two (overlapping) applications: direct predation, and attacks on other businesses. Osumah and Aghedo (2011) distinguish these aspects of ‘commodified kidnapping’ in Nigeria, describing kidnapping as a ‘booming industry’ from a money-making perspective and ‘an instrument of engagement for economic survival, securing political and business advantage over rivals and co-competitors’ (p. 283, 277). Commodified violence can be directed at rival owners, managers, workers and property, at people and businesses with property worth stealing or money to pay ransoms or at politicians, bureaucrats and judges who can make decisions affecting a business’ profits and survival (Shaw and Thomas, 2016).

Under competitive conditions, purchasing violent services should be an obvious move (Graeber, 2001: 10), a potentially ‘cost effective’ (Shaw and Thomas, 2016: 613) business strategy. This suggestion receives support from a Bangkok casino owner nicknamed Chat Taopoon. On being asked about links between gambling and murder, Chat replied:

Do murders happen because of gambling? Well, anything involving vested interests can lead to murder. So can politics. So can land dealing. So can cheating on commission fees for land deals. Newspapers always link gambling with murder. This is not true. Murder can happen anywhere, even in the music business. We see contract killings all the time. (quoted in Pasuk et al., 1998: 21)

Chat’s claim that murder is normal business practice emerged out of conditions analysed by Benedict Anderson (1990). During the 1980s Thai economic boom, new entrepreneurs from the provinces emerged by combining business dealings, family relationships, political connections and violence. Tales of their competitions over markets and seats in parliament include murder attempts involving rocket launchers and claymore mines. To Anderson, these battles indicated not a threat to this group but its rise to power; ‘if capitalists are being murdered, their killers are neither communists, student radicals, nor agents of a police state: merely employees of fellow capitalists.’ Anderson (1990) emphasized the ‘employees’ point and the organization of killings through the market. ⁶ He summed up: ‘These days, being killed by gunmen is becoming a class privilege of the bourgeoisie. After all, who will pay gunmen a million baht to slay a poor man?’ (pp. 47–48) This last claim may have been wrong; one contemporary report put the price of a person’s life in southern Thailand at 20-30 kilograms of shrimp (Vandergeest et al., 1999: 582–83). The intra-capitalist use of hired violence Anderson analysed does, however, vividly show what commodification of this ‘thing’ can involve.

A second way capitalists can escape ‘economic’ competition is by securing from the state sole rights to produce, trade or provide goods or services. States can in principle grant such monopoly rights for any economic activity, and can commodify them by selling them and/or enabling holders to resell or lease them. While such sales have largely disappeared in ‘advanced market economies’ (Boldrin and Levine, 2008: 260), other contexts provide examples. James I and Charles I of England granted monopolies in exchange for money, and monopolies were a significant source of Crown revenue before the Civil War. Monopolies were granted through a formal, open process using the patent system, though in selling them the Crown had to get around the 1601 Case of Monopolies declaring them illegal in the common law and, later, the 1624 Statute of Monopolies. Hill’s (1961) inventory (pp. 32–33) includes a staggering variety of monopolized ‘things’, from bricks to feathers, linen to lobsters and rags to hackney coaches. ⁷ Monopolies were not available to just any buyer, but ‘were obtainable only by those with court influence.’ Such influence, however, could itself be bought (from courtiers; Hill, 1961: 32; Peck, 1990: 148).

Insight into commodified monopoly can be gleaned from the 19th century ‘opium farms’ the Dutch colonial government operated in Java. Under this sytem, the monopoly right to manufacture and sell opium in a given area for a specified period was publicly auctioned to the highest bidder. Comparable ‘farms’ for opium (and many other revenue farms) were common across Southeast Asia at this time (Rush, 1990: 2). The Javanese system usually involved a contract between the winning bidder (almost always a Chinese businessman), his guarantors and the Netherlands India government, which monopolized (or tried to) imports of raw opium and sold it to the ‘farmers’ (Rush, 1990: 25, 48). Farms could be divided up and leased to subfarmers (p. 50). The government did little directly to defend these monopolies from illegal competition, farming that task too to the farmers (who hired enforcers; p. 52, 62, 117, 149). The system was legal, institutionalized and a substantial revenue source, and the auctions provided an event in the social calendar (p. 43).

Capitalism should also drive to commodify more familiar formal monopolies: those over knowledge. Modern intellectual property rights (IPRs), including patents and copyrights, are commodities; while modern states do not sell them (they are applied for, not purchased), once granted they can be sold or licenced. Firms with exclusive ownership of valuable knowledge receive a competitive boost and more ability to extract rents (Boldrin and Levine, 2008; Rotta and Teixeira, 2019). It is thus no surprise that corporations likely to benefit from IPRs have pushed hard for them (Osgood and Feng, 2018), or that massive IPR expansion has marked the neoliberal era. Things could, however, go much further. The sixth mechanism and stronger ‘commodification of everything’ definitions suggest capitalism should drive to commodify all (commodifiable) knowledge. Individual firms would be even more sheltered from market competition and able to collect rents if they could monopolize, and charge royalties for using, ‘things’ like the alphabet, algebra, the laws of physics and the metric system.

A third anti-market commodifying drive aims at direct capitalist control over political power for purposes of protection from competition, harassing competitors and extracting resources from others. Capitalists can gain this control in many ways, some of which commodify authority. This can take place in bite-size pieces through sales of rights to have decisions go a certain way or to evade laws or regulations. The English Crown once sold ‘dispensations’ allowing individuals to ignore specific laws (North and Weingast, 1989: 812). Stone (1958) included licenses to enforce and to dispense with penal statutes in a list of things ‘being sold for cash by the King or given as a reward for resale to others’ (p. 63), and Hill (1961) used commodification-of-everything language in writing that under the early Stuarts ‘[t]he right to break regulations was put up to sale like everything else’ (p. 31). Commodification of authoritative decisions can be seen in Charles I’s grant to a company of soapmakers of ‘the right of testing the soap of all other makers, and of preventing its sale if unsatisfactory’ – a handy power to have when competing for customers. The company, in return, gave Charles £4 per ton of soap it made. Independent soapmakers eventually bought the monopolists out for what was now £8 per ton to Charles (Montague, 1897: 122; compare Peck, 1990: 142 on alehouse inspections).

Capitalists could also buy positions in the bureaucracy, police force, judiciary and even legislature and executive (Walzer, 1983: 22) in which governance powers reside. Pasuk Phongpaichit and co-authors documented position-buying in politics and the civil service in Thailand (compare Wade, 1985 on India and Pei, 2016 on China). Different offices had different attractions. Some allowed holders to direct government spending in ways beneficial to them and their allies, and bureaucrats and politicians were willing to pay substantial amounts to control these flows (Pasuk et al., 1998: 3). Positions involving public service provision might allow holders to levy charges; office-holders could also accept payments not to carry out their duties. Some offices facilitated access to revenues connected to illegal businesses like prostitution, gambling and drug trafficking, and/or protection of the office-holder’s illicit activities. Payments and profits received by politicians and officials were also redistributed to superiors and inferiors and used to expand political support, and ‘These flows tend to commercialize both the internal operation of the bureaucracy and the practice of party and electoral politics’ (Pasuk et al. 1998: 4, their emphasis). Position-buying also occurred in the police force, and police viewed the system as institutionalized and (in some cases) legitimate (Pasuk and Sungsidh, 1994).

None of this was meant to be taking place within the Thai state’s Weberian structure, and position-buying was officially deplored (Pasuk and Sungsidh, 1994: 108). European history, however, witnessed formal sales of and property rights in offices. 17th century England again provides an example (Aylmer, 1974; Brewer, 1988: 14–21; Peck, 1990), as do the Spanish Americas (Parry, 1953; Burkholder and Chandler, 1972), but I highlight the spectacular case of France (Doyle, 1996a, 1996b). Payments for royal office in France were underway by the 13th century. By 1467 appointments were being made for life and holders could name a successor on retirement, practices allowing inheritance and sales to third parties. Offices sold under such conditions ‘had in effect become almost private property’, and were as good as land as security for loans (indeed, most were bought with loans raised on the security of the office itself). Whole new levels of jurisdiction and types of office were created specifically to be sold. From 1522, sales were coordinated through a state bureau described later as a ‘stall for selling this new type of merchandise’. The system expanded as a vital source of state revenue in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the Revolution, there were roughly 70,000 venal office holders, including ‘all judges and every other sort of lawyer (except barristers), all army officers, many tax-collectors, most municipal officials and even some categories of ordinary tradesmen such as market-porters and inspectors in many towns, not to mention barber-wigmakers throughout the kingdom’ (Doyle, 1996a).

These historical examples suggest four points about sixth-mechanism commodifying drives. First, the kinds of ‘thing’ for sale – violence, governance, justice, knowledge, rights to engage in economic activity – are fundamental to any society. Most, however, are rarely if ever discussed in V2 texts or broader commodification research (knowledge is the exception). The sixth mechanism thus expands ‘everything’ into crucial new areas.

Second, sixth-mechanism analyses cannot stop at demand. The examples explain why capitalists should want to buy the ‘things’ discussed, but not who would supply them. Violent services supply should look reasonably normal from a market perspective; workers and firms with comparative advantage in administering beatings, blowing up warehouses and avoiding or buying off the law should respond to capitalist demand for their talents. The other commodities, however, must be ‘produced’ by the state actors and institutions that create offices and monopolies and the state and non-state bodies that determine and enforce decisions. State officials should be able to sell most decisions and lower- and medium-level offices under the table (according to fourth-mechanism logic), but markets in monopolies and higher offices likely require more formal authorization to work effectively. Constant fiscal pressure on European states under highly competitive interstate conditions, alongside a dearth of other means of raising revenue, pushed formal early modern sales of monopolies and offices.

Third, if the sixth mechanism exists, then capitalism contains a second self-destructive drive that is comparable to Streeck’s but works in the opposite direction. For Streeck (following Polanyi), universal commodification as applied to land, labour and money threatens to destroy capitalism by making it ‘more capitalist than is good for it’. Sixth-mechanism commodifications make capitalism less capitalist by shrinking the market’s scope and short-circuiting what Streeck calls capitalism’s ‘economic social relations’ and Fraser its ‘core features’. Some commodification of sixth-mechanism forms of violence, monopoly and political power is compatible with, and likely functional for, capitalism (just as capitalism cannot exist without some commodification of land, labour and money). If these markets become too extensive, however, many other markets will be badly impaired or even wrecked. At some point the society will cease to be capitalist; because competition would prioritize access to and use of force and political authority for predation (including intra-elite predation), it would be closer to feudalism (if it were not too self-contradictory to exist at all).

The fourth point that must be raised, though, is: does this market-wrecking drive actually exist, and does it apply to everything in its scope – all kinds of and all individual offices and judgments, all kinds and instances of knowledge and economic activity, all violent services? If so, it is puzzling that the clearest examples of most sixth-mechanism markets in at least European political economies are centuries old (IPRs are again the exception). Does that mean that while these commodifying drives exist, they have increasingly been constrained by forces ‘external’ to capitalism’s core economic relations, à la Streeck? If so, why have those external forces seemingly become more powerful as capitalism has expanded and deepened?

The sixth mechanism and capitalism’s decommodifying drives

Further sixth mechanism analysis directly challenges V2 by positing a powerful decommodifying drive deriving not from ‘external’ limits on capitalism but from its core, defining relationships. This drive pushes against the commodification of everything at least according to my second and third definitions of the latter.

My argument focuses again on capitalism’s competitive pressures. Streeck shows that while capitalists may recognize the dangers of excessive commodification and thus oppose the commodification of everything, collective action problems prevent them from responding effectively as individual concerns. Such problems should be less severe for sixth-mechanism commodifications. When individual capitalists deploy the ‘things’ in question, they severely and immediately disadvantage other capitalists. They prevent others from engaging in their current lines of business, and expose them to predation through monopoly rents and privately-owned judicial, administrative, police and violent power. These commodities create a direct existential threat to capitalist concerns and the wealth and physical security of their owners. Other firms can respond in kind, and political economies can reach equilibria in which sixth-mechanism ‘things’ are partially commodified and commodifying drives sustained (as my examples suggest).

Capitalists can also work together, however, to press for decommodification of these ‘things’. This dynamic is clearly visible in Stuart England. Hill (1961: 31) writes that of the restrictive economic policies imposed by Charles I, monopolies ‘aroused most hostility’. Sir John Colpeper, in presenting the county of Kent’s grievances to Parliament, compared monopolists to ‘a nest of wasps or swarm of vermin which have overcrept the land’, and to ‘leeches that have sucked the commonwealth so hard it is almost become hectical’ (quoted in Braddick, 2008: 119). Elite opposition to monopoly helped precipitate the Civil War, and no less a figure than Friedrich Hayek (2011) began his historical account of the struggle for ‘liberty’ in England with it (p. 247). Industrial monopolies were abolished by the Long Parliament and were not reconstituted after the Restoration; commercial monopolies (especially over long-distance trade) lasted longer, but most came to an end after the Glorious Revolution (Hill, 1961).

For some sixth-mechanism ‘things’, too, commodifying drives may not exist at all. Is there any reason to think capitalism presses to commodify the foundational intellectual constructs relied on by all capitalist firms (and states)? Is there a relentless drive for states to auction off IPRs to the alphabet and the metric system? What about the right to adjudicate disputes over property ownership – to decide what belongs to whom? Of course capitalists can dream of owning these things, just as one can dream of ruling the world. But given the overwhelming reaction their enclosure and commodification would elicit from other firms (and the state, which would also be disadvantaged by these commodifications), should we think they are actually trying to make it happen?

These arguments suggest two conclusions. First, drives to commodify many ‘things’ may be historically contingent. It seems unlikely that Amazon and Costco, or Meta and X, currently face intense pressure to hire private armies to attack one another. The prevalence in early modern capitalist states of commodifications that are less common or non-existent in the west today suggests that different commodifications and commodifying drives may be cause and consequence of variations between historical capitalisms. Second, sixth-mechanism ‘things’ make a crucial addition to the argument that decommodifications can be functional or essential for capitalism. Constricting or eliminating markets in ‘things’ like violence, monopolies, judicial decisions and offices expands the scope of the market and the ‘economy’. Decommodifying these things thus should be, and is, highly compatible with neoliberal ideology (Hall, 2022).

Finally, the arguments developed in this section help to clarify the difference between Fraser and Jessop’s position on V2, Streeck’s and my own. Fraser and Jessop argue that capitalist societies taken as a whole do not contain a built-in drive towards the commodification of everything, but do not consider the possibility that such a drive could be one necessary (though inherently unrealizable) component of capitalism. Streeck, in contrast, argues that capitalism’s core relations do generate a commodifying drive that applies to everything, and that keeping that drive in check is the job of the state and society acting against the immediate short-term interests of capitalists. My own argument is that for many potentially commodifiable ‘things’ (including violence, authority and monopolies) the inter-capitalist competition at capitalism’s heart directly generates drives against commodification, and that for deeply foundational ‘things’ like the alphabet the decommodifying drive is likely far more powerful than the commodifying one. The state still plays a crucial role in my argument as the central body governing decommodification. Unlike Streeck, however, I see capitalism’s basic imperatives as supporting and demanding, rather than challenging, state-backed decommodifications in a great many areas. The state should thus need less autonomy from capital’s interests in order to maintain or bring about decommodifications of things like kidnapping, industrial monopolies and basic science than it does for Polanyi’s land, labour and money.

Conclusions

Does capitalism drive to commodify everything? This paper has demonstrated the ‘yes’ position’s problems of definition and argumentation, showed that critiques of ‘commodification-of-everything’ arguments do not directly challenge V2, defined ‘everything’ and surveyed options for defining ‘the commodification of everything’, identified crucial elements of ‘everything’ V2 texts ignore, specified capitalist mechanisms (some new to the literature) that should generate even wider-ranging commodifying drives than those the literature covers, and argued that capitalism’s core, defining relations may push to decommodify some things. What does all this mean for V2 and for the broader analysis of capitalism? Space prohibits full discussion, but I conclude by returning to definitions and argumentative strategies.

First, the answer depends heavily on how ‘the commodification of everything’ is defined. Under my first definition – some instances of all commodifiable kinds of things are for sale somewhere under some conditions – and a coarse-grained sense of the boundaries between kinds of thing, capitalism does not just drive towards such a state, it achieved it long ago. This finding, however, is trivial. If one adopts the more meaningful second definition (markets in all kinds of thing) with fine-grained boundaries, or the third definition (all individual things are commodities), my sixth-mechanism arguments suggest that V2 cannot be sustained. Capitalism does not, for instance, drive to commodify every kind of knowledge or all individual ideas; rather, capitalism’s core features push to keep much knowledge available on non-commodified terms.

The V2 literature’s argumentative strategies also need overhauling. Sweeping claims that effectively take capitalism’s drive to commodify everything for granted should be replaced by sustained theorization. Four steps are crucial, and I have made a start on all of them. First, V2 authors should specify the distinct commodifying mechanisms generated by capitalist social relations and the particular (kinds of) things to which they apply. Second, they should think systematically about ‘everything’ to search for things capitalism might not drive to commodify. Historical research can help here, as can simple use of the imagination. Third, researchers should ask whether commodifying drives vary with the historical configuration of capitalist societies, and whether pressure to commodify certain things might become less intense as capitalist social relations become more entrenched. Fourth, the issue of what makes a thing commodifiable deserves more attention. One intriguing possibility is that judgments and decisions meant to recognize merit or compliance with rules may only be commodifiable under my first definition of the commodification of everything. If graduate school admissions were openly sold, grad school would become something very different; if Nobel Prizes and food safety certifications were publicly auctioned, they would become meaningless (Sandel, 2012: 94). Judgments and decisions like these may be commodifiable only when sales are hidden.

Capitalism’s commodifying pressures are powerful, diverse and hugely consequential, and are pushing human society, global ecology and capitalism itself towards catastrophe. It is no surprise that many people think they apply to everything. This claim, however, discourages careful inquiry into how capitalist commodification actually works. Asking when, how and why capitalism presses against commodification is also essential to understanding the calamity we face.