We are fast approaching the worldwide market availability of most material
products, and many services — including many emotional and intimate services
(counseling, sex, parenthood, and relationship formation). Markets exist for
kidneys, pollution rights, sexual slaves, corneas, reproductive tissues (ovum
and sperm), and the adoption of third world children. “Commodification” is the
term used to described the process of turning of an object into a commodity,
that is, into something that has economic value and that can be bought and
sold. In many instances, commodification represents a reduction of the person
(subject) to a thing (object). There is a general consensus that, aided by the
internet and transglobal communications, a general broadening of the types of
goods and services that have been commercialized is occurrring. Commodification
is a growing phenomenon.

Early analysts of this trend tended
to fall into two camps. Some supported the notion of freedom of contract, and
the acknowledgment that legal barriers are generally ineffective. Others
objected to the implicit coercion represented by the sale of, say, sexual
services and human organs, by the very poor, to the very rich. Or, they
proffered Kantian-style anticommodification arguments based on the degradation
of human dignity representation by such transactions. The resultant discussion
was hardly a dialogue: battle lines were drawn, and commodification was viewed
as an either-or proposition.

Rethinking Commodification includes several classic texts of
commodification theory that familiarize readers with the traditional debate.
The work then offers new insights into the issue, with two dozen articles,
appellate court opinions, and essays. Taken together, this book comprises an
intellectual mosaic that moves the discussion beyond the early, on-off question
of whether or not to commodify.

Of particular interest is the
inclusion of two essays (one co-authored, the other authored) by Margaret Jane
Radin, an early commodification scholar. The first, written with Madhavi
Sunder, provides a comprehensive overview of the commodification debate. The
theorists connect the legal debates surrounding commodification, to the
Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and its prohibition against the
devastating institution of slavery. Their analysis challenges the notion that
the market is merely a neutral mechanism for maximizing satisfaction of
consumer preferences. They observe that the conceptual scheme of universal
commodification is itself a worldview that can threaten our very understanding
of all that is dear, intimate, and valuable (including love, babies, sex, and freedom).
But they also acknowledge the opprobrium and oppression heaped by legal
barriers on those who hold relatively few economic advantages, but who
nevertheless try to create and enter markets. Radin’s second essay, addressing
many of the larger theoretical parameters of the subject (along with insightful
considerations of prostitution and baby-selling) is an excerpt from her book, Contested
Commodities (Harvard University Press, 1996).

The book contains sections on the
commodification of intellectual and cultural property (including Native
American cultural patrimony); the commodification of racial, gender, and sexual
orientation identities; the commercialization of sex, care, and intimacy; the
commodifying of parenthood and family relations; and the marketing of bodies
and body parts. Along the way, readers are directed to consider the circulation
of peoples, capital, and commodities in an age characterized by globalization.
The production and circulation of “meanings” in modern society, markets and culture,
is examined alongside the changing semiotics of commodities as they pass
through various local and global circuits.

This book holds a tension between
the binary and totalizing categories of the initial commodification debate, on
the one hand, and the diverse and shifting cultural life of things proffered
for trade, on the other. The instabilities of commodities, markets, and
regulatory efforts, are considered without the distorting burdens of preconceived
conclusions: moral agents — who can, and often do, appropriate market
resources — are not presumed to be the mere victims of commodification. This
anthology represents and includes the emergent scholarship that sees freedom in
the ability to commodify, while retaining deep respect for the importance of
early and persistent concerns about subordination, cultural degradation, and
dehumanization.

© 2006 Albert D. Spalding

Albert D. Spalding, JD,
is an associate professor at Wayne State
University School of Business Administration.  He teaches legal
studies and ethics.

Categories: Ethics, General