Everything you always wanted [will need] to know about (de)commodification (Patrick Bond, Debate List, SAfrica)

Despite Patrick's friendly gesture toward labour movements below, the concept of 'commodification' and its 'de-' has not figured prominently, or even implicitly, in international union discourse over the past decades. Like 'the commons' - with which it is closely related - 'decommodification' surely needs to be included in any global labour movement campaign today. At least in any that wants to surpass the social-liberal and class-collaborationist campaign of 'Decent Work'. Or, for that matter, the rhetorical campaigns of Communists and other traditional leftists for a 'socialism' that concerns itself primarily with capturing the state and nationalising corporations.

Decommodification

 

By Patrick Bond

Capital’s inner drive is to commodify – put a price and then trade – everything under the sun. Even the air has been commodified through (malfunctioning) carbon markets. The current period of deregulated, privatized, globalized, financialized neoliberalism is oriented to that end, through class war waged from above, through public policy imposed from Washington, through capital’s trajectory of accumulation, through austerity that served bankers, through bailouts that served bankers, through geopolitical developments, through the appropriation of the environment for commodification, and through the management of crises in ways that displaced rather than resolved underlying contradictions.

 

Since the earliest emergence of markets and commercial power, those resisting commodification have turned to mutual aid systems. Since the Poor Laws of the 1830s, since the welfare state began with Bismarck’s late 19^th century reforms, since the Russian Revolution of 1917 briefly raised hopes for socialist alternatives, and since 20^th century Scandinavian social policy advocacy aimed to link the interests of poor and working people across the rural-urban divide, the national state was the preferred vehicle.

 

 

Commodification/decommodification double movements

Source: Michael Burawoy

 

 

The way Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation explained commodification and decommodification processes was as a ‘double movement’: “the market expanded continuously but this movement was met by a countermovement checking the expansion in definite directions. Vital though such a countermovement was for the protection of society, in the last analysis it was incompatible with the self- regulation of the market, and thus with the market system itself.” For Polanyi, the backlash after the first globalization of capital peaked in 1914 “was more than the usual defensive behaviour of society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being.”

 

But with the recent shift away from mid-20^th century Keynesian, social-democratic politics thanks to the accumulation crisis of the 1970s, the responsibility for advancing decommodification has fallen on social movement activists sometimes in collaboration with labour movements and environmentalists, and often working across borders because of common global-scale enemies such as multinational corporations and multilateral banks. This process began with the push for genuine democratization of peripheral states during the 1970s-90s at a time when Third World debt crises and ‘IMF Riots’ against austerity left even brutal military regimes incapable of governing, first in southern Europe, then the southern cone of Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe and many African states. But the democratisations were truncated and ‘low-intensity’ because economic policy was off the table. Even centre-left Northern political parties adopted or continued the neoliberal regime, as their core proletarian support faded.

 

The double movement was inevitable, and from the mid-1990s, with the inspiration of Zapatista critiques of Mexican free trade which adversely affected peasant and indigenous agriculture, more social movements made decommodification central to their advocacy, campaigning and revolutions. The most successful was perhaps the early 2000s fight to end intellectual property rights monopolies on AntiRetroViral (ARV) medicines to treat AIDS, which South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign won against Big Pharma, against hostile governments in Washington and Pretoria, and against the World Trade Organisation, resulting in millions of poor people now getting free access to ARVs that in the late 1990s cost $15,000/year/person.

 

A typical social struggle for the decommodification of, for instance, water, against the World Bank and water privatisers, would:

 

• assure that there is a universal free lifeline tariff that allows all consumers to have a decent supply available every day;

• valorise the ‘public goods’ (and ‘merit goods’) associated with water, e.g. public health benefits, gender equity, economic multipliers, environmental factors and geographical desegregation, which are typically ignored in the private commodity model of water consumption;

• impose a luxury consumption charge on wealthy and overconsumptive households and businesses, so as to disincentive high volume use, both for conservation purposes and to cross-subsidise universal free lifeline water;

• provide legislative and even constitutional protection for consumers so as to realise their ‘right’ to water in a manner that empowers citizens and workers, not bureaucrats.

 

The moves to decommodify occur across borders and sectors. The World Social Forum has often been a central site for decommodification struggles to combine, learn and strategize. However, no matter that these are ubiquitous campaigns given capital’s reach and damage, neoliberalism has persisted and in some respects strengthened through its crisis periods: the early 1980s, early 1990s, late 1990s and the 2007-12. This requires that today’s Occupy movements, the Indignados, the Arab Spring, the anti-austerity activists and the single-issue social policy advocates amplify their decommodification alternatives, and connect the dots between each other, so as to realize the enormous potential of a movement of 99 percent of the world’s people, plus the environment, against the commodity form and against uneven and combined processes of capital accumulation.

 

(Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society: http://ccs.ukzn.ac.za)