Does capitalism drive towards the commodification of everything?

Abstract

The claim that capitalism drives to commodify everything is widely made in late-20th century and early-21st century critical political economy and plays a central role in prominent theoretical frameworks and texts. The argument is, however, rarely articulated in any detail, and proponents do not explain why capitalism would drive to commodify not just very many things but everything. In this paper I carry out the first systematic review and critique of works making the claim. I show that the literature fails to define ‘everything’ and ‘the commodification of everything’ and identify significant weaknesses in the six implicit argumentative strategies these works employ. I also show that positions that might appear to reject the claim do not get traction on it. In the second section I reconstruct the argument by defining terms, positing six commodifying mechanisms that should emerge from capitalism’s core features, and searching for ‘things’ the literature has ignored. The search draws especially on historical research into surprising examples of commodified violence, governance, authority and monopoly. My analysis both greatly expands the literature’s theoretical and empirical scope and argues that capitalism generates decommodifying drives with respect to certain key ‘things’. Capitalism does not drive towards ‘the commodification of everything’ under any non-trivial definition of the latter term.