Читать книгу Karl Polanyi - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Inequality
Ex-Commodification	LABOR (precarity)
Commodification	MONEY (debt)
Dispossession
Ex-Commodification	NATURE (destruction)
Commodification	KNOWLEDGE (privatization)

In addition to the dispossession that produces the commodity, another source of social movements is the growing inequality that follows from commodification. For example, in the sale of labour power ‘precarity’ or insecurity has become the dominant experience of increasing proportions of the population. The commodification of labour power has been compounded by the commodification of money, making money from money by gambling on debt.

Another process Polanyi overlooked is the process of excommodification – the expulsion of entities from the market, entities that were formerly commodities but no longer. Excommodification captures the idea that there are lots of useful things that, to their detriment, are expelled from the market. In the face of excommodification, commodification can be a very attractive prospect. In relation to labour, in many places, and increasingly all over the world, expanding reservoirs of surplus labour make it a privilege to be exploited. Vast populations are exiled or confined to the informal sector of the economy where they eke out a hand to mouth existence. In relation to nature it is its incorporation into a capitalist economy that is so wasteful, yet often the absence of the market is responsible for its undervaluation. We are able to plunder nature because it has insignificant market value. Very different are knowledge and money where commodification leads not to waste but to distorted utilization – the production of knowledge is geared to those who can pay for it while the production of different types of money is used to create profit from debt.

Moving beyond the characteristics of fictitious commodities it is important to examine their interrelations in specific historical contexts. Indeed, social movements have to be understood not as a reaction to the (ex)commodification of a single fictitious commodity, but as responses to the articulation of the (ex)commodification of labour, money, nature and knowledge. In the Arab Spring uprising, the intersection of the precarity of labour and indebtedness due to micro-finance proved to be a motive for protest; the student movement can be analysed in terms of precarity of labour and privatization of knowledge production; environmental movements lie at the intersection of the destruction or commodification of nature and the precarity of labour. This framework of fictitious commodities provides an account of the underlying forces driving protest. The articulation of the (ex) commodification of fictitious commodities can also be used to understand different historical periods of marketization.