Abstract
The environmental consequences of the overconsumption of natural resources are increasingly recognized. This article introduces the theme of this special issue of Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society: commoditization as a mechanism driving societies to overdevelop the economy of market goods and services and the relations of economic exchange; and underdevelop the economy of care and connection and the relations of community and ecosystems. The origins of the author’s development of a theory commoditization are described and traced to questions arising from experience at the 1992 Earth Summit. The traits associated with commodities are contrasted with those nonmarket goods that are inherently difficult to commoditize. The presence or absence of these traits defines “commodity potential.” A Darwinian-like selection pressure is described that privileges those things with high commodity potential. In the competition for the resources of development—energy and material resources and, human attention, ingenuity, and labor—those things with high commodity potential will always outcompete those with low commodity potential. The effects of this commoditization mechanism are explored in the articles in this special issue.
Introduction
In my attempts to better understand the system dynamics driving environmental devastations wrought by the ever-increasing consumption and waste of energy and material resources, I chose to analyze the pervasive tendency in contemporary economies to turn virtually everything possible into some form of marketable product. Using the metaphor of Darwinian natural selection, I described a mechanism by which the specific traits or characteristics associated with commodities endowed their carriers with an advantage in accessing valuable developmental resources such as investment capital, energy and materials, and perhaps most important, human attention, ingenuity, and labor. I called this selection mechanism, Commoditization to emphasize the active nature of the verb “to commoditize” and the powerful role it plays in determining the direction of economic development.
My work on commoditization (Manno, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2010) was a result of my encounter with the hopeful concept of sustainable development and its many discouragements. In 1992, I attended the first Earth Summit, known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). UNCED was the largest gathering of world heads of state ever assembled. President after President and Prime Minister after Prime Minister stood at the podium at the conference center outside Rio de Janeiro and called for something known as sustainable development, an imagined form of economic and social progress that would achieve prosperity without undermining the resource base and ecological stability that made prosperity possible. It seemed that no one in the world was against sustainable development. The public forum of nongovernment organizations and its approximately 20,000 environment development activists who gathered in a Rio park were even more enthusiastic than the government officials about the project to develop communities and ways of life in which people thrived while living lightly on the earth.
A dizzying array of organizational and technological possibilities were on display in a festival atmosphere; everything from Mayan-inspired fish farming in irrigation canals, reusable and recyclable materials, electric buses, to ratio transportation systems; enough to make the 40 chapters of Agenda 21, and UNCED’s implementation plan appear to be already on the cusp of realization. And yet from my observation, what might have been a global celebration of sustainability, one that would unleash technological and social creativity globally, was instead largely a ritual of futility and pessimism.
We understand the consequences of unsustainable forms of development and the need to be careful about our impacts on the natural world, and have understood these for decades and perhaps for thousands of years, then why is it so profoundly difficult for us to change it? Why don’t we put at least as much attention and resources toward conserving energy and materials as we do mining and harvesting more and more? Why can’t we put as much attention and resources on developing good public transportation as we do on more muscle bound jeeps? Why don’t we reduce waste generation before we reuse, and reuse before we recycle, and recycle before we burn or landfill? Why not do as much research into organic agriculture as the fertilizer and pesticide industries do on their R&D? Why not spend as much on disease prevention as we do on pharmaceuticals and high-tech treatments? Why not spend more on energy conservation than on oil exploration? Given the threats to the habitability of our planet and the mess we may be leaving to our children and grandchildren, the choices are logical and obvious. And yet, there is little sign that we will soon fund ecologically sensible forms of development anywhere near as generously as we have ecologically destructive ones. What’s in the way of turning at least as much of our collective human energy and creativity now toward protecting and sustaining our air, water, soils, and communities as we have in the past into producing cars, computers, gadgets, new fabrics, new toothpaste, better cosmetics, improved drugs, and so on? The question has many corollaries such as the following: Why do we put so much more of our health resources toward treatment of illness rather than maintaining health? Why do we invest so much more in soil additives than we do in soil protection? Why do highways get so much more resources than urban public transportation? Why do the design of weapons of war get so much more R&D attention than the development and promotion of the skills and techniques of peacemaking? Why does it cost so much more to repair a radio than it does to purchase a new one?
Part of the answer to each of these questions has something to do with the fact that it’s simpler to work with things and engineering abstractions than it is to work with people and systems. It is easier to pay attention to commercial goods than the services they are meant to provide. It is easier to produce one huge power plant and distribute the electricity than it is to retrofit homes and redesign manufacturing to save the same amount of electricity the plant can produce. It is easier to produce medicines and devices than it is to educate people on healthy ways of life, to coordinate public hygiene programs, or to create the conditions in which people care enough about themselves to take good care of their bodies. It’s easier to threaten with the newest and best weapons than it is to resolve conflicts. It’s easier for everyone to get into their own cars on their own schedule than it is to coordinate the movements of large numbers of people in mass transit systems. It’s easier to design spacecraft and calculate launch trajectories than it is to build healthy communities. It’s easier to throw things out and replace them with new things than to organize a system of repair and maintenance. At one level, the source of the imbalance between technological and social development is just that things are easier to work with than people. We naturally settle for that which is simplest.
There is something else, however, that each of these examples demonstrates. The medicines and equipment of treatment are somewhat easier to own, package, and sell than are the tools and techniques of prevention. The power plant not only produces power but also concentrates it. The weapons of war are simpler to sell than the skills of negotiation. Likewise, a transportation system built around personal automobiles involves many more opportunities to package and sell than does a coordinated system of public transit. Soil additives, chemical fertilizers, and insecticides are all products patented, packaged, distributed, and sold. The farmer who knows her soil and through skill and hard work she recycles nutrients from the farm and protects the soil from erosion and overuse has as her most important product, her knowledge and skill that can’t be easily packaged and sold. The new radio is easier to market than the skills of the repairman.
Most of the sustainability solutions proposed in Agenda 21 and elsewhere had something in common, they shared certain qualities, and these qualities created a kind of friction or inertia that served as an impediment to or slowed down commercialization; they were all relational, they involved relations between people or between people and the earth. Relational goods exist only in the context of place and community. The difficulty in commercializing relational goods is that they can’t be separated from relationships that bring them into being and sustain them. Once separated from the relational context they lose value, sometimes precipitously. I may value my friendship with you, but the value I obtain from that relationship cannot be taken from it and transferred to someone else. You can’t give your friend away. You may value my knowledge of the soil, hydrology, and the contours of my farmland, but my knowledge can’t be transferred to you for use in another region with different soil, climate, and landscape. Those things that can be transferred, bought, and sold have the quality of commodities. Those that are more difficult to transfer, buy, or sell lack those qualities. I thus referred to these qualities as conferring on things a degree of commodity potential (see Table 1). The differences between things with high and low commodity potential are illustrated in Table 2.
Traits of Goods and Services With High and Low Commodity Potential (Manno, 2010)
Commodity Potential (Manno, 2002)
If things that function well as commodities are systematically favored over those things that function less well as commodities then the result will be an economy and society rich in the goods of economic exchange and poor in the goods of relations, between people and between people and the earth. In effect, what we call modernization has meant the ascendancy of market logic and relations over and above and at the expense of the logic and relations of community and habitat. Commoditization leads to the underdevelopment of the economy of relationships (the spheres of community and habitat) and overdevelopment of the economy of things (the sphere of the market).
The allocation of resources happens continuously. Personally we each decide where to place what is perhaps our most important resource, our attention; as well as deciding how to spend our money. Governments large and small are making purchasing and personnel decisions. Large corporations are making large investments. Financiers and amateur investors are directing the money they manage hoping to outperform competitors in the global casino called financial investment. Each of these decisions will result in the allocation of limited resources to particular ends. Out of these trillions of decisions the future is made.
If there are particular preferences privileging certain types of goods over others, even if the preferences are hidden in an aura of inevitability and rational choice and operate largely unconsciously, then over time and over trillions of transactions those preferences will have a large effect on what is invested in and what is manifested in the world around us. This is how commoditization operates as a selection pressure shaping the evolution of technology, society, and science.
What suddenly became clear was that if any of the wildly creative sustainability solutions on display in Rio were to flourish they were going to need substantial investments of the key economic resources: energy, materials, and equally important, people’s time, attention, and creativity. There would be intense competition for these valuable and limited resources. And, in that competition, commodities would have the upper hand. The noncommodity goods of relations that populated what I came to call the economy of care and connection, would go begging for the resources necessary for their development. The competition for essential resources would play out over trillions of investment decisions around the world. This competition would likely undermine the chances for sustainable development unless humankind made a deliberate decision to do what Tom Princen in this special issue calls “countering commoditization.”
I recalled Marx’s 19th-century musings on the fetishism of commodities, how the organizational logic of industrial production left workers’ themselves only vaguely conscious of the final goods they produced and those who bought the products of their work were mostly unaware of the workers, the resources, or the conditions in which goods were produced. Goods entered the market and became unhinged from earthly relations, transcendent. This fetishism, Marx philosophized, undermined people’s awareness of the connectedness and reciprocal dependence among people and between people and nature, including those of nature’s raw materials that became embedded in commodities.
Karl Polanyi in the Great Transformation showed how the steady expansion of market economies led to economic aspects of life overwhelming the political and the social aspects of life in terms of their influence over the shape of the world and our experience of it. Polanyi argued that by transforming work, money, and nature into commodities, industrial capitalism would unleash regular economic and social crises. Yet with all the influence that Marx and Polanyi have had on social and cultural theory, there has been little if any description or analysis of the micro level details of how commoditization operates as an ongoing force through acting as a selection pressure distorting economic and social development.
This special issue introduces new analyses of how commoditization distorts the character and progressive development of specific goods (biofuels [Montefrio], fisheries [Lam and Pitcher], menstrual products [Davidson], and the mistreatment of animals [McLeod-Kilmurray]). These topics were not selected for their representativeness as models of the impacts of commoditization. Rather, the authors were selected as having focused on their particular topic through the lens of commoditization theory and, in doing so, have derived new insights to familiar problems. The two other articles (Princen and Kidner) focus less on specific case studies but rather take on the task of further developing commoditization theory. Kidner draws attention to the social psychological implications of the tearing apart of the connection between human meaning and ecology; Princen toward appreciating the contemporary political possibilities opening for countering and perhaps reversing the effects of commoditization. Princen points to new forms of relational decision-making emphasizing collective responsibilities in addition to individual rights; an emerging political discourse based in ecological principles, and a (necessary) relocalization of economic life based on knowledge of place and an ecological awareness of the connectedness of the human community to the ecosystems within which they are embedded. Princen argues, and I accept, that the power of commoditization to distort social development increased dramatically with the widespread availability of cheap fossil fuels. The coming peak in the availability of cheap energy opens space for alternative economic models oriented toward relational (ecological) goods and services.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.