2 On commoditization

Keith Hart

I. Human society has evolved in our epoch to an unprecedented level of econ-

omic integration. The central feature of this development is a division of
labour which embraces ever-widening circles of humanity in a single nexus
of commodity production and exchange. Almost all modern social theory
is an attempt to grasp the implications of this fact. At the heart of the
issue lies the definition of a process identified variously as the growth of
capitalism, market economy, industrialism, etc. The elementary concept in
this process is the commodity. The limited objective of what follows is to
clarify the meaning of this term and to define the evolutionary tendency
which, for want of a better expression, I will call commoditization.
It is usually not difficult to find a word for something distinctive. But,
once we have found it, certain logical consequences normally ensue. The
most important of these is that phenomena excluded by the term form a
single category opposed to it in a dualistic negation. Moreover, language
has the effect of reducing the infinite variations of matter in time and
space to ideal abstractions (i.e. words) whose principal virtue as vehicles of
communication is that the meanings they convey are presumably static. It is
thus not an idiosyncratic quirk of modern social science that it be obsessed
with polarized dualities. It is very hard for us to think in any other way. If
we label something V , our discourse depends on supposing that its mean-
ing will stay the same long enough for a linguistic community to come to
share it. This 'x' then defines, at least residually, what it is not ('not x')
and sometimes generates a paired opposition ('minus x'). When 'x' is a his-
torically emergent feature assumed to be dominant in our day, it is not
unusual for history itself to be represented as the restructuring of 'not x'
by 'x' or even as the dialectical struggle between'—x' and 'x\ It is one thing
to recognize this mundane aspect of our thought. It is something else again,
however, to escape from its intellectual limitations.
The pervasiveness of commerce in modern life begs us to conceive of its
negation..The idea of the absence of buying and selling evokes what has
been called variously 'natural economy', 'self-sufficient subsistence' and
'primitive communism'. This state is in turn destroyed or replaced by the
38

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 On commoditization
market and ultimately by industrial capitalism in its several forms. One
reads frequently of a transition from subsistence to commercial economy
or of a modernization process which depends on the growing significance
of commodities where they were previously absent.1 If the commodity is
thus an expression of divided labour made social by means of some trans-
action, then its antithesis is self-sufficiency, i.e. labour performed by one-
self for oneself. No one can gainsay that modern society rests on an
advanced division of labour made possible by the production and circu-
lation of commodities on a large scale, nor that this process was less devel-
oped in all previous periods of human history. But, once we seek to ident-
ify this evolution with words, the many gradations of history give way to
huge leaps across ideal barriers established by our definitional vocabulary.
Thus, let us define a commodity. For example, 'a commodity is some-
thing useful that may be bought and sold'. Whatever 'buying' is, we now
know that, where it is absent, there are no commodities. We must next
find other words for non-commodity transactions, and the distinction
between one type and the other assumes great categorical significance. His-
tory itself may be reconstructed as a problem of transition or as a non-
linear oscillation between two great categories of social thought. Moreover,
the way is open for scholars to dispute what the commodity really is: 'all
commodities have both use value and exchange value', 'the essence of the
commodity is reciprocity'. Before long we have forgotten why we wanted
to define the commodity in the first place and learning degenerates into an
argument about reified words. Nor is this phenomenon restricted to econ-
omic history: the pattern is repeated whenever social enquiry is made to
hinge on defining some great trans-historical object such as the state, the
city or science.
There is, of course, one way out of the dilemma, which is to deny that
it exists. The logic of the above is inexorably dialectical: the commodity
grows out of and continues to transform that which it is not. But modern
economics conceives only of a world of commodities structured by its own
marginalist logic. In this way what Adam Smith saw as a historical process,
whereby every man becomes in part a merchant, has been transformed by
his latter-day successors into a universal calculus knowing no empirical
negation of itself. This is the root of the failure of economic science - that
it cannot grasp the human past, present or future.
I argue that the definition of commodity economy should be set firmly
within an understanding of human social evolution as a totality, that is, as
a process of commoditization which is always partial and therefore dialec-
tical. Moreover, I insist that the definition of what the commodity is and
39
Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 Keith Hart
is not should be organized as a hierarchical set of descriptions which
reflects both a kind of logical abstraction and the course of human history
itself. The central idea is that commoditization is synonymous with one
major aspect of our species' evolution; as such it has many concrete mani-
festations in our past and present and may take several courses in the
future. From this point of view, while we are condemned to accord our
own times great prominence in any attempted definition of commodity
economy, it would be mistaken, for example, to allow the historical domi-
nance of the market in the growth of civil society to influence our investi-
gation in too one-sided a fashion.2 For direct commerce is only one of the
ways people have found to make their labour social through the circulation
of its products.
If 'labour' is the activity of an organism engaged in producing the means
of its continued existence, that labour may be said to be divided when
more than one organism depends routinely on some mutually constituted
specialization in order to produce the needs of each. As the scope of such a
division of labour increases, so too does social interdependence. The
greater the volume of social labour, the more prominent are the mechan-
isms adopted to organize the process. The commodity is human labour
embodied in a good or service offered to society rather than consumed
directly by its producer. As such, commoditization may be defined as the
progressive abstraction of social labour, i.e. as the separation of general-
izable qualities and inherent properties from the concrete persons whose
activities make up the social whole. This process is intrinsic to the evolution
of species in general, but particularly to the history of our own species.

II. The following is a set of definitions of the commodity, each of which

stands in a specific relationship to the rest within a hierarchy of logical
abstraction that is also a putative historical sequence. Each member of the
set presupposes those preceding it, but does not necessarily entail those
following it. For all its Hegelian overtones, this is not teleological history.
The sequence is best described as identifiable stages in the progressive
abstraction of social labour. No one definition may be taken to stand for
the set as a whole, nor is the set finite, but rather a preliminary attempt to
transcend some of the limitations of existing approaches to the problem.

A. The commodity is:

(1) A thing produced for use. The first stage in the abstraction of labour
is its embodiment in an object standing outside the producer.
40

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 On commoditization
(2) Alienated. It is made social by being produced for the use of
another, someone foreign to the unit of production and reproduction.
(3) The product of divided labour. Productive specialization requires and
enhances social interdependence: an interlocking system for the pro-
vision of individual and social needs necessitates organization of
mutual rights and obligations. The founding principle of divided
labour in the human species is sexual.
(4) Circulated by means of exchange. Two-sided reciprocal transfers are
a common, but not the only, way of circulating the products of div-
ided labour.3
(5) Exchanged through the market mechanism. A giant step in the
abstraction of social labour occurs when people make an immediate
determination of quantitative equivalence or exchange value, often
in a routinized setting.
(6) Crystallized as pure exchange value, i.e. money. Money is a com-
modity whose only use is as a means of exchange.
(7) Used as capital to make profit. When money is used to make more
money, it constitutes a new active principle in social life.
(8) Deployed as industrial capital, to purchase means of production -
both produced (machines, raw materials) and non-produced (labour,
land). The wage form is a crucial step in the abstraction of social
labour since human beings now buy and sell their own productive
capacities.
(9) Predominantly human labour itself, when services come to outweigh
goods in the sphere of commoditized production.
(10) An abstract cipher. Social labour is measured directly, without
material transfer, as computerized transactions which represent
human subjects as numbers in information-processing machines.

Each of the ten steps listed above represents a further degree of abstrac-
tion of human labour from the original condition of organic life, namely
from an immediate material symbiosis between the individual and nature.
The progress of the social division of labour requires the detachment of
human activity from its material context, so that heterogeneous goods and
services may find some measure of equivalence in society. In this process,
value is quantified and generalized, the formal apparatus of social life is
made more elaborate and dominant.4 Finally, stripped of its embodiment
in things, human labour is revealed as a fully social, abstracted quantity.
This evolution is a process of commoditization, in which a series of com-
modity forms succeed in enhancing the social potentialities of humanity,
41

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 Keith Hart
while undermining the concrete authenticity of a simpler past. Not one
form alone ('the commodity is x'), but the series as a whole ('commodi-
tization is steps 1-10 . . . n') best defines the economic tendency of human
history.
The first step in the definition of the commodity (Al) generates a
residual category (Bl), what the commodity is not. Al spawns A2, the
next step in defining the commodity, thereby creating within A l a residual
category (B2) which falls outside the further restriction imposed by A2.
Within A2 the definition is refined further to include A3 and exclude B3.
This progressive sequence of definitions and negations may be represented
as a hierarchy of abstraction, in both the conceptual and descriptive senses
of the word (see Figure 2.1).
The point is that commoditization is a dialectical process: the series A
1-10 is not sufficient by itself. Every step generates a new category of
excluded phenomena which are just as crucial to an understanding of the
social evolution I am describing. The set of negations is as follows.
B. The commodity is not:
(1) Something which is not the product of human labour; something
produced which is not useful; an aspect of human interaction (e.g. a
service) which is not objectified as a produced thing.
(2) Produced for one's own use or for the use of a unit with which one is
identified. The concept of alienation, depending as it does on an
insider/outsider distinction, is clearly relative to the boundary defin-
ing the other.
(3) A thing given in the absence of a division of labour, for the sake of
sociability and even reproduction; for example, certain marriage
transactions in primitive homogeneous societies.
(4) One-sided transfers in which direct reciprocity is denied and asym-
metry is emphasized: tribute, extortion, public finance, sacrifice,

The commodity is X The commodity is not

Al X Bl

A2 X \ B2
/ N
\
A3 X B3
/ '\
A4 X
(etc.)

Fig. 2.1 Commoditization as a hierarchy of abstraction

42
Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 On commoditization
redistribution, charity. This is the economic dimension of all hier-
archical structures of domination, both temporary and lasting.
(5) Transfers in which there is no determination of value by reciprocal
exchange of equivalents, e.g. some systems of delayed gift return.
(6) Commodities that have some use in addition to serving as a form of
currency and all items which are sold merely for use.
(7) Money spent passively on consumption, rather than being invested to
accumulate more money.
(8) Earlier forms of capital - merchant's capital (buying and selling
products) and usurer's capital (making money with money alone);
neither form is directly involved in production.
(9) The first phase of industrial capitalism, when primary and secondary
production predominate and much labour is still not sold for wages.
(10) When commodity relations still involve material things more than
computerized abstractions.
One curious feature of this set of definitions is that the commodity has
shifted from being a material product of human labour (Al) to a rational
abstraction of the labour process (AlO). Commoditization is thus the evol-
ution of the social division of labour from an embryonic stage, where
human activity is alienated in the form of material products, to the ad-
vanced condition of modern service economies in which people are paid
and evaluated through complex information systems. This dematerializ-
ation of some aspects of commodity economy has been a major impedi-
ment to analyses which seek to place primitive and modern economies
within a single framework of structural comparison. It is because the dia-
lectical processes discussed here are real, and not just the products of a
philosophical imagination, that they cannot be abolished by positivistic
incantations.
III. It is clear from the above that the evolution of commodity economy
has been in large part synonymous with the expansion of the market. But
the market reflects and enhances the progress of the division of labour,
whereby producers become increasingly differentiated. Intensification of
specialized production for an expanded market often requires larger inputs
of money capital. The entry of capital into production (which is at first
mostly agricultural) speeds up technological innovation, with impressive
consequences for the growth of human productivity. Looked at as a
material process, this is industrialization. But, when the bulk of workers
buy what they need out of wages received from the owners of capital, we
may speak of industrial capitalism. This has been the main force for change
43

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 Keith Hart
in the modern world. Industrial capitalism (a term which embraces the
mechanization of agriculture) is thus the most advanced phase of a process
of economic development which begins with small-scale production and
exchange of commodities.
Within the overall sequence of commoditization, therefore, it makes
sense to emphasize the distinction between capitalist commodity produc-
tion and those other forms of commodity production (pre-capitalist or
non-capitalist) where people do not normally sell their own labour as a
commodity. These latter forms may - and often do - coexist with organ-
ized capital in the shape of merchants, bankers and industrialists from
both home and abroad. The offer of goods for sale by direct producers is
most often found where economic organization is small-scale and the div-
ision of labour weakly developed. The sale of wage labour to capitalist pro-
duction units opens up the way to a massive unleashing of industrial and
commercial forces.
All that I have said on this topic so far is a selective paraphrase of Marx,
omitting most of what he had to say on the subject of surplus value and
class struggle.5 But Marx stuck closely to the liberal market model of econ-
omic evolution and thereby limited his vision to those steps in the defi-
nition of commoditization where the market was dominant (A5-8), losing
sight of the origins of the commodity (Al-4) and of its possible further
evolution (A9,10). It is, of course, perfectly acceptable to restrict the con-
cept of the commodity to acts of purchase and sale, but such a categor-
ization leads us to draw too strong a line between commerce and other
economic forms, including those dominated by the state. Above all, a defi-
nition along these lines obscures the manifest similarities between all the
societies which have developed an advanced division of labour, including
the planned economies of the communist bloc. When the commodity is
seen to be a device linked to the abstraction of social labour, the market
may be understood as only one possible mechanism out of several.
Marx defined a commodity as an object produced for others having
both use value and exchange value.6 Exchange value can only be deter-
mined where products enter routinely into immediate exchange with each
other. So, for Marx, the commodity is synonymous with markets, and his
definition embraces all of steps 1-5 above, leaving the emergence of money
capital and the commoditization of labour as the distinctive features of the
modern age. The universalization of capitalist commodity production
makes it possible for the first time, according to Marx, to see the simple,
general categories underlying human economy. So the most primitive
forms are entailed in the most developed expression of commodity econ-
44

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 On commoditization
omy; and his main analytical effort is directed, teleologically, at the most
recent part of a historical process of evolution. In taking this position,
Marx is not alone: most of us, self-consciously or otherwise, derive our con-
cepts from the emphases most apparent in our day.
An alternative approach, typified by the work of Mauss (following
Durkheim and inspiring Levi-Strauss),7 is to define the commodity very
generally as something synonymous with human society itself, as
reciprocity - a two-sided material flow through which elementary social
relations are constituted. Utility is denied (i.e. division of labour as a pre-
condition), the transfer may be asymmetrical and the market mechanism is
subsumed under a universal category corresponding to step 2 above -
primitive alienation of things or persons as the means of expanding society's
horizons. The burden of analysis thus falls, according to a genetic logic, on
the most primitive manifestation of the general propensity, on the origins
of human society in the gift, exogamy, or whatever. Despite their confused
treatment of the process of human social evolution (which they both
accept and deny at once), Mauss et al. are particularly good at illuminating
that part of the process which Marx more or less left out, namely the
emergence of advanced commodity economy out of a social order that was
at first constituted according to other principles (i.e. the self-reproduction
of small, 'natural' groups). In this way the otherness of primitive humanity
is not sacrificed to a teleological vision of our common destiny; but the
distinctive forces driving modern history are lost through their non-
dialectical emphasis on the universal in human social life.
Despite their complementary focus on production and exchange, on the
telos and genesis of economic life, Marx and Mauss identify much the same
elements in the growth of commodity economy. At this point a detailed
comparison of Pre-capitalist Economic Formations* and Essay on the Gift
can only be represented by a brief summary. For Marx human history is a
dialectic of man-nature interaction, marked by growing social activity in
which two processes are dominant - (1) individualization of the animal
herd (evolution of the 'self and of the 'free-thinker'); (2) separation of
mankind from the earth as natural laboratory.

The original conditions of production cannot initially be themselves

produced. What requires explanation is not the unity of living and
active human beings with the natural, inorganic conditions of their
metabolism with nature and therefore their appropriation of nature;
nor is this the result of a historic process. What we must explain is
the separation of these inorganic conditions of human existence
45

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 Keith Hart
from this active existence, a separation which is only fully completed
in the relationship between wage labour and capital (Marx 1973:
489).

Capitalism is the highest form of human social development (and the

most developed manifestation of commodity economy) because (1) the
individual is objectified in private property and therefore in thought and
social life: (2) both labour and means of production (capital) are 'free' and
therefore capable of self-expansion; (3) as a mass of produced objects
standing outside mankind, capitalism reveals our humanity to us and
destroys religion. In contrast, the primitive commune through which man-
kind originally settled down on the earth is dominated by nature and by
social forms binding men to the earth - (1) the chief, objective condition
of labour is nature, not the products of labour and (2) membership in the
community generates an attitude to the land which is antecedent to the
working of it. The final dissolution of old communal forms of production
only occurs when capital (1) dissolves the relationship between the mass of
labour and the earth; (2) destroys labourers' ownership of the instruments
of labour; (3) eliminates labourers' access to social means of consumption
prior to production; (4) dissolves relations where the labourers themselves
(e.g. slaves or serfs) are a direct part of the objective conditions of pro-
duction as such. In the end, capital replaces men with machines and new
forms of society may be constructed on the basis of a wholly new balance
between the forces of society and those of nature.
Mauss' implicit evolutionary model runs remarkably parallel to Marx's
argument in Grundrisse. Humanity develops exchange as a means of miti-
gating danger, both of nature and warfare. It does so at first by establishing
social relationships with mystical beings. The primitive community per-
forms labour on nature in order to consume and reproduce itself: it sacri-
fices to the gods to maintain supply and ensure peace. This is the model
for external relationships with other groups. The reciprocity of sacrifice
(do utdes) emerges as a basic principle of social justice. Social life depends
on men engaging in intercourse with each other through the circulation of
spiritual matter, the gift. The gift collapses the distinction between self and
other; but the separation of the moments of exchange in time creates the
possibility, at least temporarily, of dominance on the part of the gift giver.
The modern contract, guaranteed by state law, contrasts starkly with the
gift in that the immediate equivalence of the things exchanged and their
separation from persons speak of a social equality which is not threatened
by the hostility of bargaining. For Mauss there is clearly an evolution from

46
Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 On commoditization
sacrifice to total prestations between primitive groups to individual gift
exchange between representatives of groups to impersonal commerce. This
corresponds to a shift from the religion of the primitive commune via
increasing internal differentiation and hierarchy to state contract law.
Hence the revolutionary significance of the Roman distinction between
ius in rem and ius in personam, fracturing the original unity of man and
nature in social life.
There are thus several evolutionary sequences present in the history of
exchange: (1) the separation of things from persons; (2) the increasing
individuation of the contract; (3) the growing significance of equality in
exchange (the principle of equivalent returns); and (4) the progressive
abstraction/objectification of concepts applied to the analysis of exchange.
In this way Mauss echoed Marx's assumption that the secularization of
society involves a separation of human activity from the material world;
that advanced commodity economy is a source of social equality; and that
individuation is linked both to all of the above and to the growth of
abstract logic. Both Marx and Mauss saw the contradictions in these devel-
opments, but they drew different political conclusions from their obser-
vations.
This brief excursion into intellectual history may serve to place my
earlier remarks on commoditization within a context that is larger than
one man's private musings. There are differences enough between Marxism
and the Annee Sociologique: I have chosen here to highlight a common
element in the thought of Marx and Mauss, individuals whose thought was
more complex than that of many of their followers. I suggested that the
commodity is at first a produced object standing outside the producer and,
later, a price put on labour which may never be materialized as an object.
This contradiction defines, as genesis and telos respectively, a single evol-
utionary process in which the commodity becomes ever more abstract.
The work of Marx and Mauss shows how such an understanding reflects the
historical separation of active human society from the material nexus of
production and reproduction that is basic to organic existence.

IV. The test of this semantic discussion of commoditization is whether or

not it clarifies our analysis of industrial capitalism's contradictory march
through our age. No such analysis will be attempted here, but some general
remarks about modern economic history may give the abstract language of
earlier passages a more concrete application.
The main historic task of industrial capitalism has been to transform the
self-sufficient labour of domestic groups into a social circuit of commodity
47

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 Keith Hart
production and exchange. The destruction of tribal and feudal organization
around the world is well known: commodity economy must expand into
that which it is not and replace existing forms with more suitable insti-
tutions. But more general than this is the process whereby people every-
where are driven to substitute commodities (paid for out of remunerations
for their own specialized services) for what they had previously done for
themselves. This dialectic of commoditization was not finished with the
explosion of factory work in the West during the nineteenth century. The
period since the second world war has seen a fantastic invasion of domestic
life by commodity economy, especially in the industrialized countries -
children are looked after outside the home from the cradle to their mid-
twenties and home cooking has begun to be replaced with fast-food res-
taurants and other commodity substitutes. Yet, on a global scale, the
socialization of domestic economy is barely begun and still has far to go,
even in the countries with the most advanced division of labour. The mech-
anism promoting this growth is the rising productivity of labour which con-
stantly raises the value of personal time and cheapens the cost of replacing
unspecialized domestic labour with commodities. It cannot be over-
emphasized that commodity exchange is intrinsically linked to, even driven
by, tendencies in the organization of production.
I have said that commoditization is a dialectical process, by which I
mean that forces of opposition and negation are generated by its evolution.
For example, naturalistic ideologies of self-sufficiency and conservative
reaction in many forms are a clear manifestation of hostility to some
aspects of commoditization in industrial capitalist societies. At the same
time, many people now spend a high proportion of their days in activities
for which they are not paid. If commoditization seems to diminish the
quality of life, this growing zone of private work affords many oppor-
tunities for the elaboration of forms of production which are relatively
free of the larger society's alienating presence. As the scope of public inter-
vention in private lives increases, so too does the sphere of personal choice.
Some may not count the two tendencies equal, but it should be recognized
that the latter is not necessarily enhanced by retreat from the advanced
commodity-producing division of labour.
But the biggest question raised in this enquiry refers to commoditization
and socialism. Is the communist state built around the negation of com-
modity economy, or is it just a variant of the complex society that grows
up around any advanced division of labour? The answer depends largely on
whether one defines the commodity narrowly, as Marx and orthodox
enonomics did, or more widely, as I have done in this paper. Even on the

48

Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]
 On commoditization
narrow definition, it would be hard to deny that Russians mostly live by
earning wages, or that forced transfers to federal and state governments are
significant in the American economy. It may be that the range of possibil-
ities in any advanced economy is relatively limited. Although I have
focused here on the problem of conceptualizing commoditization, it is an
urgently necessary task to investigate empirically what concrete difference
it makes when commodities are produced and circulated under the aus-
pices of the market or by means of state organization. It would be ironic if
we were all to be blown up in the name of 'fundamental' oppositions
which are illusory in practice.

49
Downloaded from [Link] University of Prince Edward Island, on 06 Sep 2020 at 22:30:38, subject to the
Cambridge Core terms of use, available at [Link]
[Link]