Closing Off Commodification

Colin Williams, in “A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis”, suggests that “The view that predominates is that the overwhelming trajectory of economic development is towards a commodified economy. Although the extent, pace and unevenness of this process is open to debate [. . .], the process of commodification itself is not” (527). Before we go any further here, let’s define some terms: in a commodified economy, “goods are produced for exchange”, “exchange is monetised and conducted under market conditions”, and “the exchange of goods and services on a monetised basis is motivated by the pursuit of profit” (527). Now: Williams’s contention about the unquestionable trajectory towards commodification sounds very much like the transcendent and agentless power Gibson-Graham suggest contemporary views ascribe to the economy, as when they point out in “The Diverse Economy: Constructing a Language Politics” that there has been a “shift from an understanding of the economy as something that can be managed (by people, the state, the IMF) to something that governs society” and that this shift has relied upon “a hegemonic move through which representations of economy have slipped from their locations in discourse and landed ‘on the ground,’ in the ‘real,’ not just separate from, but outside of society” (1). Cry havoc, and let slip the commodified economy!

As we’ve seen before, Gibson-Graham have some difficulties with this view. So does Williams, who remarks that “The fact that unpaid work now constitutes around half of the total time that people spend working and is growing relative to paid work in most advanced economies, means that some serious questions need to be asked about the validity of the commodification thesis” (532). Indeed. Both Williams and Gibson-Graham, among others (Jenny Cameron, for one) point to household work as one form of unpaid labor, measurable in hours via time-budget studies, but Williams also refers to “self-provisioning unpaid work” such as grocery shopping, and other authors have referred to consumption as a form of work. I’m not sure how far that goes, or where we can then draw the lines between work and leisure — or even if we can consider leisure as a non-economic activity. It depends on what one’s doing, I suppose; consumption, some would say, is certainly a form of economic activity. Closer to my heart: is what a student does in college work? Consumption? Self-provisioning? I don’t think one can necessarily measure education via a time-budget study (although I give my students points for how much revisionary work they demonstrate in terms of the changes they make between the drafts of a paper), so how else would one measure such apparent self-provisioning unpaid work (Williams 530)? How does one measure consumption?

From such questions, we might at least take the supposition that there is more than one economic domain, or, as Stephen Gudeman remarks in The Anthropology of Economy, the neoclassical economy “consists of two institutions: households and exchange” in which “one value domain, the market, [. . .] is modeled as a separate sphere making up the whole of economy in which all goods are priced and available for exchange” (5). However, according to Gudeman, “we live in a world of inconsistent, or incommensurate, domains of value that are locally specified. Culture is made and remade through contingent categories [. . .] Different value arenas make up economy” (7).

And here we’re back to the ideas — familiar from Bourdieu — that value is contextual and the economy is hardly monolithic. Gibson-Graham, in “The Diverse Economy: Constructing a Language Politics”, note that their vision of the eponymous “diverse economy is no more than an open-ended discursive construct made up of multiple consituents in which economic subjects, whether individuals or enterprises, occupy multiple sites and engage in many. . . processes”, and immediately anticipate the obvious question: “What really is the usefulness of such a construct?” (20). If it’s “open-ended”, doesn’t this seem to leave us with some difficulties in terms of the scope of any theory-building project? What isn’t economic? As I’ve noted before, I understand and agree with the various critiques of understanding economy solely in terms of monetized rationally profit-seeking capitalist market transactions — but it seems to me that, inasmuch as Gibson-Graham’s project of diversifying and opening up our understandings seems driven by these critiques, that project carries at its heart a negative hermeneutics, no matter how many positive spaces it attempts to create.

Williams’s project to demonstrate that “there exist large alternative economic spaces of self-provisioning, non-monetised exchange and monetised exchange where the profit motive is absent” (526) seems related, but it feels like not quite the same thing as Gibson-Graham’s, especially since Williams defines economy as the production, distribution, and allocation of “the goods that people need to survive” (526): notice there’s nothing here involving the usual neoclassical concerns about scarcity, but it’s still not entirely open-ended. I worry here that I’m being unfair to Gibson-Graham, but I also see more concreteness in Gudeman’s definition of economy as involving “making, holding, using, sharing, exchanging, and accumulating valued objects and services” (1), and feel compelled to point out, again, that these objects and services are not necessarily valued because they’re scarce. Making and using open-source, freely-distributed software is an economic activity, I think — it’s certainly work, just like the semi-educational process of writing for this weblog is at least partly work — but that software has use value, not exchange value. I would contend that the same holds true for other educational activities, and this again points me towards ways of thinking about collaborative student work writing non-copyrighted but perhaps licensed essays that could circulate on the web; essays not for exchange, and not to be traded for their plagiaristic exchange value, but essays to be used, to be learned from, and yes, to be consumed. Much of how one reads that consumption has to do with attitudes and context: certainly, some will say it’s cheating, and every student should always do only her own work. I see things differently, and believe in the use value of group and collaborative work (aren’t the citations in research essays a way of indicating collaboration over time?), and hope students might, as well. This would seem to call into question whether or not the university is a commodified economy, since the circumstance of commodification depends on both on the motivations of the university (is it for profit or not?) and the motivations of the students (do they want to pursue profit or are there other motivations for education)? Value, in this context, is social, and not transcendent. Or, to quote Williams citing Karl Polanyi, “the market, whatever forms it takes, is itself a social product” (Williams 534).