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Commodification Quotes

Browse 44 quotes about Commodification.

Commodification Quotes

“Places where sex is sold are the same everywhere. They always have a viewing window or something similar: a bar, a walkway, a stage where you can see bodies and, if permitted, feel them. It has to be a space that facilitates the circulation of these bodies, so that they can be appraised, touched, negotiated. And it must have an area in which to complete---once agreed upon, once contracted---sexual intercourse. The noise of people or glasses or music always helps. Smoke. Something unspeakable in the air.”

DesireSexProstitutionTransactionsBodiesBrothelsCommodificationSex TradeWhorehouseStrip Clubs
Book:The Taiga Syndrome
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“What society teaches people is not to guard themselves like precious gold that must not be stolen, but rather to make them forget that they themselves are valuable gold—encouraging them to scatter this gem within outwardly. If one pays attention to those who have internalized and ritualized the selling of their soul, it becomes clear: they possess dozens of interests and pursuits, paint colorful pictures, and write rich texts, yet remain inwardly colorless and utterly empty.”

PassionIdentityGoldMarketingAdvertisingAdvertisementMarketCommodificationSaleMonetizing
Author:Sov8840
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“[I]t is easy to confuse European interest in preserving life to prevent economic loss with positive concern for the captives’ human welfare. But to interpret the regime of the slave ship in that way is to be duped by the slave traders’ rhetoric—a language of concealment that allowed European slaving concerns to portray themselves as passive and powerless before the array of forces (including the agency of the captives themselves) outside their control. Slave merchants and their backers disguised from themselves the ugly truth that the Atlantic regime of commodification took captives from fully realized humanity and suspended them in a purgatory in between tenuous life and dishonorable death.”

EvilSlaveryDeceptionDisguiseDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The essence of online privacy lies in the power it grants individuals to navigate the vast sea of information without the constant specter of surveillance. It's a shield against the commodification of personal data, a reminder that in the digital age, our autonomy should not be bartered for the sake of convenience. As we champion the cause of online privacy, we uphold the principles that define the core of a free and democratic cyberspace.”

PowerAutonomyConvenienceReminderCommodificationPreserveDemocratic CyberspaceDefining FactorSpecter Of SurveillanceUpholding Principles
Author:James William Steven Parker
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“I do not subscribe to functioning labels because functioning labels are inaccurate and dehumanizing, because functioning labels fail to capture the breadth and complexity and highly contextual interrelations of one's neurology and environment, both of which are plastic and malleable and dynamic. Functioning is the corporeal gone capitalistic -- it is an assumption that one's body and being can be quantitatively measured, that one's bodily outputs and bodily actions are neither outputs nor actions unless commodifiable.”

AutismAutisticAutistic AuthorCommodificationCapitalisticInherent ValueFunctioning Labels
Book:Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness
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“The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. …[T]his was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession.”

CapitalismNeoliberalismHarveyPrivatizationCommodificationCapital Accumulation
Book:A Brief History of Neoliberalism
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“You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff. A related phenomenon is the ongoing transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb 'to like' from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse: from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture's substitution for loving.”

LoveLikeCommodificationLiking
Book:Farther Away
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“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.”

CapitalismSlaveryResistanceOppressionColonialismExploitationCommodificationCapitalistsHuman Commodification
Book:A Small Place
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“As discussed earlier, humans who lack the reflective self-awareness of normal adults, such as those with particular forms of amnesia or very young children or those with certain mental disabilities, still are self-aware and still have an interest in continuing to live. There may, of course, be a difference between the self-awareness of normal adult humans and that of other animals. But even if that is the case, it does not mean that the latter have no interest in continuing to live, and it does not justify treating the latter as commodities.”

JusticeAnimalsVegetarianismVeganismWill To LiveCommodification
Author:Gary L. Francione
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“People are trained – brainwashed – to believe that material well-being stands for psychological well-being. If you have a house, a job, a car, lots of commodities, a partner and family then you ought to be happy. But where is the real you in all of that? Of course, psychological well-being, not material well-being, should be the benchmark. But we live in a materialist world thanks to economic materialism (predatory capitalism) and philosophical materialism (scientism). Science more or less denies that we have minds and free will, hence are just machines, while predatory capitalism treats us as material objects. Mind – the psyche, psychology – is exactly what is absent from the materialist hegemony, and that’s why the world is so anxious, depressed and alienated. It comes with the territory. It’s an inevitable aspect of materialism. Materialism shapes us as matter. Consumerism shapes us as consumers. The class system locks us into artificial class identities. In a world of commodities, we ourselves are commodified. All of our values start to revolve around objects, things, commodities, consumption, matter. The human has disappeared. We need to revalue all values in terms of idealism rather than materialism, and rationalism instead of empiricism.”

ScienceCapitalismMaterialismCommodification
Book:The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence
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“The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.”

HumanitySlaveryFree WillCommodificationHumanization
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.”

Free WillDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.”

TraumaDehumanizationCommodificationMiddle Passage
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Whereas the slave cargoes gathered on the African coast reconfigured the normative boundaries of social life, the slave communities in the Americas exploded those boundaries beyond recognition. If an Akan-speaking migrant lived to complete a year on a west Indian sugar estate, he or she was likely by the end of that time to have come into close contact with unrelated Akan strangers as well as with Ga, Guan, or Adangbe speakers in the holding station on the African littoral, with Ewe speakers on the slave ship, and with Angolans, Biafrans, and Senegambians on the plantation. This was the composite we call diasporic Africa—an Africa that constituted not the continent on European maps, but rather the plurality of remembered places immigrant slaves carried with them. Like any geographic entity, diasporic Africa varies according to the perspective from which it is surveyed. Viewed from a cartographic standpoint (in essence, the view of early modern Europeans), diasporic Africa is a constellation of discrete ethnic and language groups; if one adopts this perspective, the defining question becomes whether or not the various constituent groups in the slave community shared a culture. Only by approaching these questions from the vantage point of Africans as migrants, however, can we hope to understand how Africans themselves experienced and negotiated their American worlds. If in the regime of the market Africans’ most socially relevant feature was their exchangeability, for Africans as immigrants the most socially relevant feature was their isolation, their desperate need to restore some measure of social life to counterbalance the alienation engendered by their social death. Without some means of achieving that vital equilibrium thanks to which even the socially dead could expect to occupy a viable place in society, slaves could foresee only further descent into an endless purgatory.”

CommunitySlaveryCommodificationAfrican Diaspora
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Media markets, like all markets, are profoundly nihilistic. Clicks, likes and shares are a multi-denominational currency. As long as they accumulate, as long as visibility (and revenue) is gained, it does not matter why. In other words, the media using sexual violence as clickbait does not imply support for feminist goals.”

NeoliberalismCommodificationMetooMedia Feminism
Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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“The imperatives of a market that valued people as commodities interposed a nearly impassable gulf between captives and any community that might claim them as new members. Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have. The price put on their persons pushed most captives beyond the possibility of eventual reintegration as members in any community. The crisis of captivity on that coast, in other words, was that only with great difficulty or great luck could the prisoners’ ‘commodity potential’ be masked or converted back into social currency.”

CommunitySlaveryDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.”

CommunitySlaveryExclusionCommodificationSocial Death
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.”

EfficiencyRationalizationDehumanizationProductionCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“In my approach, each racialized person counts the same, as racialized and therefore commodified. There is not in this approach some conceptually privileged racialized group (some uncommodified racial group), either on account of access to power or proximity to suffering. To be racialized just is to be commodified.”

Race And Racism In AmericaCommodification
Book:Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism
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“We're seeing the world through a prism now; digital capitalism has refined the algorithm to monetize out attention. Peace, contentment, nuance, subtlety, cooperation - all of these things are list as algorithms filter our online communications for maximum engagement. What holds away, of course, is hyperbole, shock, outrage, sensationalism.”

CommunicationCapitalismAlgorithmDigital MediaCommodificationDumbing Down
Book:The Analog Sea Review: Number Four
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“We dwell in homes or work in sites that once displaced animals, we pay federal taxes that legalize the slaughter of animals for profit or pleasure, we travel in cars with leather seats over roads unfenced to prevent roadkill, we attend schools that allow animal experiments in biology classes, we take drugs once tested on animals, we buy newspapers that carry adds for the meat, egg, dairy and fur industries, we shop in stores that profit from the sale of animal products, we vote for politicians who pass laws favoring the meat, dairy, egg and hunting lobbies, we pay the salaries of federal and state judges who interpret a constitution that says nothing about the welfare or rights of animals and we embrace religions that give humans dominion over animals; and it’s a rare sermon where the sacredness of animals is sounded. ~ Colman McCarthy”

AnimalsCommodificationAnthropocentrismHuman Animal RelationsHuman ExceptionalismInterspecies InequalitySystemic Exploitation
Book:Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex
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“Bizzaro Time by Stewart Stafford I took dawn selfies on a bridge, Geneva worms conferred in slime, A woman's dog slithered serpentine, It snapped and hissed in bizarro time. A businessman's briefcase in flight, Went public in a philanthropist sky, Umbrellas blossomed into trees, Peacenik pigeon medal caught the eye. Coffee shops served liquid light, Brewed up pagan code of yore, Pedestrians' morphed molten form, Glass-blown in tangerine pour. We shared loop shrugs, muted pleas, Sober intoxication's escapist twist, A uniquely-marketed Tuesday morn, Dreamt up to commodify every tryst. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

TechnologyAuthenticitySatireDystopianSurrealismSocial CommentaryAbsurdismCommodificationSocial Commentary HumorSocial Commentary Satire
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“There exists a culture shared even by those who are dissatisfied with mass culture, and it is among the most dangerous precisely because it is dazzling—deceptive. It is a culture that belongs to those who are "dissatisfied with the world as it is." This manifests in the following ways: They still carry a certain belief and hope in humanity. If they suffer, they might dream that their suffering will one day “be heard by everyone.” Through their works, they may fantasize about becoming popular. They might romanticize the psychiatric term "trauma." They might aim to "fix and recover" things or people. They might set their minds on leaving a "meaningful impact" and become activists. They might frequently “discuss” on philosophy forums. They might be aiming at “dark vibes.” They might cling to mottos like “forever alone.” They might refer to themselves as "just a random book lover.” They might have interests in “just some random weird stuff.” They might still be screaming into the void. They might try to “prove their depth” publicly. They might refer to themselves as "lost souls" to the point of weariness, even internalizing this very term—coined by the system to reduce by classifying them—implying a form of domesticated rebellion. And so on. These supposed outsiders are actually on the inside, worshipping at the altar of visibility, validation, and vague worldly hope. Their beliefs—“art-as-cure,” “literature-as-refuge,” “activism-as-purpose”—are not radical to the point of exile but packaged and predictable. They don't reject the system; they only ask to be understood within its boundaries. They weep, but with an eye to applause. They write, but always with a publisher in mind. They compose, but just to make money. They mourn, but only to be noticed. They claim detachment, but still speak as if begging to be liked and heard. They imagine themselves as “wild,” but only within the categories that subcultures and language allow. After all, there are two ends to the ruins: on one end, these kinds of “loners” who are still tied to conventional wisdom; and on the other, the utterly unknown, mystic, cosmic, and free spirits who have transcended everything human.”

CultureRebellionCollapseConventionalNormAlienationOutsiderSubcultureHomogeneityCommodification
Author:Sov8840
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“It doesn't surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we're looking at a phenomenon that's very profitable and it's connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious.”

ThinkingLooksSidesBlackClassMiddleMovementAspectConnectionsSurpriseObviousMiddle ClassPhenomenonProfitableBlacknessSurprise MeCommodification
Author:Angela Davis
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“Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.”

KindIdeasSpiritualCommunitySpaceMilitaryCommunicationModelsAreasIndiaDifficultyMadPrisonOppressionAlternativesControlledGreyExileTibetanBaliCommodificationCollusionGrey Areas
Author:Anne Waldman
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“At the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons, in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom - not democracy, and not ecological stewardship - is the defining metaphor of the WTO and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total commodification.”

WorldHeartHumanityLeftGoalWaterNaturalDemocracyAirEconomicAreasStandingSacredMetaphorSeedsRealmsHeritageMasteryGenesAssaultDefiningStewardshipNatural WorldEcologicalEconomic FreedomCommodificationHealth And Education
Author:Maude Barlow
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“The role of globalization is to homogenize all cultures, and to turn them into commodified markets, and therefore, to make them easier for global corporations to control. Global corporations are even now trying to commodify all remaining aspects of national cultures, not to mention indigenous cultures.”

TryingTurnsCultureRolesEconomyEasierAspectCorporationsControlledGlobalizationIndigenousNationalityDifferent CulturesCultural DiversityHomogeneousHomogeneityCommodificationIndigenous CultureNational Culture
Author:Jerry Mander
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“The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That is, historical capitalism is in crisis precisely because, in pursuing the endless accumulation of capital, it is beginning to approximate that state of being Adam Smith asserted was 'natural' to man but which has never historically existed. The 'propensity [of humanity] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another' has entered into domains and zones previously untouched, and the pressure to expand commodification is relatively unchecked.”

MenFirstsStatesHumanityNaturalOne ThingCapitalismAspectPressureCrisisFundamentalsHistoricalEndlessZoneAdamTruckDomainAccumulationPropensityCommodification
Author:Immanuel Wallerstein
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“It is not surprising that liberals believed in progress. The idea of progress justified the entire transition from feudalism to capitalism. It legitimated the breaking of the remaining opposition to the commodification of everything, and it tended to wipe away all the negatives of capitalism on the grounds that the benefits outweighed, by far, the harm.”

IdeasProgressBenefitsCapitalismHarmOppositionTransitionSurprisingJustifiedWipeFeudalismCommodification
Book:Capistalist Civilisation
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