Abstract
Violence is structured in the commodification of people and nature and the transformation of society into market relations, where people, things, and nature are transacted, bought, and sold, as commodities. Commodification processes include personal debt loading in the provision of education, the casualization of employment, and the destruction of solidarities in communities, unions, and public education. Commodification intensifies competition and exploitation and generates processes of victimization and construction of vulnerable groups, including women and children, the aged, and people with disabilities. Economic growth and degradation of the living environment make people sick. The capitalist process of wealth accumulation promotes unsustainable consumption and further damages the continent’s major ecosystems.
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Notes
- 1.
1. The commodification process is a process which is largely the product of the corporatization of everyday life. Academic Justin Clemens makes the point that the logic of corporations is ‘to maximize profitability at any price, by squeezing labour and externalising costs, by hyper-differentiating and quantifying every aspect of the labour process. These techniques are geared to concentrating power in an absent executive, to streamlining and unilateralising hierarchies of command, to neutralising negotiation and to negating responsibility at every point…never before have they [multinational corporations] been so numerous, so disproportionately large and so influential in the absence of any serious countervailing force’ (Clemens, 2015:32). The commodification process, it could be argued, is a fundamental aspect in the construction of modern society because it places and frames humans firmly as objects subjected to a whole range of techniques of behavioural control. Jacques Ellul defined technique as ‘the totality of methods rationally arrived at, and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity’ (Ellul, 1964:xxv). Technique, he argued, is more than machine technology ‘but refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result’ (ibid: vi). Capitalism involves commodification. There is a constant push ‘to the commodification of everything, and in particular of everyday life…in the long run, this secular process guarantees the demise of the system. In the meantime, it gets translated into household structures…with the increasing commodification of everyday life has gone a decline in core residentiality and kinship as determinative of the boundaries…the end point is a unit whose cohesiveness is increasingly predicated on the income-pooling function it performs’( Wallerstein 199:111–112).
- 2.
2. This is well illustrated in the destruction of Wollongong as a community as the outcome of the closure of BHP steelworks. The Labor Party became a spear-carrier for neoliberal capitalism and the American imperial project when Prime Minister Hawke signed the Accord in 1983 and closed the Wollongong BHP steelworks. The closure of the steelworks, which had provided physical and emotional sustenance for generations and which was put to an end by the decision by a short-sighted government, has been vividly described in Julianne Schultz’s Steel City Blues: The Human Cost of Industrial Crisis (Schultz, 1985, 2007). She describes the disintegration of the community by the closure of the steelworks and the alienating crisis that ensued. Another human tragedy unfolded at Newcastle with the closure of the Newcastle steelworks by BHP. The severity of the ‘unemployment crisis had massive psychological and social cost on local suburbs with poverty, domestic violence and welfare payments and cash assistance cut’ (Burrows, 2010:27; Schultz, 1985). By 1985, BHP ‘announced a massive profit of over $150 million’ (D’Cruz, 1986:48). Later, the decision was made to close BHP Newcastle steelworks. The then member of New South Wales parliament for Swansea, Jill Hall, declared: ‘The decision to close BHP steel making is a slap in the face for the workers of the Hunter, and slap in the face for the Hunter community. BHP has betrayed the people of the Hunter, the people of this State, and I might go so far as to say the people of Australia’ (NSW, 1997:21).
- 3.
3. Selling inner-city public housing has been an ongoing process in Sydney since the 1980s as part of a broader process of gentrification, defined as ‘the migration of higher income households to lower income neighbourhoods’, which has transformed major Australian cities and created patterns of social, economic, and political inequality (Atkinson, Wulff, Reynolds, & Spinney, 2011:1).
- 4.
4. According to Ross Gittins: ‘those costs include the direct costs for treatment, plus the indirect costs, such as disability support pensions, imprisonment, accommodation and so on, plus the costs of lost production and income, plus the costs to carers and families and their reduced participation in the workforce’ (Gittins, 2015).
- 5.
5. The state is complicit in failing to protect the population’s health from the biological effects of non-ionizing radiation. Devices like cell phones may pose ‘risks of cancer, genetic damage, changes in reproductive system, and learning and memory deficits’ (Segar, 2015).
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Paul, E. (2016). Commodification. In: Australian Political Economy of Violence and Non-Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60214-5_3
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