The Commodification of Everything

These days you can buy almost anything. Sperm and eggs are advertised on the web. Speed dating services will provide you with several minutes-long dates in one night for the right price. Human organs are being bought and sold around the world. Universities are increasingly thinking of the education that they offer as a “product” and their students as “consumers.” There are fewer and fewer realms of life in which the language of money does not speak powerfully. 

Commodified Vs. Commoditised

Exploring the distinction of two concepts sometimes used carelessly.

Commodification: The Essence of Our Times

Under advanced capitalism, commodification expands into all corners of social and political life, with devastating consequences. Finding a limit to this process is more urgent than ever.

The Social Cost of Commodifying Nature

"The injustice present here is undeniable. The commodification of carbon sinks present in Uganda and East Africa as a whole have jeopardised indigenous peoples way of life, and in too many cases taken away their way of life completely. As a geographer I appreciate the need to protect the environment and investing in carbon sinks and carbon sequestration projects is admirable and effective, however it should not come at such a high social cost."

Commodification and Financialization of Nature

This dialogue seminar and strategy meeting will focus on the environmental, social, cultural and moral threats of the commodification and financialization of nature through market-based conservation mechanisms like carbon markets and REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and enhancing forest carbon stocks) that are being promoted as part of the so-called “green economy”. Carbon markets and REDD do not only represent false solutions to climate change, they also enable the corporate capture of our commons (lands, biodiversity, water, energy, air …) by privatizing and commodifying nature through new and speculative markets, including financial markets. Capitalist environmental policies like payments for environmental services (PES) and carbon and biodiversity offsets will enrich corporations and a few big NGOs while marginalizing and even expelling the very Indigenous Peoples, local communities, small peasants and women that have conserved and restored nature for generations.

The Commodification of Life and Environmental Protest in the  21st Century

The way forward on issues of intellectual property, especially the patenting of life and the appropriation of traditional knowledge, are key issues for social justice advocates to address in the coming decade. The transformation of biodiversity, the genetic code of seeds and humans,  and much more into a form of private property that can be centrally owned is a serious form of global power that should be resisted. 

Commodification and Privatisation of the Planet

By protecting seeds und intellectual property laws, the G8 is encouraging the privatization of life, providing monopoly market access to multinational corporations and driving thousands of Indian farmers to suicide.

The Commodification of Love

Gift-giving is not a love language any more than Pig Latin is a Romance language. Rather, gift-giving is a vapid, pernicious cultural imperative in our society, and we’ve bought it (literally) hook, line, and sinker. We’ve become consumers of love.

The Commodification of Human Life: Human Trafficking in the  Age of Globalization

In the context of economic globalization, the nation-states‘ continued sovereign control over immigration has denied many the opportunity to migrate legally and safely. As a consequence, potential immigrants may seek to reach their destinations through illegal channels, thereby giving rise to irregular movement. Human trafficking is a particular type of such movement in  that it commodifies human life, making it sellable, exploitable, and disposable

The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer

In this revealing social history, Daniel Thomas Cook explores the roots of children’s consumer culture—and the commodification of childhood itself—by looking at the rise, growth, and segmentation of the children’s clothing industry. Cook describes how in the early twentieth century merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers of children’s clothing began to aim commercial messages at the child rather than the mother. Cook situates this fundamental shift in perspective within the broader transformation of the child into a legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumer. (Book)

Commodification and Urban Development: A Case Study of Taiwan

This paper aims to identify the processes of commodification of land and housing in Taiwan during the era of rapid economic development since the Second World War. On paper, Taiwan has a quite extraordinarily socialistic philosophy of landownership, based on the teachings of Sun Yat-sen and his doctrine of equalization of land rights. However, there is a very large discrepancy between policy and practice and as a consequence urban development and housing delivery are intensely commodified sectors of the Taiwanese economy. The beneficiaries of urban development have primarily been the middle class and powerful development factions. The specific economic and political institutions, related primarily to its precarious relationship with Mainland China, have shaped the perplexed trajectory of commodification of land and housing in Taiwan. (PDF Document)

Urban Design in Neighbourhood Commodification 

The intention to promote local economic development through place marketing and urban design based interventions is linked to the commodification of the city, a trend emerging parallel to a new milieu for intercity competition. The aim with this paper is to highlight how urban design is used as a tool by the municipality to sell the city as a place to live, work and invest in. The focus is on the physical characteristics and function of two urban renewal projects and how the municipality has looked into these neighbourhoods in connection to the image that it wants to promote for the city. The analysis focuses on official plans and documentation, and on expert interviews. It distinguishes between product oriented and process-oriented interventions. The reabilitation of the physical space is used to promote discourses on sustainability, innovation and creativity and, throught these discourses, generate an appealing image for investments. The paper aims to contribute to the discussions on the transformation of the role of the urban design and planning in contexts of entrepreneurial urban governance, place-marketing strategies, and the neoliberalization of planning. (PDF Document)

Conceiving of Sex as a Commodity: A Study of Arrested Customers of Female Street Prostitutes

Framing prostitution as an economic exchange, this paper evaluates some of the consequences of conceiving of sex as a commodity rather than as an aspect of an intimate interpersonal relationship among the customers of prostitutes

Pornography and the Commodification of Sexual Desire

The increased availability of pornography is thus a sign of changing value patterns in Western societies, which are moving ethical primacy away from the spiritual towards an appreciation of physical aspects of life. The disconnection of sexuality from procreation and a focus on hedonistic aspects has propelled it into mainstream culture, leading to a democratisation and diversification of public sexual discourse.

The Re-packaging of Sexual Commodification in Advertising

Through a visual medium, advertisements engage the public in articulating want, need, and desire. In the context of women’s advertisements, the image demonstrates an individual need that can be fulfilled through the woman’s participation in commodity culture. By shifting her desire onto an object, the woman herself becomes a commodity, while also preserving a culture defined by the transformation of the “relations of subjects 
into relations between objects” (Goldsman, et al, 336). Furthermore, commodity culture renders women’s bodies as objects of desire and objects to be desired, limiting a woman’s full humanity and laying claim to her body as a form of property. (PDF Document)

Technology and Commodification of Higher Education

The commodification of higher education, then, refers to the deliberate transformation of the educational process into commodity form, for the purpose of commercial transaction. The commodification of education requires the interruption of this fundamental educational process and the disintegration and distillation of the educational experience into discrete, reified, and ultimately saleable things or packages of things.

Education For Sale!  The Commodification of Everything?

Let me begin by clarifying my use of terms and specifying the terrain of my argument and of my concerns. To start with the latter, this lecture may be thought of as, in-part, a cost-benefit analysis of the increasing use of ‘the private’ as a means of delivery of public services, including education. Current political and policy wisdoms stress, almost exclusively, the benefits of such moves, ignoring, almost entirely, the apparent 
and possible costs. Over and against this, I want to stress, in an attempt to achieve some balance, almost exclusively, the costs of various kinds of private participation and privatisation. For while I am happy to concede that there are benefits to be obtained from some forms of privatisation of public services, these benefits are widely rehearsed and sometimes exaggerated, while the costs, and I mean primarily social costs, are systematically neglected. Furthermore, in policy rhetorics which laud ‘the private’ there is deafening silence in relation to the role of the profitmotive, and a systematic neglect of business failures, and of business ethics. (PDF document)

Managing the Academics: Commodification and Control in the Development of University Education in the UK 

The Assault on Universities: A Manifesto for Resistance

The contributors to this sharp, well-written collection, many of whom are active participants in the anti-cuts movement, outline what's at stake and why it matters. They argue that university education is becoming increasingly skewed towards vocational degrees, which devalues the arts and social sciences – subjects that allow creativity and political inquiry to flourish.

Higher Education Becomes a Globally Traded Commodity as Demand Soars

 "There is almost no industry that has survived the global downturn as higher education has. That means there are boardrooms around the world saying, 'Where can we put our money so it can survive the next crisis and we can continue to grow?' What we are about to see is a huge private investment into international higher education."

The Commodification of Death

In modern industrial Western technological societies , death has become a commodity; something that can be bought and sold in the market place. Death as a natural phenomena is death that is most common and expected even planned , produced, purchased and consumed.  In the new millennia death has become a commodity that is consumed through carefully planned and socially demanded medical services. Most people die of heart disease and then cancer in their 70's in a clinical setting such as a hospital or nursing home.   This death is the LAST PURCHASE the last act the individual performs in a consumer oriented society and in the process the individual becomes an OBJECT.  We live and die as consumers, clients, patients, calls, cadavers, transplant resources.