Читать книгу Commodification and Its Discontents - Nicholas Abercrombie - Страница 8

In the television series The Wire, there is a conversation about the nature of the business of drug dealing (series 3, episode 11). This takes place between the two leaders of a gang, Barksdale and Bell, who differ as to how they should run the trade. Bell favours the idea of a business. He is taking classes in economics at the local university and argues that the profits of the drug trade should be invested in legitimate businesses. He is a cool, calculating force. Increasingly through the series he appears in a suit and tie and wearing glasses. Barksdale, by contrast, sees himself in romantic terms. He holds to traditional values loyal to his local community. He wears street clothes. He is clearly suspicious – correctly as it turns out – of the people from politics and business with whom his partner deals. He wants to make money, but that is not a fundamental value, and he spends rather than invests. Barksdale describes himself as a gangster and contrasts himself colourfully with Bell. He is red, the colour of blood; Bell is green, the colour of money. Their gathering conflict though the series revolves around a disagreement about how life should be lived.

The ideologies of Money Talk and Coined Liberty similarly incorporate different ways of valuing human activity. They are moral claims. To borrow Arjun Appadurai’s phrase from a different context, these are different regimes of value (Appadurai, 1986b). Each regime has a view – a prejudiced view – of the moral stance of the other. Rather like the DNA strand, they are intertwined but opposed. The point is put well by Oscar Wilde in his play Lady Windermere’s Fan. He gives one of his characters the now widely quoted definition of a cynic: ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’. What is interesting about this epigram – apparently objecting to the reduction of value to price – is that it is remembered and quoted so very often without recognizing Wilde’s apparently subtle qualification. The next line in the play is a rejoinder defining a sentimentalist as: ‘a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing’ (Wilde, 1995: lines 350, 354). For the regime of Money Talk, the contrast is between fundamental human values and monetary value and the fear is that there will be a process of commodification in which, over time, human values will be replaced by monetary ones. What then are these human values?

As will be clear from the survey of Money Talk, a wide range of fundamental values are deemed to be at risk and philosophers are particularly good at identifying them. Margaret Radin, for instance, argues that a process of universal commodification that sweeps all before it ‘cannot capture – and may debase – the way humans value things important to human personhood’ (Radin, 2001: 9). Such universal commodification makes personal attributes and relationships such as family, love and friendship directly monetizable and saleable. And that is ‘to do violence to our deepest understanding of what it is to be human’ (Radin, 2001: 56; see also Anderson, 1993). Alasdair MacIntyre presents a somewhat different account, which starts with the Aristotelian notion of the virtues as constitutive of the human self. Virtues are exhibited in what MacIntyre calls social practices. These are forms of cooperative human activity ‘through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to … that form of activity’ (MacIntyre, 1981: 175; see also Keat, 2000). The range of social practices is very wide and includes, for example, the game of football, farming, painting and the sciences. Social practices are undermined by commodification because the realization and standards of excellence of the goods are internal to the practice while money, as a valuation, a judgement of excellence, is external. Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky (2013), on the other hand, argue that what is at risk in contemporary society is the de-moralization of society and the disappearance of any conception of the good life, that is, a life that is desirable. These three ideas – Radin’s, MacIntyre’s and the Skidelskys’ – of what fundamental values are imperilled by commodification are somewhat different, although it might be possible to bring them together as expressions of what it is to be human. One of the things common to them, however, is the idea of incommensurability. For them, money cannot be the measure of everything. Even if it is not altogether clear what they are, there are things that cannot be valued in terms of money. These things have the quality of being fundamental, untouchable, special in themselves. In short, they are treated as sacred, a point to which I return in chapter 5.

One view – the most common – of the relation between this regime of value indicated by the philosophers and that of money is that they are separate or should be separated. The metaphor is of distinct territories, and the fear is the invasion or infection of fundamental human values by money and all it brings with it. Michael Walzer, for instance, formulates a view of modern society as composed of spheres, each of which has a distinctive pattern of human activity. Examples are kinship and love, education, political power and money and commodities. These spheres are incommensurable and have to be kept separate. In particular, the other spheres are at risk from money. As Walzer notes, ‘money is insidious and market relations are expansive’. And somewhat apocalyptically, the consequences of any expansion are serious. ‘A radically laissez-faire economy would be like a totalitarian state, invading every other sphere … This is market imperialism’ (Walzer, 1983: 119, 120; see Keat, 2000 for critique). It is, in fact, strikingly difficult to avoid using the metaphors of separation and invasion. However, the fact that the two regimes of value are incommensurable does not entail that they be separate or that one will invade the other. The lack of separation is recognized by some of the philosophers. Russell Keat (2000) argues that markets may have features of non-markets, Elizabeth Anderson speculates on a ‘hybrid’ relationship, and Radin proposes the idea of ‘incomplete commodification’ in which the two regimes may co-exist. It will be the argument of this book that not only can the two regimes co-exist, but also there is a sense in which that co-existence is necessary.

The invasion part of the metaphor is, perhaps, a rather different matter. With some notable exceptions (Zelizer, 1985, 1997, 2005, 2013; Ertman and Williams, 2005) most sociological accounts of commodification see it as a process of invasion (or domination – Walzer’s word). Over time, the money regime of value takes over. There is a feeling in these accounts, especially those influenced by Marx, correctly or otherwise, that this process is inevitable unless stopped. A similar non-Marxist view, which has received a good deal of attention in recent years, is contained in a book by philosopher Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy (2012). He argues that we have moved from having a market economy to having a market society. ‘Today the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life’ (Sandel, 2012: 5). That matters for two reasons. First, corruption and inequality necessarily follow the capacity to buy anything. More significantly, though, not all things are properly valued by means of the market. The practice of slavery, for example, ‘fails to value human beings in the appropriate way – as persons worthy of dignity and respect, rather than as instruments of gain and objects of use’ (Sandel, 2012: 9). Note how much like other instances of Money Talk this argument is.

One of the great strengths of Sandel’s book is that his many examples are not all of very large and important matters such as slavery. Quite the contrary: his illustrations are often taken from the relatively small-scale behaviour of everyday life such as the giving of wedding toasts, apologies and gifts, sponsorship and the practice of branding. Queuing, for instance, is a relatively common experience. Sandel’s example concerns the New York City’s Public Theater free outdoor Shakespeare performances in Central Park. When tickets became available on the day of performance, long lines formed and demand could be intense. So those who were unwilling to wait in line for some hours paid others to do so and thereby secured tickets. What may have started as a small-scale business became more established as rival companies developed to exploit queueing opportunities. The practice attracted much criticism, not least from the Public Theater itself – a publicly subsidized, not-for-profit organization. But what is wrong with commodifying queuing? There is an argument about fairness. People with limited resources are no longer able to access theatre which is supposed to be free. But Sandel sees a more fundamental objection. These performances are a kind of civic celebration, a gift to the citizens of New York. Allowing businesses to make a ‘profit from what is meant to be a gift’ is to change ‘a public festival into a business, a tool for private gain’ (Sandel, 2012: 32).

Sandel’s account is a version of what one could call the Commodification Thesis, which argues that there is a progressive replacement of one regime of value by another. Is this, though, the inevitable triumph of the values of money, so that Money Talk is merely ineffective railing? Can commodification be resisted?