Commodification and Its Discontents

Nicholas Abercrombie

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509529841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Should human organs be bought and sold? Is it right that richer people should be able to pay poorer people to wait in a queue for them? Should objects in museums ever be sold? The assumption underlying such questions is that there are things that should not be bought and sold because it would give them a financial value that would replace some other, and dearly held, human value. Those who ask questions of this kind often fear that the replacement of human by money values – a process of commodification – is sweeping all before it. However, as Nicholas Abercrombie argues, commodification can be, and has been, resisted by the development of a moral climate that defines certain things as outside a market. That resistance, however, is never complete because the two regimes of value – human and money – are both necessary for the sustainability of society. His analysis of these processes offers a thought-provoking read that will appeal to students and scholars interested in market capitalism and culture.

1
Money Talk

John Self, the central character of Martin Amis’ novel Money, lives in a world of money, having it or not having it, having a great deal of it but trying to get more, thinking about it and talking about it. Money almost constitutes his world, it seeps into its interstices, it flows, it surrounds in its liquidity. As John Self says: ‘In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out. You can’t drop out any more. Money has seen to that. There’s nowhere to go. You cannot hide out from money’ (Amis, 2005: 153). But, at the same time, a moneyed world of this kind is unreal. It presents a surface appearance of ease, of luxury, of plenitude. John Self is able fully to indulge his gargantuan appetites for food, sex and alcohol. But underneath this surface, there is both deception and corruption. Self is systematically and intentionally deceived by almost every person he comes across, to the point that he loses all his money. At the same time, the pursuit of his excesses, particularly alcohol, destroys him as a person. There is redemption at the end of the book but that requires the loss of his money together with the realization that money will not buy a life that is morally or spiritually satisfying. Self muses: ‘Maybe money is the great conspiracy, the great fiction. The great addiction too: we’re all addicted and we can’t break the habit now … You can’t get the money monkey off your back’ (Amis, 2005: 384).

Amis’ novel was originally published in 1984, in a period characterized by a strong – and negative – public interest in money. In a single year, 1987, the play Serious Money by Caryl Churchill, the film Wall Street and Wolfe’s novel Bonfire of the Vanities all appeared. But that interest has hardly abated since, especially following the financial crisis of 2008. Not a day passes when there is not a story about money and its misuse in newspapers, on television, in blogs or in social media. There has been a positive deluge of books on various features of the crisis, its causes and consequences (for example, Kaletsky, 2010; Lanchester, 2010; Tett, 2010; Lewis, 2011). Meanwhile, fictional representations of money in novels, plays and films continue to reinforce the sensation that there is a cultural problem in our societies that affects individuals and institutions and that is something to do with money.

I want to refer to all this discussion of money in newspapers, radio, television, film, novels, poetry and popular music as ‘Money Talk’. However, the appearance of Money Talk is not just restricted to these media. It also saturates everyday life. We talk about how much things cost or how much – or little – money we have. We compare our financial circumstances or spending habits with those of friends or neighbours. We speculate on the ways of the rich or the poor. We discuss the use of money by persons and institutions in the public eye. Metaphors, images and sayings involving money abound. We say that ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, ‘money for old rope’ or ‘in for a penny, in for a pound’. Somebody else has ‘money to burn’ but, on the other hand, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’. ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’ but ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’. The very word for money comes in so many different forms in English – dosh, dough, sovs, scratch, mazuma, gravy, spondulicks, bread, wad, moolah, folding green – and these synonyms themselves imply so much behind the simple metaphor, especially in the association of money with food. Much of this Money Talk effectively involves, implicitly or explicitly, moral judgements about human greed, the way that money is used as a yardstick of behaviour or that everything can apparently be bought and sold. These moral judgements are typically hostile; it is the evils of money that are emphasized rather than any benefits that its use might bring.

Perhaps, though, all this talk about money in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is only prominent because of a sense of economic crisis. As John Lanchester points out in his How to Speak Money (2015), while the economy is calm, there is less need to understand economics. However, Money Talk has, in fact, a very long history – and that, in itself, is a sociological puzzle. A serious account of that history is well beyond the scope of this book – and may be a foolish enterprise in any case (but see Jackson, 1995; Buchan, 1997; and for shorter accounts, Martin, 2014: ch. 10; Plender, 2015: ch. 1). But even a casual sampling of the literature of past periods shows a remarkable similarity in the way that Money Talk is mobilized across the centuries. The Bible, of course, is a rich, if inconsistent, source of Money Talk which has informed the writing of subsequent centuries. Some sixteen of the forty parables of Jesus concern money. The Gospels and the Epistles more generally are similarly full of familiar comment on the destructive power of riches, such as: ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19:24) or ‘Ye cannot serve God and Mammon’ (Luke 16:13) or ‘Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you’ (James 5:1). The Graeco-Roman world played a similarly significant role in forming the views on money of future generations. The story of King Midas has provided a cautionary tale for centuries. Aristotle’s opinions on usury were influential in medieval Christian doctrine. He condemned usury as ‘hated’ and a practice ‘which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it’ since ‘money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest’ (quoted in Jackson, 1995: 244). Similarly, prohibitions on the practice of usury occur throughout the Koran and the restriction is still widespread in Islamic countries. As it declares, ‘whoever returneth to usury, they shall be the companions of hell fire, they shall continue therein for ever’ (quoted in Jackson, 1995: 248). Shakespeare takes up the theme of usury in his The Merchant of Venice, while dealing with another vice of money in Timon of Athens (act 4, scene 3, later used by Karl Marx in Capital). In the latter play, gold:

This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed;

Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves

And give them title, knee and approbation

With senators on the bench.

In some ways it is perverse to pick out individual plays in Shakespeare since all of them use metaphors involving money. Coins, for example, are omnipresent. As one commentator notes: ‘The way coinage was treated in early modern England created an assemblage of variously useful shorthand symbols and similes, providing a way of concisely expressing aspects of the human condition’ (Cook, 2012: 71). Timon of Athens was probably written in the early years of the seventeenth century. Almost a century earlier, Thomas More had published his Utopia. With a characteristic combination of certainty and violence of expression, he pronounces on the evils of money which would be remedied by its abolition: ‘For who can fail to see that fraud, theft, pillaging, disputes, riots, strife, rebellion, murder, treason, poisoning … would die out with the abolition of money. And at the very moment when money vanished, so too would fear, anxiety, grief, stress and wakeful nights’ (More, 2012: 120, 121).

The eighteenth-century Adam Smith is often thought of as the godfather of the doctrine of unregulated markets. He, however, also identified the vice of money as riches: ‘With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which, in their eye, is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves’ (Smith, 1999: 277). At much the same time as the publication of The Wealth of Nations, the English Romantic movement was stressing, not so much the perils of riches, as the corruption of fundamental human values that money engenders. Shelley (1929: Queen Mab, section V, lines 44–5), for example, notes:

Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring

while, more famously, Wordsworth (1936: sonnet XXXIII) asserts:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

In Marx’s earlier work, the idea that money corrupts value is especially prominent. In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in the midst of his discussion of Timon of Athens, he says: ‘If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?’ (Marx, 1964: 167, emphasis in original). And, at much the same time, Charles Dickens was writing his novels, in almost all of which the vices of money take a prominent place. He has Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit declare: ‘I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to anyone belonging to it’ (Dickens, 1953: 49). Summarizing, the critic Humphrey House notes: ‘Money is the main theme of nearly every book that Dickens wrote: getting, keeping, spending, owing, bequeathing, provide the intricacies of his plots; character after character is constructed round an attitude to money’ (House, 1942: 58; see also Miller, 1967; Trilling, 1967).

Despite its continuity and longevity, however, Money Talk does not, over its long history, make the same claims. It is used, typically to attach blame, condemnation and disgust. At the same time, money, it seems, can perform almost any function and encourage any sin. According to writers over many centuries, money promotes, among other things: greed, miserliness, display, contempt for the poor, the defilement of honour and a good name, perversion of the sacred, the destruction of more important human virtues, calculation and measurement, a worship of the transitory and unreal, the obliteration of uniqueness, a tendency to abstraction, the erosion of authenticity, a false standard of excellence, the diminution of the quality of personal relationships and the encouragement of debt and corruption in public life.

These qualities of Money Talk – its diversity and its moral and rhetorical force – indicate that it is a portmanteau expression. Money comes to stand for, or index, a whole variety of other matters that are not necessarily connected with each other or, indeed, with money. Money Talk then becomes a general way of expressing discontent with, or outright opposition to, current social arrangements. The diversities of meaning do not indicate intellectual carelessness. Rather, they give to Money Talk a flexibility that enables it to adapt to changing circumstances. Furthermore, Money Talk is rooted in the mundane. As I have already noted above, it is part of everyday conversation, a set of basic assumptions which are often unconsciously made. In addition, it refers to an entity – money – that is in some respects mysterious and hidden. Dickens captures the point somewhat lyrically:

The mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. (quoted in Miller, 1967: 170)

In short, Money Talk is ideological.

Ideologies are rarely subtle and Money Talk is no exception. Typically, it is strident, simple, evangelical even. It does not admit of shades of gey, but only black and white. Money Talk does not inhabit a complex moral universe. It sees itself as part of a struggle with a world corrupted by money. This Manichaean quality is, in turn, a feature of another and crucial characteristic. Money Talk is usually oppositional. It constructs an enemy.

Money Talk may be contrasted with another ideology that I shall call Coined Liberty. The phrase comes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, in which the possession of money is explicitly associated with the small degree of freedom that can be bought in prison, for ‘money can always and everywhere be spent, and, moreover, forbidden fruit is sweetest of all’ (Dostoevsky, 2004: 13). (Dostoevsky, however, does not appear to endorse this viewpoint in his other novels. Indeed, in these, his more sympathetic characters seem rather to be promoters of Money Talk.) The main principle of Coined Liberty is freedom, freedom of the individual subject, that is. But its main expression, in modern times at least, is the free market and the conditions that promote it. That freedom is held both to underpin and also to flow from individual liberty. In addition, free markets are claimed to be dynamic and fostering of innovation, increasing prosperity which finds its way to all members of society. Like Money Talk, Coined Liberty has a long history and has generated an enormous literature.

Coined Liberty makes moral claims. It is about the virtues of markets or, more precisely, free, unregulated markets. The virtues of liberty are as important to Coined Liberty as justice or personhood are to Money T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Money Talk
• Part One: Case-Studies
• 2. Land
• 3. Bodies
• 4. Books
• Part Two: Resistance to Commodification
• 5. Sacredness and Property
• 6. Moral Regulation
• 7. Moral Climate, Ideology and Intellectuals
• 8. Moral Complexity
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement