What is Commodification?

You keep using that word - it does not mean what you think it means.

Leo XIV put out this tweet:

It is important to resist the commodification of basic human needs. Food, water and healthcare cannot be subordinated to market considerations or geopolitical interests. Access to adequate food is a fundamental human right grounded in the dignity of every person. Meeting this need not only alleviates suffering but also addresses underlying causes of geopolitical instability. Indeed, food security is an essential component of global and integral security. - @Pontifex, Jun 22

There’s a word in there that stuck out to me: Commodification.

See, the root word commodity has a very particular meaning: “an economic good, usually a resource, that specifically has full or substantial fungibility: that is, the market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.” - per Wikipedia.

However, in talking with people, and seeing people’s reaction online, it seems we only have a very surface-level understanding of what a commodity is. Everyone is interpreting this as a call for free food, water, and healthcare. It seems that we understand it merely to mean “something bought and sold”. But this is somewhat silly. On one hand, differentiated goods exist; these are not commodities. These are resources that are not equivalent to any other good on the market.

As an exemplar, while pork is a commodity, the pastured pork that I produce with an omega-3 enhanced grain ration and sell directly to consumers is a differentiated good. It now stands out and has a relationship to persons rather than being awash in the market. One has the freedom to choose between my pork and my neighbor’s pork - and thus, find what gives them the highest use value. I also have the liberty to raise this pork for my own private consumption; opting to eschew the market economy altogether.

Commoditization hampers this - and government takeovers of commoditized industries in order to make that commodity free further serve to obliterate (or severely stifle) the production of differentiated goods.

So it gives me much distress when these words are in the context of a document to the UN seemingly advocating for more top-down donation of food and supplies. Perhaps I am wrong - but it certainly seems that this is what is being advocated for. Perhaps the door is open to interpretation and actual decommodification, but without radical and persistent rebuke, encouraging NGOs to work together more will only cause them to continue down the train of thought they are going down - which is hypercommodification.

Making something free does not make it less of a commodity.

It actually has the inverse effect.

Is there a way to actually achieve decommodification? Yes.

The Right to Useful Unemployment

If you have not read much of Ivan Illich - you need to read Illich. The Right To Useful Unemployment is a great introduction to his thought.

Present-day industrial society organizes life around commodities. Our market-intensive societies measure material progress by the increase in the volume and variety of commodities produced. And taking our cue from this sector, we measure social progress by the distribution of access to these commodities. Economics has been developed as propaganda for the takeover by large-scale commodity producers. Socialism has been debased to a struggle against handicapped distribution, and welfare economics has identified the public good with opulence – the humiliating opulence of the poor in the schools, hospitals, jails and asylums of the United States and other western countries.

Again - if we want to stop commodification - the solution is not government takeover of the commodity brokers - the solution is to stop producing commodities, and start solving problems and meeting needs (although, Illich actually doesn’t even like this framing).

Commodification doesn’t require money. It doesn’t even require exchange. All that commodification requires is the ram-rodding of production into a single mode. That is the hallmark of commodification - nothing more, nothing less. This itself is a tragedy, especially for goods that are consumed by people.

Perhaps I am romantic, but it seems that the things that nourish man should not be commodities. We should have rich relationships to the things that nourish us. We should not just act as machines that need routine oil changes.

Illich notes that the production of commodities leads to what he calls “disabling professions” - one doesn’t know how to mend one’s own wounds because they have a doctor, or build one’s own house because there are oppressive building codes:

Beyond a certain threshold, the multiplication of commodities induces impotence, the incapacity to grow food, to sing, or to build. The toil and pleasure of the human condition become a faddish privilege restricted to some of the rich. When Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress, Acatzingo, like most Mexican villages of its size, had four groups of musicians who played for a drink and served the population of eight hundred. Today, records and radios, hooked up to loudspeakers, drown out local talent. Occasionally, in an act of nostalgia, a collection is taken up to bring a band of drop-outs from the university for some special holiday to sing the old songs. On the day Venezuela legislated the right of each citizen to ‘housing’, conceived of as a commodity, three-quarters of all families found that their self-built dwellings were thereby degraded to the status of hovels. Furthermore – and this is the rub – self-building was now prejudiced. No house could be legally started without the submission of an approved architect’s plan. The useful refuse and junk of Caracas, up until then re-employed as excellent building materials, now created a problem of solid-waste disposal. The man who produces his own ‘housing’ is looked down upon as a deviant who refuses to cooperate with the local pressure group for the delivery of mass-produced housing units. Also, innumerable regulations have appeared which brand his ingenuity as illegal, or even criminal. This example illustrates how the poor are the first to suffer when a new kind of commodity castrates one of the traditional subsistence crafts. The useful unemployment of the jobless poor is sacrificed to the expansion of the labour market. ‘Housing’ as a self-chosen activity, just like any other freedom for useful unemployment of time off the job, becomes the privilege of some deviant, often the idle rich. - Illich, RTUE

Free Stuff becomes Forced Stuff

Gimbels, if I get really rank with the clerk, ‘Well I don’t like this’, how I can resolve it? If it really gets ridiculous, I go, ‘Frig it, man, I walk.’ What can this guy do at Gimbels, even if he was the president of Gimbels? He can always reject me from that store, but I can always go to Macy’s. He can’t really hurt me. Communism is like one big phone company. Government control, man. And if I get too rank with that phone company, where can I go? I’ll end up like a schmuck with a dixie cup on a thread.

The prospect of free water doesn’t frighten me overmuch.
The prospect of free food frightens me more.
The prospect of free healthcare sends existential horror through my body.

And no, it’s not about the tax bill. It’s not about the cost at all. It’s about what you get - and what you’re not able to get.

See, healthcare is fundamentally not commodifiable. The level of individualized care needed is - well - individual. Differentiated. No two doctors - or even doctor visits - are the same. And it isn’t as if we could produce measurable standards of care.

I need the freedom to find a doctor that is good. Not just one that is affordable. Single-payer isn’t the problem - it’s the corollary of single-source.

Centralizing hurts the little guy the most. Let’s go back to water actually. Water isn’t water, in case you’ve never been down the water aisle of the grocery store. People buy that stuff as their drinking water even when the tap is right there. Why? Taste. Health.

The rich can afford the expensive water. They can afford filters to remove the chlorine and fluoride that is put in it from a central authority.

But the poor? Not so much. Unless you’re poor in the country. Then, you have a well.

The Right Level of Commodification

It’s worth revisiting this:

Beyond a certain threshold, the multiplication of commodities induces impotence, the incapacity to grow food, to sing, or to build. - Illich, RTUE, emphasis added

It’s not that commodities don’t have their place. It’s useful to be able to buy number-two-yellow-dent-field-corn. It’s useful to buy a 2x4 from the store and know it’ll have a modulus of rupture of at least 6 ksi. But, when I must build my house from these 2x4s, or I must buy that field corn, eschewing vernacular alternatives like the tree hewn from my backyard or the oats in the pasture, the logic of commodity stifles man.

I use the term “must” loosely. If the government subsidizes the cost of something to free but leaves other options open (i.e. free water, but if you want to buy better water you still can), it still over-encourages commoditization, and makes the consumption of commodities mandatory for the poor.

Alternative Modes of Production are Possible

We need to remind ourselves: we don’t have to do commodity production. It is a choice we make. We can choose to buy and sell differentiated goods. We can choose to produce our own goods for private use. (In many cases, I mean “we” as a global “we” - if the laws prohibit such behavior, we can change them.)

Is This The Kingdom?

In light of all this, I invite you to meditate on the words of Our Blessed Lord -

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

As you read this, ask: is Christ, then, calling us to seize the means of production?

Or is he rather calling us to abandon or reform the means of production?